Who could imagine the day when New Zealand is displaying more sense, seriousness and substance in defence and national security than the Australian government?
That day arrived this week when Kiwi Prime Minister Chris Luxon announced his government would double the NZ defence budget from 1 per cent of GDP to 2 per cent in the next eight years.
More importantly, it will increase military spending by $NZ9bn over the next four years, a meaningful timeframe for a government commitment.
Only the Albanese government remains unmoved in its tortoise-like approach to building a defence force.
Luxon has so far been a pretty effective prime minister for the Kiwis. Economic reform, education reforms, deprioritising identity politics – Luxon represents a welcome return to reality after the years of woke excess under Jacinda Ardern, the international princess of the politics of progressive fantasy.
Instead, Luxon put the new view: “New Zealand and our allies and partners across the world are no longer in a benign environment.”
Defence Minister Judith Collins said: “We do need to have strike capacity.” Unlike the recent reticence of the Albanese government, she was clear it was China that was driving New Zealand’s increased defence spending: “Just recently, we have been given a very big wake-up call, this country, when we had enormous firepower directed down our area of the world in the Tasman Sea.”
She was referring to the recent journey of a Chinese navy convoy led by a powerfully armed destroyer that was backed up by a combat frigate, a supply ship, and, analysts believe, probably a submarine.
The new money will enable New Zealand to acquire missiles and drones, to upgrade its two Anzac frigates and parts of its air force. This represents a revolution in our fellow Anzacs’ appreciation of modern strategic reality.
In truth, Wellington has been living in a strategic fantasyland since David Lange effectively took NZ out of the ANZUS pact by banning the visit of US nuclear-powered or nuclear weapons capable ships to its ports in 1987.
In crucial ways, NZ left the modern world altogether at that point, losing all relevance, or even presence, in all consequential strategic conversations, and losing what had been a priceless access to influence in Washington.
In many ways Wellington had a similar strategic outlook as Canada. It had a big neighbour that would get in the way of any aggressor coming its way, so it took no responsibility for itself.
In recent years, Chinese diplomatic and military activism in the South Pacific has woken our Kiwi cousins to some of the dangers they actually face.
It’s obvious, nonetheless, that New Zealand starts now from a very low base of defence capability. Kiwi soldiers were always regarded as brave and capable, and were a central part of the Anzac reputation, but for 40 years they’ve worn that heritage away. Now it’s gone forever, it will not come back. It will never regain the reputation it once had of being the Prussia of the South Seas.
These new defence commitments are a welcome return to common sense, and incidentally common purpose with Australia.
Luxon’s new approach has the great advantage over the Ardern era policy of actually trying to deal with the real world.
The Albanese government, in contrast, found virtually nothing new for defence in the recent budget. Australia spends just on 2 per cent of GDP on defence, the same proportion as when Albanese came to office three years ago.
According to Marcus Hellyer of Strategic Analysis Australia, the total, cumulative, net extra funding for defence to date, over the funding lines laid out in the 2016 defence White Paper, is a piddling $400 million.
Canberra still does a lot more in defence, absolutely and proportionately, than Wellington. But Luxon, unlike Albanese, has recognised the urgent need to increase his nation’s military capabilities as quickly as possible.
You know Australia has reached a moment of peak feeble when the land of the long white cloud puts us in the shade on strategic urgency.
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