In Whose Footsteps?

Who To Follow? Helen Clark is one of the prime movers of Labour’s anti-nuclear policy, and principal author of New Zealand’s independent foreign policy. Andrew Little has come out swinging in favour of AUKUS Pillar 2. Helen Clark negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with China that has kept the New Zealand economy afloat through a global financial crisis and Covid-19. Andrew Little has cast our largest trading partner as a dangerous geopolitical disruptor in urgent need of Anglophone “containment”.

MAYBE IT’S A GENERATIONAL THING? Andrew Little, born in 1965, qualifies (narrowly) as Generation X, while Helen Clark, born in 1950, is, indisputably, a Baby Boomer. Gen-Xers have a “thing” about Boomers, a strange mixture of envy and resentment, that manifests itself in their determination not to be seen following in their predecessors’ footsteps.

If Helen Clark was one of the prime movers of Labour’s anti-nuclear policy, and principal author of New Zealand’s independent foreign policy, then Andrew Little has come out swinging in favour of AUKUS Pillar 2. If Helen Clark negotiated the Free Trade Agreement with China that has kept the New Zealand economy afloat through a global financial crisis and Covid-19, then Andrew Little has cast our largest trading partner as a dangerous geopolitical disruptor in urgent need of Anglophone “containment”.

It is, if I may borrow a term made popular by Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, “weird”.

More problematic, however, is Andrew Little’s support for the ideas of Professor Anne-Marie Brady, the Christchurch-based academic who has done so much to “recalibrate” this country’s relationship with China.

Just four years ago, Professor Brady and her colleagues from the “Small States and the New Security Environment” research team had this to say about what they saw as New Zealand’s geopolitical vulnerability:

“The global environment has not been so challenging for New Zealand since 1942 when British forces in Singapore, who were New Zealand’s shield, fell to the advance of the Japanese. New Zealand must now face up to the national security risk of the Covid-19 outbreak. The current situation poses a risk not only to New Zealand, but collectively, for our Pacific, Five Eyes and NATO partners, as well as like-minded states who uphold the international rules-based order.”

Scary stuff! Clearly, the Chinese have taken the place of the Japanese in this grim geostrategic scenario. And, one must presume that Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” project is the reincarnation of Imperial Japan’s “Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.

If New Zealand’s economic survival wasn’t at stake, this sort of re-heated Cold War rhetoric would be laughable.

But wait, there’s more. Six years ago, in 2018, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister, one Winston Peters, addressed a high-powered Washington audience, before whom he announced New Zealand’s “Pacific Reset”. This, in part, is what Mr Peters (who just happens to be, once again, New Zealand’s Foreign Minister) had to say:

“The Pacific Reset […] reflects New Zealand’s response to the increasingly contested strategic environment in the Pacific in which more external actors are competing for influence. This calls for close cooperation with Pacific Island countries, Australia, the United States, and other partners with historic links in the region –countries such as Japan, the EU, UK and France – to uphold values that we share and want to promote in the region; values like democracy, good governance, greater women’s participation, and above all the rules based systems on which the region relies.”

It is surely no more than coincidence that the person who invited Mr Peters to address the Centre for Australian, New Zealand & Pacific Studies at Washington’s Georgetown University, was a fellow member of the same NATO-supported research team dedicated to assisting “small states” (like ours) navigate the “new security environment”, as Professor Brady.

Small states in a small world!

And guess who was the minister responsible for New Zealand’s national security (SIS & GCSB) when Winston was re-setting the Pacific at Georgetown in 2018, and Professor Brady was reminding us of the perils of being unprotected in that wide, wide sea, as Covid raged? That’s right, it was Andrew Little. The same bloke who, less than a year ago, became (briefly) New Zealand’s Minister of Defence.

All of which strongly suggests that the journey towards AUKUS, the weapons purchase agreement announced in September 2021, got underway at least three years before Messrs Biden, Sunak and Albanese started talking about equipping Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. Around the time that New Zealand prime-ministers started turning up as loyal friends of the West at NATO gatherings.

If all these moves and counter-moves make you feel that New Zealand is being pushed about like a pawn on somebody else’s chessboard, then “Congratulations!” – you have been paying attention.

And, whoever’s footsteps this younger generation of politicians are now following, they sure as hell ain’t Helen Clark’s.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 August 2024.