Are We In A “New Security Environment”, Or Just The Same Old Anti-Chinese One?

Dragon Replaces Bear: If New Zealand’s economic survival wasn’t at stake, the current spate of anti-Chinese propaganda, so reminiscent of the paranoid Cold War rhetoric of the 1950s, would be laughable.

HOW SHOULD NEW ZEALAND make its way out of the Covid-19 crisis? More and more powerful and influential players are lining-up to answer that question. At stake is considerably more than the nation’s physical and economic health. Domestic policy choices cannot avoid having foreign policy consequences. Covid-19 has further deranged what little remained of the US-led post-Soviet world order. Faith in the American hegemon is faltering and the OECD Club’s fear of China is increasing by the day. Aware of the pivotal role the Chinese play in maintaining the global economy – not to mention their own – America’s European and Australasian allies find themselves torn between the equally urgent demands of their US patron and their own populations.

The situation in Australasia is particularly fraught. A major regional player, Australia stands resolutely alongside its American “mate”, dutifully repeating all of the United States’ foreign policy and defence lines. That China absorbs at least a third of all Australian exports is known by Canberra’s elites, but somehow this central economic fact of the country’s economic life is simply excluded from its diplomatic and military calculations. At some point – and perhaps quite soon – this central contradiction at the heart of Australian foreign policy will become critical. If Canberra chooses Washington over Beijing, then the Australian economy will tank. If it chooses Beijing over Washington, then Australia will be plunged into a profound identity crisis.

New Zealand’s economic wellbeing, like Australia’s, is dependent upon its exporters’ access to the Chinese market. Unlike Australia, however, New Zealand’s foreign policy establishment has so far managed to avoid taking a side in the growing stand-off between Washington and Beijing. Wellington is neither as diplomatically nor militarily committed to the United States as Canberra. As a consequence, it has substantially more room for diplomatic manoeuvre between the two great powers. In the present, highly volatile strategic environment, that confers a considerable advantage.

In Washington and Canberra, however, Wellington’s diplomatic manoeuvrability has become a source of considerable aggravation. It would suit the Americans and the Australians much better to have New Zealand safely and securely in the “ANZUS” tent. In geostrategic terms, a US-aligned Australasia is crucial to Washington’s new “Indo-Pacific” plan for containing China’s ambitious “Belt and Road” project. It has become a matter of some urgency, therefore, to facilitate a decisive shift in New Zealand foreign policy towards Washington and away from Beijing.

In conformity with the maxim that it is shameful to let a good crisis go to waste, the pro-Washington faction within New Zealand’s foreign policy establishment has persuaded the University of Canterbury to oversee a “pop-up” think tank dedicated to assisting the New Zealand Government “devise a resilience strategy that will ensure New Zealand’s independence and sovereignty are protected during the Covid-19 pandemic and after.”

The think tank has been “popped-up” by SSANSE (presumably pronounced “sanes”) an international research institute dedicated to exploring the challenges facing “Small States and the New Security Environment” (i.e. the world since Russia and China stopped playing nice). Based in Iceland, with funding from NATO, the institute would likely have passed without notice in this part of the world had it not been for the prominent role played in SSANSE’s activities by our very own Professor Anne-Marie Brady.

Professor Brady is, of course, the academic face of the campaign to reorient (if you’ll pardon the pun) New Zealand foreign policy away from Beijing and towards Washington. Alongside her fellow SSANSE directors and co-directors, Professor Margarete Šešelgytė, Professor Baldur Thorhallsson and Professor Alan Tidwell, Brady composes the “Editorial Board” of the new think tank. Its pitch is nothing if not portentous:

“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.”

With the Chinese clearly taking the place of the Japanese in this grim geostrategic scenario, and the “One Belt, One Road” project standing in for 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.

Professor Brady is not, however, without powerful friends in high places. Not the least of whom is New Zealand’s Foreign Minister, Winston Peters. Since his in/famous “Georgetown Speech” of 15 December 2018, Peters has made it clear that he, too, favours redirecting New Zealand’s diplomatic effort away from the nation that takes the lion’s share of this country’s exports and back towards its traditional friends and allies – who don’t. The Foreign Minister referred to this reorientation as “The Pacific Reset”:

“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.”

There they are again, those “rules”. The same ones, no doubt, that sanctioned the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003!

Was it just one of those incredible coincidences that the man who heads up the Center for Australian, New Zealand & Pacific Studies at Georgetown University (which hosted Peters’ visit) is none other than Professor Alan Tidwell, SSANSE Co-director and Professor Brady’s associate on the editorial board of the University of Canterbury’s pop-up think tank? No greater coincidence, I’m sure, than Professor Brady following Foreign Minister Peters on “Newshub Nation” last Saturday morning. If you missed it, Peters used the occasion to voice his support for Australia’s call for an inquiry into China’s mishandling of the Wuhan outbreak of the novel coronavirus we now know as Covid-19.

Australia is about to pay a high price for once again shouldering the burdens of America’s “Deputy-Sheriff”; and unless the growing influence of the pro-Washington faction of our foreign policy establishment is stopped in its tracks – so will we.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 5 May 2020.

Voter Motivators 2017: Immigration.

A Big Wide World Out There: Familiarity with “foreign” cultures has rendered “foreigners” a lot less frightening to young New Zealanders than old ones. New Zealanders raised entirely in the globalisation era know there’s a big wide world out there – a world which values highly the Kiwi’s celebrated ability to get along with just about anybody. Racism no longer pays.

 

IMMIGRATION has set the world on fire. The debt owed by both Brexit and Trump to the issue’s inflammatory power is huge. With record volumes of migrants pouring into New Zealand, immigration policy is widely expected to be among the biggest voter motivators of 2017.

 

But will New Zealanders react to these new arrivals in the same way as British and American voters? Or will the circumstances underpinning this country’s record migration flows smother the flames of racism and xenophobia before they take hold?

 

If New Zealand history is any guide, probably not. Net inward flows of migration have always been the signal of economic prosperity and growth. Just as net outward flows have been the surest sign that all is not well in God’s Own Country. There’s an ancestral voice in the racial memory of Pakeha New Zealanders which commands their attention during periods of rapid population growth. A voice which reminds them that, in these stolen islands, more non-indigenous people are always a good thing.

 

For Maori New Zealanders, the opposite is true. The more immigrants that arrive on these shores, the more the indigenous essence of Aotearoa-New Zealand is diluted. The Treaty the Maori chiefs signed with the British in 1840 seemed a wise and timely concession when barely 2,000 Pakeha were sprinkled lightly across their lands. Twenty years later, when the number of British settlers overtook the population of tangata whenua, the promises given at Waitangi proved to be as cynical as they were unenforceable.

 

What is it, then, which stops the latest population projections from Statistics New Zealand from setting the fern leaves of Kiwi nationalism alight? Released on 18 May 2017, these projections indicate that over the next 20 years the number of immigrants from East and South Asia will double. By 2038 the number of New Zealanders of “Asian” ethnicity will represent nearly a quarter of the country’s population. Maori, by contrast, will see their share of the population rise by just 2 percentage points – from 16 to 18 percent. “European” New Zealanders’ share of the overall population is projected to fall from roughly three-quarters to two-thirds.

 

In times past, projections such as these would have generated a massive public backlash against the political party, or parties, responsible for such a dramatic reconfiguration of the nation’s ethnic profile. Twenty years ago, media headlines decrying an “Asian Invasion” were exploited by Winston Peters’ to secure 13 percent of the Party Vote for his NZ First Party. Why, then, twenty years later, is NZ First not polling twice or three times that number?

 

The explanation is, almost entirely, economic.

 

Chinese immigration has encouraged Auckland property prices to soar – producing a “wealth effect” (courtesy of tax-free capital gains!) for which, justifiably or unjustifiably, Chinese investors are held responsible. Bolstering this shift in perception across the entire country has been the steady rise in China’s consumption of New Zealand’s exports. Rather than bite the hand which is, increasingly, feeding them, many Kiwis have considered it more prudent to retire the worst of their old prejudices.

 

In regional New Zealand, likewise, the sterling contribution of Filipino dairy farm workers is encouraging a hitherto undetected enthusiasm for multiculturalism.

 

Even in the working-class heartlands, the money to be made hiring-out the spare room to overseas students is often enough to defang traditional blue-collar hostility towards “low-wage workers” flooding “their” labour market.

 

The other factor which explains New Zealanders reluctance (so far!) to respond to nationalistic dog-whistles is the sheer number of Kiwis who have travelled overseas. Familiarity with “foreign” cultures has rendered “foreigners” a lot less frightening to young New Zealanders than old ones. New Zealanders raised entirely in the globalisation era know there’s a big wide world out there – a world which values highly the Kiwi’s celebrated ability to get along with just about anybody. Racism no longer pays.

 

None of which should be advanced as evidence that racism and xenophobia will find no purchase in the forthcoming general election. There are many thousands of New Zealanders who feel like strangers in their own land. Who miss the comforting homogeneity of the sleepy, white, British dominion in which they were raised. Such voters are, however, a dwindling asset for all but the NZ First Party. Only Winston can afford to make “A Whiter Shade of Pale” his theme song.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 June 2017.

A Special Kind Of Prejudice.

Self Portrait Of A Sinophobic  Killer: Thankfully, New Zealand history boasts only one self-confessed homicdal racist - Lionel Terry. To ensure we never have another, the issues of race and immigration must be kept entirely separate.

 

LIONEL TERRY was waiting for Joe Kum Yung as he came limping up Haining Street on the evening of Sunday, 24 September 1905. The 70 year-old veteran of the Otago gold rush knew nothing of the 32 year-old English adventurer lurking in the shadows of Wellington’s notorious “Chinese Quarter”. As Joe shuffled past, Terry stepped forward, raised his revolver and fired. The elderly man collapsed in the street. Stunned neighbours rushed to render assistance but, by the time he arrived at the nearby hospital, Joe Kum Yung was dead. Terry, meanwhile, had disappeared into the Wellington night.

 

The next morning, however, Terry turned himself in to the authorities. “I have come to tell you that I am the man who shot the Chinaman in the Chinese quarters of the city last evening”, he explained. “I take an interest in alien immigration and I took this means of bringing it under the public notice.”

 

Convicted of Joe’s murder, Terry was sentenced to hang. But this was New Zealand in 1905 and English gentlemen did not die for killing elderly Chinese. Declared insane, the murderous white supremacist spent the rest of his life in psychiatric institutions where, in later years, he was allowed to paint and write poetry. With his long white hair and neatly trimmed beard he was treated as an eccentric minor celebrity.

 

It takes a special kind of prejudice to kill a man for the purposes of bringing an issue “under the public notice”. But the anti-Chinese feeling which Joe’s homicide highlighted was by no means exceptional. Nor was it a phenomenon restricted to the political right. Indeed, in the early years of the twentieth century, anti-Chinese agitation was associated much more closely with the political left. Terry himself was a staunch anti-capitalist who railed against employers who imported “coolie-slave labour” at the expense of honest Britons who expected a fair day’s work to be rewarded with a fair day’s pay.

 

For most of New Zealand’s history, racism and immigration have been inseparable. At issue, always, was not the number of immigrants arriving in New Zealand, but the extent to which the new arrivals either challenged, or conformed to, the expectations of the non-immigrant population.

 

Foremost among those expectations was the working-class prohibition against selling one’s labour for less than the going rate. This was an article of left-wing faith all around the Pacific Rim: adhered to with every bit as much fervour in New South Wales and California as New Zealand. That Chinese workers represented a deadly threat to “White Men’s” wages was part and parcel of the same working-class gospel, fuelling European workers’ racist antipathy towards the “Yellow Peril”.

 

For Chinese New Zealanders the consequences of this deeply-ingrained racial prejudice were severe. The legal barriers to their full acceptance as New Zealand citizens (poll taxes and administrative restrictions on travel) took a scandalously long time to dismantle, and the social barriers lasted even longer. It was only fifty years ago that Kiwi schoolchildren regaled each other with “Ching Chong Chinaman” rhymes and jokes.

 

In 2002 Helen Clark issued a Prime Ministerial apology to Chinese New Zealanders for the treatment meted out to them by the New Zealand state. Ten years later, however, a senior New Zealand politician was still willing to entertain his audiences with the jocular observation: “Two Wongs don’t make a White.”

 

There has been considerable consternation at the Green Party co-leader, Metiria Turei’s, uncompromising criticism of NZ First’s “racist” immigration policies. When placed in the shameful context of this country’s long history of anti-immigrant (especially anti-Chinese immigrant) prejudice, however, the Green Party’s progressive sensitivities on this issue are a lot less surprising.

 

Where they do lay themselves open to criticism, however, is in their refusal to cast an equally large accusatory stone at their preferred coalition partner, Labour. The latter’s willingness to mix race and immigration issues has a long history. Whether it be Bill Rowling’s backing of Rob Muldoon’s 1982 legislation stripping Samoans of their New Zealand citizenship, or the more recent “Chinese-sounding names” debacle, Labour’s record on this crucial progressive litmus test is, on the face of it, no less worthy of criticism than NZ First’s.

 

Thankfully, New Zealand history boasts only one Lionel Terry. To ensure we never have another, the issues of race and immigration must be kept entirely separate.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 July 2017.