Two former Prime Ministers, a former party leader, a diplomat and a businessman yesterday released a joint statement on New Zealand’s relations with China, which stated the obvious.
Things have changed.
The former Prime Minister, Helen Clark, describes the change as a “radical repositioning”.
But what has not been explained, and no one seems to know, is why.
The statement, in the form of an open letter to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon from former Labour Prime Ministers Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Helen Clark; National leader Don Brash; the former Speaker, Sir David Carter, a former Ambassador to China, Carl Worker and businessman David Mahon is being published as an advertisement in various newspapers and expresses “grave concern” about the current direction of New Zealand’s foreign policy.
It drew a predictably ad hominem response from Foreign Minister Winston Peters.
A spokesperson for the Minister said he saw no value in indulging the tired arguments of various former politicians or officials who appeared to be suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome.
Dr Brash told POLITIK the group had decided to publish the statement now “partly because of the imminence of (Prime Minister Christopher) Luxon’s visit to China, and partly increasing concern at the sheer number of seriously dumb actions being taken by the Government.”
Brash might have also mentioned the persistent reference in speeches by Luxon, Peters and Defence Minister Judith Collins to what she recently told the Institute of International Affairs was “some states increasingly acting in ways that undermine existing international rules and norms and seeking to reshape both regional orders and the global order as a whole.”
That is code for China, as Collins demonstrated in her next sentence when she singled out China for a missile test which ended up near Tahiti and the recent naval flotilla which circumnavigated Australia.
She said these actions demonstrated that New Zealand’s geographic location no longer sheltered us from threats to the extent that it once did.
Hugh White is the former Australian Defence official and strategic studies analyst who, in the 1980s played a key role in persuading New Zealand to buy into the ANZAC frigates and then went on to author Australia’s 2000 Defence Policy Review and is now Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University and he discounts the likelihood of a direct Chinese threat.
“The only circumstance in which Australia could credibly find itself under attack from China would be if Australia joined America in a war with China over Taiwan,” he says in a lengthy essay published this week in the Australian journal, “The Quarterly Essay.”
White argues that unless it uses nuclear weapons, the United States does not have the force, strength, or the will to defend Taiwan from China.
“There is no evidence that Trump cares much, if at all, about the strategic contest with China in Asia,” he says.
“On the contrary, a lot of evidence points the other way.
“It suggests that Trump is happy to deal with China in the same way he deals with Russia, as a fellow great power in a multipolar world.
“That means conceding China’s right to an exclusive sphere of influence in its own backyard, just as he insists on America’s right to dominate the Western Hemisphere.”
Until 2023, New Zealand had what successive Prime Ministers called an independent foreign policy.
National Foreign Minister Murray McCully defined it in a speech to the Institute of International Affairs in 2017.
“I do want to address directly the notion that seems to attract coverage on slow news days that somehow New Zealand will at times need to choose between its relationship with the US and its relationship with China,” he said.
“That belief shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of both relationships.
“It also runs directly counter to the whole notion of an independent foreign policy.
“We will, and do, agree and disagree with both the US and China according to our own sense of what is right and what is in New Zealand’s interests.”
There is nothing new in this.
The Labour Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, tried to define it in 1972 when his Government was debating recognising the Peoples’ Republic of China.
“The Labour government will look at every question from the point of view of New Zealand’s interests and New Zealand’s aims in the world,” he wrote in a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade publication.
“We must in future be more self-reliant, and self-reliance requires independence of judgement and action.
“China has now entered the mainstream of world affairs.
“It is playing an active part in the United Nations.
“In Asia and the Pacific, its influence is great and is bound to grow. It is logical and sensible for New Zealand to recognise the People’s Republic of China and enter into normal relations with it.”
Clark is one of the architects of the independent foreign policy which she championed first as a Labour Party activist and then as an MP during the nuclear-free debate and then as Prime Minister, where she famously refused to have New Zealand troops join George W Bush’s ill-fated intervention in Iraq in 2002.
“What the independent foreign policy meant to me was maintaining New Zealand’s full independence to make its calls on the issues as it saw them, whether that was on nuclear weapons, whether it was on trade, whether it was whether you intervened in Iraq,” she told POLITIK.
“It was keeping that complete flexibility of movement and managing to manoeuvre directly between great power interests because, as a small trading country, you need to be friends of all and enemies of none.”
The joint letter to Luxon singles out Peters for what it says are statements he has made which seek to position New Zealand alongside the United States as an adversary of China.
“For example, since coming to office, your government has signed New Zealand up to a number of strategic groupings led by the United States,” it says.
“You have authorised a naval vessel to sail through the Taiwan Strait despite knowing that would antagonise China.
“You have strengthened defence ties with the Philippines at a time when it is in a low-level military stand-off with China in the South China Sea.
“You have allowed one of your MPs, both last year and again recently, to lead a large delegation of MPs to Taiwan, despite many years of avoiding such a scale of political contacts (given that for more than half a century, we have acknowledged that Taiwan is part of China) and knowing that the visit would cause offence.
“Most recently, Foreign Minister Peters has poured scorn on the New Zealand-China FTA, which through bipartisan efforts has become a bedrock of New Zealand’s modern economic security.
“It would not be surprising if China were to come to the conclusion that the special relationship which New Zealand has had with it since becoming the first developed country to have a free trade agreement with it in 2008 is no longer so valued by New Zealand.”
Peters’s response was opaque.
“The Government stands by its independent foreign policy approach, which has been transparent about its focus on advancing New Zealand’s security and prosperity after the years of inaction by the previous administration.,” he said.
However, whether it was a coincidence or otherwise, a 1200-word statement highlighting the economic benefits of the China-New Zealand relationship emerged from the Chinese Embassy in Wellington only hours after the joint letter was distributed under embargo to journalists.
“Since the signing of the China–New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 2008, New Zealand’s exports to China have surged from $2.5 billion to $20.85 billion in 2024 — an average annual growth rate of 14.1 per cent,” the Chinese statement said.
“That pace far outstripped the country’s export growth to the rest of the world over the same period, which averaged 7.7 per cent annually.”
The statement noted that China was New Zealand’s largest market for food and fibre, the largest source for overseas students, and the third largest for tourists.
It is obvious that China sees its links with New Zealand business as the key to its whole relationship.
On his visit here last year, Premier Li Qiang asked a meeting of some of the country’s top business leaders to become a bridge between China and New Zealand to help New Zealanders see China “in a more objective way.”
The other factor that must make China suspicious about New Zealand’s foreign policy intentions is the invoking by Collins of ANZUS to define the relationship with Australia.
After the nuclear ship row in 1985, New Zealand never formally withdrew from ANZUS but, given that the United States had withdrawn its security guarantee, which was the sole purpose of the Treaty, it effectively meant that as far as New Zealand was concerned, it was dead.
The joint statement issued after the annual joint Defence Ministerial talks last December between Collins and Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles said: “The formal expression of our alliance is found in the 1944 Canberra Pact, the 1951 ANZUS Treaty and through various Australia – New Zealand Joint Statements on Closer Defence Relations, instigated in 1991 and last updated in 2018. “
This was the first time that ANZUS had been invoked in a statement after the annual meeting since 1985.
What is surprising about all this is that there has never been a definitive statement from the Prime Minister or even the Foreign Minister on the reasons why New Zealand has decided to abandon 40 years of bipartisan foreign policy and risk its economic relationship with its biggest trading partner.
There has been no public debate.
“I think the public’s mind obviously hasn’t been drawn to this by the government,” said Clark.
“The public is probably understandably more concerned at the moment about issues of house prices and cost of living and quality of the health system, schools and the rest of it.
“But it is actually quite a radical repositioning of New Zealand foreign policy that’s going on, and it has not had the public attention it deserves.”
The writers of the letter have confirmed that the Prime Minister will shortly visit China, which will give him an opportunity, if he wishes, to rebalance the relationship that has skewed to the other side of the Pacific over the past year.
