If Australia weren’t so important to New Zealand, New Zealanders could relish the farce masquerading as politics in Canberra.

Australians used to denigrate New Zealand’s post-1993 proportional voting system. But Helen Clark got nine years in office, John (now Sir John) Key had eight years before handing over to Bill (now Sir William) English for a ninth year, and Jacinda Ardern is solidly supported in her party and by her two coalition partners, with a credible prospect of six years or more.

Now, some joke, to understand Canberra’s whirling turnstile of prime ministers, we must remember that Australia grows bananas—abundantly.

In the early 1980s, Australian deputy prime minister Doug Anthony worried that New Zealand’s dicky economy might make it an unstable neighbour—hence, he told me, the need for the closer economic relationship free trade agreement (CER).

Turn that around. Is Australia now stable enough to be a reliable partner in the region and build CER into a genuine single economic market?

Ardern talked on Friday of ‘close ties in all areas of our relationship, including on trade, economic, defence and security matters’. ‘[W]e cooperate closely in our region and on the international stage.’

She said she was ‘looking forward to working with [Prime Minister Scott] Morrison to advance that’.

Foreign Minister Winston Peters noted that Morrison was involved in New Zealand tourism administration when the ‘high-profile’ ‘100% Pure New Zealand’ campaign slogan was coined.

Morrison headed the NZ Office of Tourism and Sport from 1998 to 2000. The Audit Office criticised a report of his to Tourism Minister Murray McCully on the separate Tourism Board. McCully resigned after the Audit Office criticised his dealings with the board.

Peters depicted Morrison as ‘familiar with the New Zealand political psyche, the composition of New Zealand, how [we] think and work’.

He didn’t mention Morrison’s hard line as immigration minister foreshadowing Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s detention and deportation of convicted prisoners born in New Zealand, some of whom had lived in Australia since they were children and were criminalised there.

Add the inhumane treatment of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru and refusal to take up New Zealand’s offer to resettle some of them.

The Morrison–Dutton party could be called the Illiberals. In July, Justice Minister Andrew Little called Dutton’s policy ‘venal’ and didn’t retract the comment when Dutton hit back. Earlier that month, Peters—as acting prime minister while Ardern was on maternity leave—said Australia had breached the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in detaining a 17-year-old New Zealander.

Still, Ardern on Friday gave Malcolm Turnbull credit for the ‘Pathway to Citizenship, which has allowed many New Zealanders to regularise their status in Australia’—around 600,000 people born in New Zealand live in Australia—and thus claim some services they have paid taxes towards but are denied while not citizens.

And the turmoil does not—at least not yet—undermine cooperation in security and development in the South Pacific. New Zealand has begun a ‘reset’ of its engagement with the island nations, recognising its growing Pacific ethnic minority, the important marine food and other resources in the sparsely populated region, and China’s growing presence, including with large loans.

New Zealand also values the positive aspects of Australia’s engagement in East Asia, including the expected announcement of a free trade deal with Indonesia.

But there are differences. One is between New Zealand’s ‘independent foreign policy’ and Australia’s tight US military alliance and more assertive stance on China’s activities in East and Southeast Asia and influence in Australia’s universities and its politics.

Another difference is on climate change. Morrison is a coal champion. Ardern backs the Paris accord.

And New Zealand businesses find progress frustratingly slow on removing obstacles to the single economic market. Australia is the biggest foreign market for manufactures and a stepping stone to bigger markets.

Insiders say Australia moves on a matter needing joint action such as CER only when it’s high on Canberra’s domestic action list.

And why not? Australia is the bigger sibling in this unequal ‘close relationship’. Bigger siblings are often dismissive—sometimes with justification, as over New Zealand’s paltry defence contribution (now being edged upward).

This dismissal is usually veiled behind platitudes. But sometimes the veil slips. Julie Bishop declared during New Zealand’s 2017 election campaign that she couldn’t work with a Labour government. Interference in another country’s election offends diplomatic propriety—Bishop was foreign minister. Turnbull didn’t correct her.

That’s life. More worrying to Wellington is instability in Canberra, because stable politics there are critical to a stable relationship, and even a switch to Labor wouldn’t assure that, given its travails and Bill Shorten’s unfamiliarity with the Tasman sibling.

For now, to New Zealanders Canberra truth looks stranger than fiction—as Politik editor Richard Harman unintentionally encapsulated in a typo calling the deeply factionalised Liberals ‘fictionalised’.

Ahead of the ASEAN–Australia summit in Sydney next month, ASPI today publishes my report Australia as an ASEAN Community partner. The report discusses how and why Australia should join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

We should aim for a form of ASEAN membership/partnership by 2024, the 50th anniversary of Australia becoming the first ASEAN dialogue nation. New Zealand should and would join any Australian effort to join ASEAN.

The ASEAN–Australia summit is the launch point for a discussion of what much closer cooperation could mean for the future of the ASEAN Community.

Alternative routes to membership could be used:

• Half-in status by 2024, with Australia and New Zealand becoming ASEAN observers. This embraces the existing ASEAN system.

Or, what I’ve come to see as the better course:

• The creation of a new form of ASEAN membership—embracing Australia and New Zealand as ASEAN Community partners. This avoids the geographical veto (for not being part of Southeast Asia) while acknowledging the value that Australia and New Zealand offer. As ASEAN Community partners, Australia and New Zealand would have full ASEAN rights and obligations.

Australia won’t have to give up deeply held beliefs about democracy and human rights to enter ASEAN. We can heartily embrace the values formally expressed in the ASEAN Community. On the march to community, ASEAN is seeking to remake its regionalism, and proclaimed norms are shifting. An Australia inside the ASEAN Community would help fellow members fulfil the Community’s foundation documents, especially the ‘ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint 2025’, which commits to an ASEAN that will ‘promote human and social development, respect for fundamental freedoms, gender equality, the promotion and protection of human rights and the promotion of social justice’.

There’s a big gap between the democratic promise of the Community’s aspiration and the current political reality in many ASEAN states. That democratic deficit, though, calls for Australia to get closer and work harder, not to hold back.

As geostrategic and geoeconomic pressures build in Asia, ASEAN, as a middle-power grouping, needs the extra heft offered by Australia and New Zealand.

Australia’s ASEAN membership wouldn’t affect our alliance with the US any more than formal alliances with the US have restricted the ASEAN roles of Thailand or the Philippines. Certainly, the quasi-alliance Singapore has created with America hasn’t altered Singapore’s ASEAN commitment.

Australia’s alliance would be an asset, not a hindrance, just as the US alliance was no barrier to Australia signing ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation to join the East Asia Summit. Nor do alliance and ASEAN ‘insidership’ prevent Australia from building ever-closer partnerships with Japan, South Korea, China and India—ASEAN has the same aspirations.

The Sydney meeting next month will need to launch two huge discussions on the how and why of Australian membership. The ten-member association will take a mountain of convincing. And Australia will have to make changes in how it think about and understands itself. The shift in Australian attitudes would be as significant as those within ASEAN.

The ultimate arguments won’t be about the geography of Southeast Asia; they’ll be about attitudes, understandings and beliefs, and the way Asia is changing.

Australia’s dealings with the ten nations of ASEAN are set by geography, flavoured by history, worked by diplomacy and driven by trade. Throbbing always are the central concerns of power and strategy and defence. The geography and the diplomacy and the power mean that Southeast Asia must be a constant interest of Australia’s, even if the terms of Australia’s obsession change shape over time.

Those interests and obsessions inject many layers into Australia’s interactions with ASEAN as the regional institution. Not least in the continuous shape-shifting is the steady movement of weight, wealth and power in the ASEAN direction.

Joining ASEAN is the logical culmination of decades of Australian regional engagement. ASEAN membership would be an embrace of the region in the service of our deepest interests.

Membership of ASEAN and our alliance with the US and close partnerships across Asia are the endowment of a nation with its own continent, a country as much at home in the Indian Ocean as the Pacific Ocean. Australia must express its vast geography and multiple interests. In the 21st century, Australia must be all-in in Asia.

The all-in line asks for more than transactional competence and business-as-usual. Asia is shifting too fast: ASEAN membership is only one part of much that will confront Australia in our region(s). We will seek change, and be changed in turn.

ASEAN membership seems a long way off, but only if you ignore the distance Australia and ASEAN have travelled in the past 50 years. In the journey of convergence, the hardest miles are done and fading into memory. The greatest changes are things already changed—certainly in the makeup of Australia’s community and the way the nation thinks of itself.

Australia’s Asian future will be shaped by ASEAN’s success or failure. We have fundamental interests in ASEAN. If the ASEAN Community project is a success—in its social, political and strategic dimensions—Australia will want to be deeply involved in that vibrant community. Equally, Australia’s interests would be deeply compromised if ASEAN stalls or fails.

Australia knows the Southeast Asia it wants to live with. Joining ASEAN is the best way to give full expression to our future in Southeast Asia and in Asia.

Australia’s dread of France in the South Pacific in the 20th century has slowly turned into a new desire—that France stay and play and help pay.

As the quintessential status quo power in the South Pacific, Australia today embraces France as a new bastion of the existing, preferred order. The shift in Canberra’s thinking acknowledges how France has adapted its ways and adopted regionalist colours. No longer is France the feared as the outsider prone to blowing up—both bombs and its own interests.

Australia can embrace France as a fellow status quo power in the South Pacific because this is the region where the colonial powers stayed. Unlike Asia and Africa, decolonisation around here didn’t always equate to departure. Only Britain did a full exit—handing off to Australia and New Zealand as it left.

New Zealand set the decolonising-without-departing model by moving first, showing smarts and creativity. Wellington used a different model for each of its four colonies: Samoa became the first island state to get independence in 1962, with free movement to NZ for 20 years; Cook Islands got self government in 1965 (NZ sharing control of defence and foreign affairs); Niue got self government in free association with NZ in 1974 and Tokelau is a dependent territory of NZ.

Less deftly, but with equal determination, the US managed the same trick: America Samoa is an unincorporated territory, and America has compacts of free association with Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau (although it took eight referendums to get Palau’s compact ratified).

Compared to the Kiwis, France has taken nearly 50 years to decipher the decolonising-without-departure memo; perhaps the longest of long games was the only option, given the baggage Paris carried.

France has already scored a major win in the stay-and-play stakes: full membership of the Pacific Islands Forum. Even before New Caledonia votes next year, the South Pacific has rewarded France for its long game. The Forum last year announced the decision to admit New Caledonia and French Polynesia as full members (they’ve had associate membership since 2006). Two French controlled territories have joined the peak Island club that was created as an expression of Pacific independence.

Nic Maclellan  rightly judges this ‘a momentous change’. The Forum which hammered out much of its identity and cohesion in fighting France, now accepts that ‘France seems to be in the Pacific to stay’. Theo Ell calls Forum membership the prize for ‘a marked change in French Pacific strategy, which was previously strongly individualistic and isolationist’. To normalise and reinforce its presence, Paul Soyez writes, France has embraced South Pacific regionalism, giving Noumea and Papeete enough autonomy to join in.

The Forum is the institutional expression of Australia and New Zealand as insiders, both ‘of’ and ‘in’ the South Pacific. For the Islands, the Forum is a mechanism to manage relations with Australia and New Zealand, as well as other big players outside the South Pacific. Equally, Australia and New Zealand use the Forum as a vehicle not just for regional consensus, but as a mechanism to create and police norms. The nature of the club reflects Island polities which are conservative, pro-Western, capitalist and Christian. That suits Australia wonderfully—as it will France.

France—through New Caledonia and French Polynesia—gets two seats at the top table for what will be a protracted argument about the nature of the Forum and the future of the Islands. More than a diplomatic debate, the wrangle goes to issues of power and identity, pitting Oz status quo interests against Fiji’s revisionism.

A key aim of Fiji revisionism is to strip Australia of its rights as an insider, to redefine regionalism so that Australia isn’t part of the South Pacific. In Fiji’s reimagining, Australia and New Zealand would be kicked out of the Forum. In that argument, Australia counts France a welcome reinforcement to the established order.

Proclaiming Australia’s ‘leadership role’ to deal with instability, natural disasters and climate change in the South Pacific, the 2016 Defence White Paper named a set of partners: New Zealand, France, the United States, and Japan. The hierarchy of lists always matters in White Papers and this is high rating for what France can deliver.

The White Paper’s discussion of France offered these three layers of history, international approach and new South Pacific partnership:

• Australia and France ‘share a longstanding and close defence relationship’;
• The two nations have a ‘shared commitment to addressing global security challenges such as terrorism and piracy’;
• And in the neighbourhood: ‘We are strong partners in the Pacific where France maintains important capabilities and we also work closely together to support the security in our respective Southern Ocean territories.’

The White Paper was published in February, 2016, and two months later France won the $50 billion submarine prize; the Oz–French strategic partnership shape-shifted to a new universe. In an ironic reversal of history, the South Pacific can now provide relationship ballast for the inevitable arguments and agonies of the sub build.

The long submarine marriage until 2050 will be marked by passionate, expensive acrimony between two disparate partners. And no divorce is possible in a huge project, as diabolically expensive as it’s technically difficult. In the decades ahead, partnership in the South Pacific may be the natural and easier part of the Oz–French relationship. Change, indeed.

 

Mark Thomson’s account of Australia–New Zealand defence differences prompts an impolite question: quite what is the point of these trans-Tasman comparisons?

The intellectual answer is that we want an accurate account of the world around us. Australia’s world (at least sometimes) includes New Zealand, whose world (almost always) includes Australia. It’s important to see how we compare, and then to compare our comparisons.

But there should be a policy angle too. Understanding where Australian and New Zealand security policies differ and converge may clarify the future of the trans-Tasman alliance.

Mark seems genuinely taken aback by the differences he has discovered. ‘Given the shared history and common heritage of the two countries’, he argues, ‘it’s not immediately clear why such substantial differences have arisen.’

But there are important dissimilarities in our histories. And as the late Denis McLean (a former New Zealand Secretary of Defence) observed in his fabulously entitled Prickly Pair, these differences are reflected in our separate and rival nationalisms.

Policy-makers on both sides of the Tasman need to be aware of these differences and still find ways to work together. To wit the refreshing insistence in the 2016 Australian Defence White Paper:

‘We recognise that New Zealand will make its own judgements on its national interests, and that New Zealand’s military capability choices may not always reflect Australia’s. Despite this, we will continue to coordinate our efforts with New Zealand in the South Pacific and in supporting our shared interests in a secure region and a rules-based global order.’

But this leads to a third possible reason for comparison making. If the policy gaps between Australia and New Zealand are bigger than they should be, comparisons may pinpoint the areas requiring change to bring us closer.

This almost suggests that collaboration demands equivalence. But Mark implies that New Zealand and Australia really should see the world more similarly than they apparently do:

‘…as maritime trading nations in the same part of the world, interests should be strongly aligned; both countries would be severely affected if trade was disrupted, and the security of each is ultimately contingent on strategic stability in Asia. What’s more, New Zealand can’t be secure if Australia isn’t.’

And now the really interesting question arises. If ways were found to bridge the gaps between Australia and New Zealand, who would do the adjusting? The consensus appears to be that the change should come from New Zealand. As I have argued on Incline, the Turnbull government’s White Paper welcomes New Zealand back to the upper strategic echelons. This point is conveyed in references to New Zealand and Australia as ANZUS allies, which, as Mark notes, didn’t make John Key’s day. Australia’s elevation of New Zealand’s profile is partly due to our cooperation in Iraq, but I expect also because of New Zealand’s accelerating partnership with the United States and willingness to speak out Asia’s maritime tensions including in the South China Sea.

I’ve not found a parallel logic in New Zealand’s briefer and less prescriptive White Paper (whose arrival occasioned my earlier exchange in these pages with Peter Jennings). The Key government doesn’t say very much about what it expects from Australia except perhaps that it will remain sitting about where it is. ‘Through its size, location and strategic reach, Australia contributes significantly to New Zealand’s security’, the New Zealand White Paper announces. And it’s important for New Zealand to try and keep up: ‘it is critical that the Defence Force maintains its ability to operate effectively with its Australian counterpart’. Seemingly Australia does what it does and New Zealand adapts.

You might say that this is how it works between larger and smaller members of an alliance, especially where the latter attaches more importance to the relationship. But this leads to an interesting thought experiment. What if New Zealand was asked about the changes it would like to see Australia make?

I think there might be two main requests. First, when Australia is focused on Middle East operations and maintaining a capability edge in the Indo–Pacific (a regional conception not shared by New Zealand) it should recall the South Pacific’s importance. New Zealand’s White Paper expects its defence force to be involved in a major Pacific operations over the next ten years. They would very likely be conducted with Australia. And Wellington may wonder if Canberra has thought carefully about the suitability of the ADF’s capability trends for Pacific operations. Some of the new stuff looks rather big for local conditions.

The second query involves Australia’s approach to the major regional powers in the Asia–Pacific. Wellington knows Canberra’s concerns about China’s approach to maritime disputes in East Asia. As recent Ministerial comments suggest, Wellington is concerned too. But Mark’s observation that ‘Australia has adopted a cautious position on the Middle Kingdom’s growing assertiveness’, might raise eyebrows in New Zealand. While sharing the Australian White Paper’s view that the rules based system is under challenge, including in Asia, Wellington might welcome its number one ally being more reluctant to portray China as an outlier from that system, and less hasty to set up a contest where only American leadership in Asia can make the difference.

But New Zealand would add a proviso. Whatever you do, Australia, don’t get too close to our approach. Otherwise New Zealand’s independent identity will be submerged by a sea of sameness. That risk may encourage Wellington to keep trans-Tasman differences looking a little bigger than they really are.

It’s funny how the same document can be perceived so differently. In his demolition job on New Zealand’s latest Defence White Paper, Peter Jennings sees Wellington plumbing ‘new depths of vacuity’ in its ‘desperation to say nothing offensive to outsiders’. This includes, he asserts, a reluctance ‘to say that Chinese assertiveness is undermining security’ in the South China Sea.

But those aware of Wellington’s increasing willingness to comment on South China Sea matters will see in the White Paper a formalization of positions that have already complicated the Key government’s relationship with Beijing. Those positions include a statement designed specifically for China regarding the international tribunal case launched by the Philippines:

‘New Zealand supports the rights of states to seek recourse to international dispute settlement…It is important that all states respect the final outcomes of such processes.’

Nobody in their right mind would expect New Zealand to have matched the Australian White Paper’s depiction of China as a serial challenger to international rules in Asia (which I explore elsewhere). And Wellington’s treatment of China as an ‘important strategic partner’ has a higher profile in its White Paper.

But Beijing, Washington and Canberra will have noticed New Zealand’s enthusiastic reference to Japan as a country ‘with common democratic values and a shared commitment to maintaining regional peace and security’ and the endorsement of ‘Japan’s recent moves to make a more proactive contribution to international security’.

Similarly, while Peter detects ‘no expression of Wellington’s willingness to exercise freedom of navigation or overflight rights’ in the South China Sea, a careful reader will spot the White Paper’s assertion that New Zealand’s Defence Force ‘makes an important contribution to international efforts towards freedom of navigation’ including ‘maritime surveillance in the South Pacific and South East Asia’. Match that with recent comments by Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee about the role of New Zealand’s P3 Orions and Wellington isn’t keeping as quiet on those matters as Peter wants to make us think.

I also wonder if Peter has misread New Zealand’s strengthened focus on Antarctica and the southern oceans ‘as a useful secondary task, but nothing more than that.’ The reader of a very thoughtful piece by David Capie might conclude that Antarctica + New Zealand’s vast EEZ + the South Pacific could be just the combination to cement cross-partisan political support for significant defence investment. After all, the report from the public submission process reveals particular concern ‘about New Zealand’s ability to protect and monitor its vast Exclusive Economic Zone, and other strategic areas of interest like the Ross Dependency.’

That takes us to capabilities. Peter is on firmer ground in asking for more specifics on what NZ$20 billion of capital investment will purchase New Zealand. Like him, I’m very keen to see what the forthcoming Defence Capability Plan says (and what it doesn’t say). But the big point is that this money buys New Zealand planners some flexibility. It was big news at the end of 2013, as I explained over two years ago in these pages, when the Key government injected extra money into defence as part of its Mid-Term Review. This capital commitment is even bigger news still.

What the promise of extra cash doesn’t buy New Zealand is extra time. The White Paper notes that the Ministry of Defence has been expanded to ‘deliver’ on the replacements for the Hercules, the Orions and the frigates. And as I have argued in a New Zealand newspaper, by the time the next White Paper is out in five or six years time, the decision points on at least one of these major capabilities will have passed.

But even here things aren’t as bleak as Peter’s cherry-picked quotations suggest. As for airlift, the most urgent priority, the Key government is giving the impression it wants to look at options with greater capacity and range than the present combination of the C130s and 757s allows. On surveillance, the White Paper does more than Peter claims. Comments on the current upgrading of the Orions, including for ‘underwater surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence’, (the first of these words, especially telling), are clearly intended by the White Paper’s drafters as a sign of further things to come.

That leaves the frigates as the third and last of the major replacements. There is a certain vagueness in the statement that ‘Work on options for the replacement of the frigates will begin well before they reach the end of their service life in the 2020s’. To what extent that might mean New Zealand’s involvement in Australia’s future frigates will depend partly on whether the latter are of a size and expense that works for Wellington.

But having such a capability in general terms is not optional for the Key Government. The White Paper establishes as a requirement for the defence force ‘naval combat and air-surveillance capabilities to secure sea lines of communication, conduct counter-piracy and sea control operations within a coalition’. And it connects these capabilities to New Zealand’s requirement to meet its ‘commitment to Australia’ and ‘make a credible contribution in support of peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region’.

How future New Zealand governments reconcile this wider ambition well beyond the South Pacific with a clearer local focus remains to be seen. That tension will deserve continuing attention. But the big news for Australia is that its neighbour across the Tasman is more ambitious about its defence force than it has been for several decades. There’s a wolf in that sheep’s clothing.