Barry Soper: Should New Zealand be worried about Chinese military presence?

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says we'd be strongly opposed to the militarisation of the Pacific. Photo / Mark Mitchell

A Chinese military base closer to New Zealand than Samoa, should we be worried? Well that largely depends on your answer to the question, why?

If you listen to the Americans who've had a Pacific presence here for yonks, although much further away from New Zealand, they'd say it was strategic, there to protect us if anything goes awry.

Reports out of Australia say there have been talks between Beijing and Port Vila, Vanuatu's capital, about the prospect of the People's Liberation Army moving in there.

The Chinese have certainly spent a lot of money establishing their foothold there, as they have done throughout the Pacific. But in Vila they've gifted, among many other things, the futuristic National Convention Centre which seats a thousand and dominates the skyline.

It comes with a 600-seat restaurant and a 200-seat media room for press conferences.

It all seems a bit out of place, certainly the rent they've been able to drum up apparently doesn't even pay the electricity bill.

The political reaction here to a military base has been interesting, from the relative ambivalence of National's Simon Bridges to the Prime Minister saying we'd be strongly opposed to the militarisation of the Pacific, although other than noise, there'd be little we could do about it.

The old timer Winston Peters doesn't accept that though, suggesting we should be throwing more money at the Pacific ourselves and we should get used to it. Peters says we should be doing a whole lot more in the Pacific and we should have been doing it for a long time now. He hopes the Government's first Budget reflects that next month which essentially means it will.

Peters says our place in the Pacific's about our security and our neighbourhood and we've got to spend more alongside other partners who've got the same values as we have.

In his book, China doesn't get a look in there.

Perhaps that's what American Vice President Joe Biden meant when he was here in the dying stages of the Obama Administration when he said it's no longer what America can do for New Zealand, it's what it can do with New Zealand.

And maybe that's why Rex Tillerson sought a second meeting with Peters in Vietnam last year before he was sacked by Trump, although withdrawing from the Trans Pacific Partnership was hardly courting this part of the world.

But on that one, like many things Downunder, it seems the migrating China is simply waiting in the wings.