Dialogue: Transtasman interests will hurdle defence difficulties

Critics who believe New Zealand's defence policy will damage transtasman relations ignore what really matters to Australia, says TERENCE O'BRIEN.*

Australia and New Zealand agree that the defence link is a central strand of the transtasman connection.

The closer defence relationship framework is particularly vital to us now, given the Defence Force's new emphasis on depth over breadth. Joint training with Australia becomes more important in these circumstances.

Critics of the new New Zealand policy fear, however, that the transtasman relationship will suffer. Yet the relationship has many dimensions. There is no golden rule that any one strand should outweigh all others.

In today's world, there are multiple examples of partner Governments (even military allies) quarantining various dimensions of their dealings. Relationships such as those between the United States and Japan, or China and Taiwan, amply demonstrate the pragmatic isolation of security and trade, so that effective dealings endure even when relations in one domain or the other grow stormy.

In a globalising world, where private enterprise, not Governments, drives trade and economic flows, it is no surprise that such distinctions can be, and are, made.

Critics in New Zealand of the Government's defence policy who fear damaging economic and related consequences for this country are overstating the case. Transtasman trade is, moreover, a two-way street. Australia gains measurably from trade access to New Zealand.

In direct security terms, the contrasting size and potential of the transtasman partners ensure that our hard power (military and economic strength) will never match Australia's fondest expectations. Yet New Zealand's soft power (unthreatening, innovative, internationalist) is useful to Australia precisely because it is a different combination.

In recent Southwest Pacific turbulence, there has been more than one instance where contesting factions have displayed preference for our lower-key, even-handed style and defence professionalism.

This point is worth registering gently because of the particular aversion among some individuals (officials, academics, media) in the Canberra security community towards New Zealand and its defence policies.

While Australian political leaders continue to observe, quite correctly, that decisions about New Zealand's security are for our Government alone to make, critics of the defence policy here dismiss that as diplomatic speak, disguising what they interpret as the real Australian attitude represented by those in the security community.

That attitude was nurtured in the Cold War and amplified particularly by contempt for our non-nuclear policy, which ironically (for the critics) now constitutes the essential logic of non-proliferation.

New Zealand's international security policy in relation to arms control, when contrasted with that of Australia, is notably more constructive in these times.

Yet there is no room for complacency. Some careful New Zealand diplomacy is needed to nourish the transtasman connection because there are hurdles looming.

Over many years, successive Australian governments have exhibited a strong commitment to a military alliance with the US. That strategic partnership is perceived as securing Australian interests in the region and beyond, and serving the ambition of an emerging middle-level power.

New Zealand must fully respect that. There is evidence that the Bush Administration now harbours expectations of support, however, from its closest allies across a range of new policy that could alter significantly the global strategic landscape and ignite controversy.

Those expectations embrace a search for allied support for a multilayered missile defence system; for related power projection and satellite protection in space; for an adversarial stance towards China (the Hainan spy plane incident was a symptom, not the cause, of an American policy shift); for a slowdown of reconciliation and reunification moves on the Korean peninsula; and for understanding of the US renunciation of the Kyoto climate change treaty.

Australia has signalled support for missile defence (very few other countries have gone as far, at least yet), for a robust approach to China, and understanding about Kyoto.

Space-tracking facilities developed with US cooperation on Australian soil are essential to American missile defence, so Australia's inclinations in that respect are no surprise, although the Opposition Labor Party (ahead in the polls) is notably more circumspect.

To remain an operational military partner of the world's unrivalled power, which continues to spend lavishly to augment that power through technology, imposes a growing financial burden on Australia.

Defence spending increases are essentially driven less by fear of greater threat, let alone perceived New Zealand inadequacies, than by a need to keep commensurate military pace with the US in support of the all-important strategic relationship.

Australia's long, resourceful diplomatic commitment in East Asia has at times encountered problems (witness the degraded condition of some of Australia's relations in Southeast Asia), but the implications for Australia now of the more virile US approach to China pose a greater additional challenge, as indeed it does for us.

Hitherto, military modernisation was ranked last among China's strategic priorities. Its rising economy is so dependent on international integration that it can hardly contemplate aggressive expansion, while remaining assertive nonetheless of its interests at its borders, notably Taiwan. The Bush Administration seems ready now to challenge basic assumptions.

Pursuit of US missile defence and space weapons will certainly alter Chinese attitudes and, very likely, priorities. Missile defence could become yet another self-fulfilling prophecy if China builds on its own arms potential. Under successive Governments, New Zealand diplomacy has wisely sought to avoid taking sides between the US and China. For Australia, such impartiality is harder. The assertiveness of President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld pose awkward questions for the senior Tasman partner.

*Terence O'Brien is a teaching fellow in international relations at Victoria University.