British High Commissioner Iona Thomas welcomes higher defence spend as she warns of ‘radical instability’

British High Commissioner Iona Thomas. Photo / Liam Clayton

The British High Commissioner, Iona Thomas, said Britain has welcomed New Zealand’s higher defence spend as the world charts a path through an era of “radical instability” and “radical uncertainty”.

“We welcome New Zealand’s increase in defence spending in recognition of the very challenging environment that we are operating in,” Thomas told the Herald in an interview.

This year, Defence Minister Judith Collins published a Defence Capability Plan that charted a path to lift annual defence spending to 2% of GDP – a level seen as a benchmark for members of the Nato alliance, a group that includes Britain, but not New Zealand.

United States President Donald Trump this year got Nato leaders to agree to lift spending to 5% of GDP, superseding the old benchmark, which dated back to Barack Obama’s presidency.

In the past, New Zealand has been perceived as being late to recognise these types of strategic shifts, but Thomas thinks that in this case, New Zealand is quite aligned with partners like Britain.

“The UK National Security Strategy talks about radical uncertainty and radical instability and talks about the threats we face from competition for resources, advanced technologies; and similarly, the NZ Threat Assessment produced by the NZSIS [NZ Security Intelligence Service] talks about the most challenging national strategic environment in recent times,” Thomas said.

Thomas agreed the two countries were “very much” aligned.

“Talking to colleagues in the New Zealand system, they sense that we are currently in a time of rapid change ... we’re also seeing norms upended, we saw that with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Thomas said.

“This is the third year the NZISIS Threat Assessment has come out, and I see in that a consistent narrative that these are volatile, challenging times and that presents a threat to New Zealand as well as more globally,” she said.

Thomas is speaking in Christchurch at the NZ Institute of International Affairs today on the subject of the UK-NZ partnership in uncertain times.

The speech will be the first taste of any change in policy from Britain under new Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, who got the job last week in a reshuffle that followed the forced resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner.

The speech comes about a year after Thomas’ speech on the Aukus defence deal between Australia, the UK and the US, which stated clearly Britain’s view that it was not a formal alliance, ruffled a few feathers in New Zealand.

Thomas said she was aware of the Aukus debate going in, and so the reaction was “not unexpected”.

She said the debate seems less prominent now.

The NZSIS has recently begun publishing assessments of the threat environment. The third, released this year, reiterated concerns from the previous two that the international situation was deteriorating and that New Zealand faced the toughest national security environment of recent times.

NZ and Britain have long been close security partners, but that proximity has increased in recent years. New Zealand Defence Force personnel train Ukrainian soldiers in the UK, and the HMNZS Te Kaha joined a British Carrier Strike Group as it made its way into the Indo-Pacific.