But the
Prime Minister has been much more circumspect about Iran and its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, after his Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was revealed by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to be responsible for at least two fire-bombings of Jewish places of worship and hospitality in Sydney and Melbourne.
Albanese immediately expelled the Iranian ambassador, effectively severing diplomatic relations.
He announced Australia would align with the US, Canada, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and others in designating IRGC a terrorist organisation.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters quickly supported Australia, our last remaining military ally, saying New Zealand “unequivocally condemns Iran’s actions, including through proxies, in Gaza, the Red Sea and around the Middle East and the world”.
He immediately ordered Iran’s Ambassador in Wellington to be blasted by senior officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT).
Luxon then slowed things down. His office says the matter is “complex”, involving “a range of foreign policy, security and legal considerations”.
It is important, his staff say, that this work is undertaken “thoroughly” while they await MFAT advice on what, if anything, Luxon should do next.
Trade can’t be a factor in the delay, with exports to Iran now under $2 million a year.
Moreover, with our free-trade agreement coming into force this week, Luxon emphasises New Zealand’s economic focus on the UAE, one of Iran’s many regional adversaries.
Hopefully, the delay isn’t a sign of dithering but about giving New Zealand diplomats time to escape Iran, given its history of kidnapping foreign officials and worse. With more warning of Albanese’s announcement, Australia’s diplomats in Tehran have already fled.
New Zealand Jewish Council President Juliet Moses says Iran’s terrorist activity in Australia should be “a wake-up call” for New Zealand, but that’s not quite right.
As Moses also points out, our own SIS has publicly warned since at least 2023 that Iran, with its allies Russia and China persistently carries out foreign interference in New Zealand, including intimidating the local Iranian community and reporting back on them to Tehran.
Last week, SIS director-general Andrew Hampton again reported that China, Russia and Iran have been targeting New Zealand with “covert or deceptive activity”.
China led in attacking the latest SIS report as “entirely unsubstantiated and groundless”, but Luxon, who is Minister for National Security and Intelligence, said he stood by it “completely”.
If, as that implies, Luxon is on top of Iran’s nefarious activities domestically and globally, his slowing down our response probably is best explained by concerns about the safety of New Zealand diplomats, business people and tourists still caught in Iran.
One argument against designating the IRGC a terrorist organisation is that it is a quasi-part of the Iranian state, even if reporting to the religious leader, Khamenei, not to secular leader, President Masoud Pezeshkian.
But New Zealand had no difficulty in saying France’s Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), which is clearly part of the French state, had conducted state-sponsored terrorism when it bombed the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland 40 years ago.
It would be remarkable were Luxon not prepared to make the same claim against the IRGC, especially now it has attacked our closest friend and only ally – a country he calls “family”.
As he decides what to do, Luxon might also reflect on the IRGC’s central role in causing the current catastrophe in Gaza, to the extent that it can be considered a proxy war launched by Iran against Israel.
With Hezbollah in Lebanon on Israel’s northern border, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), which run and operate out of Gaza respectively, are funded, armed, trained and supplied with intelligence by IRGC and its Quds Force, which is responsible for foreign operations.
Hamas began receiving terrorist support from Iran in the early 1990s, while PIJ was inspired by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 Iranian revolution and is in practice an arm of IRGC.
Since the early 1990s, when suicide bombers have murdered Israelis in supermarkets and kindergartens, and when rockets have constantly been fired from Gaza into Israel, the inspiration, money, training, weapons and intelligence have almost exclusively come from Iran.
Both Hamas and PIJ, like Iran, are committed to the destruction of Israel, and the killing or expulsion “from the river to the sea” of Jews who are not then prepared to live under Iranian-style Islamic law.
Iran has form in that respect, with its own Jewish population having plunged from around 80,000 when Khomeini took over to fewer than 10,000 today.
Iran and its PIJ proxy got the pip with Hamas during the Syrian war, backing the more secular dictator Bashar al-Assad while Hamas preferred the Muslim Brotherhood which wants sharia law. But, since 2017, all three have made up.
Documentary evidence has not yet emerged that Iran formally ordered Hamas and PIJ’s terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 – attacks which, per capita, were the equivalent of a close New Zealand neighbour raping, torturing, slaughtering and kidnapping 500 young people at Rhythm & Vines.
But they were undoubtedly involved. Hamas has revealed it informed the IRGC three months in advance of the planned atrocities, which were carried out with Iranian weapons and training and then publicly welcomed by Tehran. This is the same IRGC that arranged the attacks in Sydney and Melbourne and which the SIS suggests is also active in New Zealand.
Luxon very much wants New Zealand to recognise Palestinian statehood next month, as a way of signalling New Zealand’s continuing support for a two-state solution which the Netanyahu regime is actively trying to permanently scuttle. On the same grounds, Albanese also seems determined to proceed with Australian recognition.
Fair enough, as long as it is clear any such recognition extends only to Fatah, which runs the West Bank, and the wider Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO).
While corrupt – which is hardly unusual in the region – Fatah and the PLO are at least enemies of Hamas, the PIJ and Iran, and are supported by the likes of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
As leader of the country, it is ultimately up to Luxon alone to make these calls. But it would be an abomination if he decided to recognise Palestine as a state, a somewhat dubious proposition, but refuse to tell the plain truth about the IRGC and designate it the terrorist organisation that it so obviously is.
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