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Talk about tiptoeing across a minefield. Almost alone among its western partners, the government here makes a Thomistic distinction between Hamas’s supposedly standalone military and political wings, with only the first designated as a terrorist entity and even then only rarely identified as such by political leaders.
In her initial statement responding to the recent atrocities, Labour’s foreign minister, Nanaia Mahuta, cast the situation simply as an ‘outbreak of conflict’ involving Israelis and Gazans. This seemed altogether too weak to Luxon, who said such lack of clarity offered ‘another example of a government falling apart’ on the foreign policy front.
The new prime-minister-elect’s party has pledged to ‘maintain a modern, combat-ready military’ here in the South Pacific, one of the largest areas of maritime responsibility on the globe. The party wants to ‘maintain our strong relationship with Australia and other Five Eyes partners, the United States, Canada and the UK’.
This may mark the end of the prevailing political idea in New Zealand: that domestic issues and trade can somehow be kept entirely separated from international developments in an interconnected world. Aukus will provide the answer to that question.
The Kiwis have been offered access to the tripartite security partnership established two years ago by the US, UK, and Australia, which shares information in cutting-edge defence technologies to counter China’s muscular naval incursions in the region. While both the departing Labour administration and Luxon’s party have fudged on this issue, the incoming government looks more likely to usher in such a policy. The Kiwi fleet could yet be returning to the sea.
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