Phil
Pennington Reporter
A
geopolitical analyst says New Zealand faces tough and costly
choices on national security and defence but they’re barely
being debated on the election trail.
Associate
professor Reuben Steff is visiting from Mendel University in
the Czech Republic for the Aspen New Zealand Security Forum
in Queenstown on Friday.
He said informed people he
talks to say defence spending would have to keep going up
beyond its already rising trajectory, of an extra $9 billion
up to 2029.
“We could go completely neutral, we could
say, ‘Hey, reject all this stuff’. I don’t think it’s going
to happen,” Steff told a NZ Institute of International
Affairs forum in Wellington on Wednesday.
Higher
defence spending was just one among the big choices ahead
that political leaders were not talking much about even
though polling showed New Zealanders cared about it, he
said.
“We’re very good in New Zealand kicking the can
down the road, but we have these imminent decision
points.
“What are we going to do about the frigates
and the renewal of the entire navy? How are we going to fund
that?”
What about joining AUKUS Pillar Two – where had
that got to, Steff asked.
Smart moves he proffered
could include moving closer to a newly militarily awakened
Japan perhaps in a trilateral with Australia, and appointing
a national security adviser like many countries
had.
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Attracting expensive
AI military technology by offering the country’s unique
geography as a testbed for other countries was another
option.
The tech tide could not be stopped but had to
be tapped.
“We don’t want to be passively dependent on
this coming to us and others setting the terms for
us.”
Building datacentres, and gaining some
sovereignty while spreading them out of their huge and
vulnerable concentration in Auckland, was another
example.
“If we don’t do this, others countries are
going to do it.”
New Zealand was already more a giver
than a taker on space launch. On military drones, it was not
a question if the country bought them, but where from “and
whether we can build a system around them” of doctrine,
data, people and industry, Steff said, who recently
published a 60-page
report on AI and defence.
Inaction was one
handicap; lack
of speed was another, Steff said in a joint note with
retired army officer John Howard put out by the NZ
Initiative.
“The problem is not what New Zealand knows
but how it decides.”
Steff gave the Wellinton forum a
picture of New Zealand where, instead of a slide into a
steady loss of autonomy amid the Great Power competition of
US versus China, the country assumed the US would always be
around in the Pacific, but hedged by focusing on partners
and sources of tech – say, frigates from Japan – close to
home and strategic zone of Australia and the Pacific
islands.
Dr Peter Harris of Victoria University’s
Contemporary China Research Centre challenged Steff on
whether any country would actually be able to choose a
middle ground between the US and China if it came to a
war.
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