As the Trump administration advances war preparations
against China, New Zealand has joined a host of nations
drastically boosting their military budgets. According to
the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global
military spending increased by 9.4 percent in 2024 to reach
$US2.718 trillion.
New Zealand’s National Party-led
coalition government recently released a multi-billion
dollar Defence Capability Plan that will nearly double
military spending from just over 1 percent to 2 percent of
GDP within eight years. This involves $NZ9 billion in new
spending over the coming four years.
Prime Minister
Christopher Luxon said the committed amount “is the floor,
not the ceiling, of funding for our defence
force.”
The far-right government is
escalating its involvement in the war against Russia. Luxon
announced on April 22 that up to 100 NZ Defence Force (NZDF)
personnel will continue to train Ukrainian soldiers in the
UK and throughout Europe, and provide intelligence, liaison
and logistics support through to December 2026, bringing the
total value of support to $152
million.
The announcement came on the eve
of Luxon’s latest trip to Europe, which began in Britain
with a meeting with Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The
pair visited a military training site in the south of
England to see the Operation Interflex facility, where NZ
has helped train over 53,000 Ukrainian Armed Forces
personnel, including conscripts.
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Luxon addressed the
Ukrainian soldiers, cynically hailing them as “heroes”
while also calling President Volodymyr Zelensky a hero. In
fact, Zelensky leads a fascistic police state, which is
sacrificing hundreds of thousands of young men in the
service of US-NATO imperialism and throwing opponents of war
in prison, including the socialist Bogdan
Syrotiuk.
The war is part of a global resurgence of
imperialist barbarism, including the US-Israeli genocide in
Gaza, the bombing of Yemen and threats against Iran and
China. Driven by the crisis of capitalism, the imperialist
powers are driven to violently redivide the world and its
resources. New Zealand, a minor imperialist ally of the US,
is seeking to ensure its place in this bloody
carve-up.
A joint statement by the UK and NZ
governments expressed their commitment to substantially
increase defence spending and to renew “our historic
defence partnership to make it fit for the future, and to
deepen cooperation in our defence capabilities and
industries.”
Starmer welcomed NZ’s participation
in the UK-led Carrier Strike Group deployment in the
Indo-Pacific, and “ongoing consultations” regarding
Wellington’s “potential opportunities for participation
in AUKUS Pillar II,” an anti-China military pact involving
Australia, the UK and US.
Luxon then travelled to
Turkey for the ANZAC Day service, which commemorates the
disastrous 1915 landing of British, Australian and New
Zealand troops at Gallipoli during World War I. As the WSWS
noted, the April 25 holiday in Australia and New Zealand is
“always a spectacle of militarist reaction and
warmongering.” This year, it was held under conditions
where the imperialist powers are threatening an even greater
calamity than previous world wars.
Luxon was the first
NZ prime minister in a decade to visit the battlefield,
declaring ,“Gallipoli is a name etched into New
Zealand’s national identity.” While his speech was
littered with hypocritical calls for “peace,” New
Zealand’s ruling class is preparing for war. Echoing calls
internationally for “whole-of-society” militarisation,
right-wing New Zealand Herald commentator Matthew Hooton
wrote a frothing column last week advocating compulsory
military training to “transform NZ society.”
China
is the main target of the relentless war build-up. According
to the Defence Capability Plan, echoing US propaganda
points, “China’s assertive pursuit of its strategic
objectives is the principal driver for strategic competition
in the Indo-Pacific, and it continues to use all of its
tools of statecraft in ways that can challenge both
international norms of behaviour and the security of other
states. Of particular concern is the rapid and
non-transparent growth of China’s military
capability.”
China, however, has no overseas
military bases in the Pacific. It is the United States
which, under successive administrations, has shifted the
bulk of its navy into the region to encircle and threaten
China, while strengthening military ties with Japan, India,
South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, NZ and
countries throughout the Indo-Pacific.
Since taking
office in November 2023, NZ Foreign Minister Winston Peters,
leader of the populist NZ First Party in the coalition, has
visited nearly every Pacific nation to intensify political
pressure to fall into line with the US-led war drive. This
has involved a bitter diplomatic row with the tiny NZ
semi-colony of the Cook Islands over its new strategic
agreement with China.
Peters’ most recent Pacific
trip took him to Hawaii on April 15, where he met with
officials, including the US Indo-Pacific Command Chief
Admiral Samuel Paparo. New Zealand’s partnership with the
United States, he declared, “remains one of our most
longstanding and important, particularly when seen in the
light of our joint interests in the Pacific and the evolving
security environment.”
As part of the military
build-up in the Asia-Pacific, an NZDF contingent has joined
Bersama Shield, an annual exercise in the Malayan Peninsula
involving militaries from the UK, Australia, New Zealand,
Malaysia and Singapore. According to an NZDF statement, the
exercise is designed to “enhance cooperation and
interoperability by working together in a warfighting
scenario,” and to deepen its “commitment to the South
East Asia region.”
Defence Minister Judith Collins
is visiting the Philippines this week to sign a Status of
Visiting Forces Agreement, agreed last year, to strengthen
military cooperation. Washington and its allies are
preparing the Philippines to serve as a staging ground for
conflict over Taiwan.
Such preparations are alarmingly
advanced. Last September, a New Zealand Navy vessel sailed
through the Taiwan Strait alongside Australian and Japanese
warships on their way to exercises in the South China Sea,
deliberately heightening tensions with Beijing.
In
another provocative move aimed at Beijing, a delegation of
New Zealand parliamentarians, members of the All Party
Parliamentary Group on Taiwan, visited the island this
month. The seven MPs from National, Labour, NZ First and ACT
met with Taiwan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin
Chia-lung and President Lai Ching-te.
Last October,
Lai Ching-te delivered an inflammatory speech to mark
National Day, which commemorates the 1911 revolution that
led to the founding of the Republic of China, the formal
name of Taiwan. Lai challenged the One China policy,
antagonising Beijing while expressing support for US
imperialism and its preparations for war against the Chinese
mainland.
New Zealand does not formally recognise
Taiwan but “acknowledges” Beijing’s position that
Taiwan is an inalienable part of the Peoples’ Republic.
Beijing opposes independence for Taiwan as it would set a
precedent for carving up Chinese territory more broadly,
while allowing the island to become a US military staging
ground for attacks against the mainland.
China’s
embassy in New Zealand issued a furious statement condemning
the Taipei visit. It accused the NZ MPs of “wrongdoings”
and “colluding with ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist
forces.” An embassy spokesperson said the trip severely
violated “the solemn political commitments made by New
Zealand to China when the two countries established
diplomatic ties” in 1972.
New Zealand’s entire
political establishment, including the opposition Labour and
Green parties, along with the corporate media, are busy
stoking anti-Chinese hysteria. Labour leader Chris Hipkins
told Radio New Zealand that the new Defence Capability Plan
builds upon those made by the previous Labour-led
government. In 2023, Labour’s Defence Minister Andrew
Little declared that NZ had a “stake” in the South China
Sea and signed strategic pacts with Fiji and Japan.
An
immense price is being paid by the working class for the
huge military build-up. The government has frozen wages
across the public sector and sacked thousands of workers.
The healthcare and education systems are run-down and
starved of funds.
The first ever 24-hour strike by
senior doctors is being held this week. It is the latest in
a rising struggle of medical workers, including young
doctors, nurses and laboratory technicians against
underfunding, under-staffing and low pay in the public
health system, allied with the threat of privatisation.
Working people will not accept the imposition of austerity
at home and war abroad.
By John Braddock, Socialist
Equality Group
1 May 2025
Original
url: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/05/01/cwye-m01.html
