About
For one whose working career was in the law for a number of decades, the decision to re-direct into into researching and writing about national security issues represented a considerable realingment.
The main reason for doing so is that national security and defence have emerged as topics of prime importance at the present stage in history on the threshold of an era of increasingly fraught international relations in the Indo-Pacific and wider Pacific area contributed to by increasing interest from the major international powers.
This opened up a further interest in what steps New Zealand should be taking to defend itself. One contributor to this need is the increasingly visible presence of China. Another is uncertainty about whether the US can be relied upon to stand behind Western-aligned countries in the region, and particularly New Zealand, the Pacific Island states, and Australia.
That, in turn, led me to the view that it was necessary for New Zealanders to be better informed about whether, as a nation, we have are giving sufficient close attention to how we might defend ourselves in the coming decades. Are we doing our best to identify what risks there will be for New Zealand in the decades ahead? Is this country too reliant on ideas from a previous, quite different era? A specific and central area of sensitivity is the nation’s military defence strategy. Do we have a clear picture of what the government proposes? Can we be sure that our government understands these risks and has identified a sensible, coherent pathway to navigate the difficult times ahead? Are government policies and strategies likely to keep New Zealand safe? Although the main focus is on military defence, another question to be discussed in future blogs will be whether New Zealand is doing the best job we can in seeking non-military ways of meeting the particularly concerning growth of Chinese influence among some of our Pacific neighbours.
My initial researches took me to New Zealand government websites for answers to these questions. The results did not provide useful or informative insights.
This experience led to carrying out an independent analysis of these questions—an enquiry that would involve sorting through the open-source information available on the internet and then analysing the material to isolate the truly important assumptions and judgements that underlie New Zealand’s thinking about national defence followed by considering whether they survived a critical reasoning process.
Always, the uppermost question has been whether we could be confident that New Zealand’s current defence planning will lead to an effective response to military threats or whether we could be doing more or doing things differently to defend ourselves. What follows is the result of this sequence of thinking.
What steps New Zealand ultimately takes will depend on what its citizens think needs to be done. Increasing public discussion about defending New Zealand is critically important. This site’s content aims to contribute to answering that question. We hope that readers will share their unique perspectives on safeguarding New Zealand.