You can tell a lot about someone by the friends they cultivate. Friends, after all, are the people you pick, unlike your family.
Australia and New Zealand are family: a pair of occasionally squabbling siblings who’ve nevertheless spent the last century more or less getting along under the same antipodean roof.
But it seems that New Zealand’s current government wants to walk out on the family and find some new friends.
Their choice of new friends, though, is rather telling.
Beijing has praised New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in between blasts at the “insane” Morrison government in a blunt attempt to wedge the close Tasman allies.
After President Xi Jinping’s administration formally suspended a high-level trade dialogue with Australia, China’s foreign ministry portrayed New Zealand as the diplomatic model Australia should follow.
That would be the “model” of gratefully taking Beijing’s money and keeping their gobs shut about genocide in Xinjiang.
Since Australia’s relationship with China imploded a year ago, Beijing has presented New Zealand as an example of a well-behaving wealthy country.
China’s state-controlled media gleefully reported comments by New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta last month that Wellington was uneasy about the increased usage of the Five Eyes intelligence grouping as a vehicle for making statements critical of Beijing. Ms Ardern quickly clarified New Zealand’s commitment to the intelligence grouping with Australia, the US, Britain and Canada.
In a speech in Auckland on Monday in front of a business crowd, Ms Ardern spoke directly about the increasing difficulties in New Zealand’s relationship with the Xi administration.
“It will not have escaped the attention of anyone here that as China’s role in the world grows and changes, the differences between our systems — and the interests and values that shape those systems — are becoming harder to reconcile,” she told the China Business Summit.
But a whole lot of cash makes it that much easier, eh, Jacinda? Why else would your government be sidling ever-closer to signing up to Xi Jinping’s imperialist “Belt and Road Initiative”?
Beijing has praised New Zealand as a model partner as sanctions have been whacked on more than $20bn of Australian exports and China’s media and foreign ministry have thundered about Canberra.
That may have limited Beijing’s criticism this week of the forthright language Ms Ardern used on China and the motion in Wellington condemning the treatment of Uighur people in Xinjiang.
“Forthright language”, my arse. Specifically intervening to water down Brooke van Velden’s tabled motion and removing the word that Ardern knew would send China apoplectic (“genocide”) is about as “forthright” as Neville Chamberlain handing over the Sudetenland.
“To present New Zealand as the right kind of partner and then turn around and flay it publicly and put it in the freezer is a little hard to reconcile,” [David Capie, director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at Wellington’s Victoria University] said.
The Australian
Which shows the sort of fundamental misunderstanding that reigns amongst the willfully-blind elite. China is a bully, a gangster-regime: remember that, and its behaviour becomes crystal clear. It will shove around anyone who stands up to it, while patting the heads of its toadies and lickspittles – who’ll still get a clip over the ear to remind them, if they step even the slightest out of line.
And that’s the sort of friend the Ardern government is cuddling up to: relegating New Zealand to the status of the weakling nerd who does the bully’s homework, to try and curry favour.
Please share this article so that others can discover The BFD