As Jacinda Ardern continues to try and dance along a barbed-wire fence with a leg in each paddock, the rip in her undies is getting harder to hide. Ardern and her Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta have spent the last few years playing an increasingly threadbare game of bowing first to one partner in the Pacific, then the other.
Some of us are starting to notice that our dance card is not quite as full as the other guy’s.
After months of inching towards the West, Jacinda Ardern’s set-piece speeches on her Europe trip last week seem to have been crafted to try and keep observers guessing.
At the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Madrid, the NZ Prime Minister gave a speech that – in tone at least – seemed designed to evoke memories of the direction that her Labour predecessor David Lange had taken in the 1980s.
This is the coquettish game that Ardern has been playing for years: taking the odd turn with its traditional allies, all the while winking and blowing kisses over her shoulder to the hulking bully smirking in the corner.
At the outset of her three-minute speech to NATO leaders in Spain, Ardern said ‘New Zealand is not here to expand our military alliances. We are here to contribute to a world that lessens the need for anyone to call on them’ […]
Her pledge not to join a military alliance might seem like a significant concession to China, which tends to see the rise of new Western-led groupings in the Indo-Pacific as plots against it.
It’s not the first time Ardern has danced this step. While Australia and the US were forming key alliances like the Quad and AUKUS, Mahuta — who had already spurned NZ’s Five Eyes partners over China — ostentatiously distanced the Ardern government from the party.
She also seemed to take a softer approach when she spoke to Chatham House in London on Friday. Her prepared speech did include relatively mild criticism of China – which she called ‘assertive’ – but she managed to avoid mentioning China by name entirely during the much longer 40-minute Q&A session that followed, despite strenuous questioning.
It’s a half-hearted effort at best, with much nodding and winking that signals their real intentions.
More broadly, the Prime Minister and her foreign minister, Nanaia Mahuta, have talked up the role of the Pacific Islands Forum – which Ardern described at Chatham House as ‘the place for discussing and determining regional security needs’.
No-one should forget, though, that Ardern used the PIF to directly attract its closest ally and curry favour with China.
China might be seen to have trod on Ardern’s and Mahuta’s toes with its clumsy moves on the Solomons, but the political gold-diggers still desperately needs Beijing’s money
Last week’s mediocre free trade deal with the EU – which gave New Zealand only minor gains in the crucial meat and dairy sectors that make up 40 per cent of its exports – only underlined the simple fact that New Zealand needs China more than ever.
Behind all the high-falutin’ rhetoric, the truth is that the EU isn’t backing up its fine words with money or military muscle. France talks a big deal about its Pacific interests, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that their biggest muscle-flexing in the Pacific so far was blowing up a ship in Auckland harbour.
China remains a willing and able buyer of a massive 33 per cent of New Zealand’s exports, especially of the butter, cheese and beef that the EU would rather exclude from the bloc on protectionist grounds.
For the foreseeable future, China will remain New Zealand’s biggest trading partner – by far [..]
Time will tell, but while Beijing will scrutinise her Lowy speech, as they have her previous comments, China will be far more interested in Ardern’s actions than her rhetoric.
The Australian
Ardern and Mahuta seem to think that they’re being terribly clever, trying to play this duplicitous game, but we can all see what they’re up to — and who’ll they’ll be going home with after the last dance.