She’s Thinking Big Things Again

Remember Helen Clark’s “incredibly benign strategic environment” zinger? Oh, how we all laughed.

If only we were laughing about Helen’s spiritual offspring, Jacinda Ardern, and her similarly clueless foreign policy witterings. As Australian journalist Nick Cater writes, if Ardern’s recent speech on China is a genuine expression of her government’s foreign policy, “we’re in trouble”.

Cater was referring to Ardern’s deep insight that “the world is bloody messy”.

Wow. Remember when the media relentlessly mocked G. W. Bush for pointing out that the Middle East should just stop killing each other? Such are the great minds we hang our foreign policies on.

If Ardern’s speech was a genuine reflection of her country’s foreign policy and not an early draft by a junior official she picked up by mistake, we’re in trouble. New Zealand is resuming the position in the latest cold war as it assumed in the final decade of last – the fetal position, with its hand over its ears and its eyes buried in the pillow. David Lange’s ill-judged 1984 declaration that NZ would be a nuclear-free zone would have offered some comfort to the communists in Moscow, who even then were engaged in an under-reported hot war between nuclear submarines in a theatre that included the Tasman Sea.

Ardern’s declaration will have been similarly well received in Beijing.

The Australian

Which was probably the point. As I wrote last week, Ardern has continually tried to play a coquettish game of appearing to side with NZ’s traditional allies, only to turn around and nudge and wink to Beijing.

But if Cater thought Ardern had plumbed the depths of foreign policy dumbassity, she has news for him.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern believes Kiribati’s withdrawal from the Pacific Islands Forum does not speak to wider disunity amongst its members.

Sure, it’s not as if the Solomons are grabbing Beijing’s cash with both eager hands and all-but handing themselves over to be the furthest outpost of the PLA’s Pacific empire.

Just to rub it in, two more Pacific nations dropped out yesterday: the Marshall Islands and the Cook Islands. Nauru is also pleading Covid as an excuse not to show up.

But Jacinda has more important things on her tiny mind.

Ardern said climate change remained the most important topic of discussion.

RNZ

It would be comedic if it weren’t so tragic.

Yet things are decidedly worse this time. The Soviet Union was not actively seeking to establish a military presence in our backyard. It was not NZ’s second largest source of foreign investment, nor did its people lick up the lactose yielded by two in five NZ cows. Even in his crazy moments, Lange would not have imagined signing the Russian equivalent of the Belt and Road agreement Ardern inherited from her National Party predecessor in 2017 and has no intention of renouncing.

In other words, NZ is closer to becoming a client state of China than any other Western nation […]

NZ should be a solid partner in the Western alliance against Russia-China. Instead, it appears to be vacillating in a most disturbing manner, in desperate need of a leader prepared to toughen up.

Not that Australia’s got too much to boast about, of course.

Our public institutions and big business have been almost entirely captured by the pro-China lobby. We’ve seen the depth of China’s influence in universities altering their course content to fit Beijing’s desires and relentlessly punishing student activists who criticise it. In sport, Chinese money has seen the Taiwanese flag banned from matches where Taiwan plays.

When the Morrison government stood up to China, big business wailed and gnashed its teeth, chastising the Australian government for interrupting their river of gold. Mining billionaire Twiggy Forrest snuck a Chinese official into a major government function, which he duly used as a bully platform to harangue the government.

At the same time, Chinese lobbyists were recruiting high-level Labor figures and handing over literal shopping bags full of cash at Labor fundraisers. And they got the government they paid for.

Or did they?

It seems too much to expect that the Albanese government will actually stand up to China as strongly as its predecessor — especially with a Defence Minister who, in opposition, paid secret visits to China and cleared his speeches with its embassy here. This is all of a piece with Labor policy of 50 years, when party hero Gough Whitlam travelled to China to pay homage to the Mao regime, right in the middle of the Cultural Revolution.

But early signs from Albanese have been mildly surprising. There have been hints that the ludicrous Port of Darwin lease may be reviewed (again). Even the Defence Minister is talking tough on foreign policy.

The Prime Minister has a chance to redeem himself on foreign policy by nudging the Kiwis back into the fold. If Howard was Bush’s deputy sheriff, Albanese must be Biden’s kelpie.

The Australian

Let’s see if he can nudge his own party back into the fold, first.