Has Te Pāti Māori just ruled itself out of government, or will Labour’s Chris Hipkins cave in, in the pursuit of power? 

Te Pāti Māori's "bottom line" policies of subordinating the sovereignty of Parliament to the Treaty of Waitangi and a separate Treaty of Waitangi Commission, together with a contestable $200 million fund to promote Māori sovereignty issues raise that question. If ever implemented these changes would be the country’s most profound constitutional changes since the establishment of Parliamentary government in 1852.

Two immediate questions arise from these proposals. First, in the highly unlikely event Te Pāti Māori finds a partner in government willing to implement them, how would that occur? A major constitutional change of this magnitude, assuming it was adopted by Parliament, would have to be endorsed by a public referendum, presumably by a two-thirds majority. Or is Te Pāti Māori intending to avoid that path and simply impose its plans as a political deal, the price of supporting a government to take office?

That raises the second more immediately important question. What is the attitude of the Labour Party, the only major party Te Pati Māori will support to lead a government, to these proposals?  So far, unsurprisingly, Labour has not responded to Te Pāti Māori's announcements and their implications, but it will not be able to remain silent throughout the election campaign. National and its allies will ensure that the spectre of Te Pāti Māori's bottom lines hangs over Labour, whatever Labour’s response.

Meanwhile, Labour has raised again the co-governance issue which was so controversial at the last election. Its loose-lipped liability, Willie Jackson, told a weekend television interviewer that Labour would probably have to find different words to describe its co-governance plans, and said subsequently that Labour would not be promoting “silly” co-governance arrangements. All this did was make it clear that co-governance in whatever form remains on Labour’s agenda.

Te Pāti Māori's announcements and Jackson’s comments highlight Labour’s problems when it comes to meeting Māori aspirations. On the one hand, it cannot afford to ignore them and expect to retain its Māori support base. But, on the other hand, it cannot be seen as embracing them too fully, for fear of alienating its own conservative working-class base and floating, middle of the road voters, wary of such issues.

Chris Hipkins’ ongoing equivocation about whether
Labour could work with Te Pāti Māori in government constantly highlights this dilemma. In the current situation, he knows that if he concedes before the election to Te Pāti Māori's bottom lines he will likely not be able to even contemplate forming a government afterwards. Yet without Te Pāti Māori on board, especially if its electorate-vote only strategy succeeds in creating a substantial overhang, Hipkins is unlikely to be putting together a government anyway.

There is a way out of Hipkins’ dilemma – if he is courageous enough to adopt it. He could take the position that Te Pāti Māori's bottom lines effectively rule the party out of being a credible potential partner in government, and that Labour would instead look to form a government with the support of the Green Party and the Opportunity Party. On current polling numbers, that combination would be a real threat to the current government.

Such a decision would put pressure on Te Pāti Māori's electorate-vote only strategy. If voters in the Māori electorates saw there was little likelihood of Te Pāti Māori being in government, they may well conclude they would be better off voting for Labour candidates. That would be to Labour’s clear advantage.

On the other hand, Te Pāti Māori may well be trying to provoke Labour to proactively rule it out of government contention, and so give it a form of martyr status, enabling it to campaign in the Māori electorates that the whole current political system is conspiring against them and Māori aspirations. If it succeeds, it could then choose to sit outside government on the cross benches and use its numerical strength to oblige whoever is in government to have to negotiate with it on every issue of significance.

However, another consequence could be adverse for the Opportunity Party and the prospects of a centre left government. Any increased overt reliance on the Opportunity Party by Labour before the election might lead voters attracted to the party by its stated non-aligned positioning to conclude it really is a centre left stooge after all, and to desert it. That would not be to Labour’s advantage.

Through all this Hipkins’ problem remains that in trying to balance these competing pressures, alongside Labour’s avowed small target strategy which has left the party looking as though it stands for very little, he continues to look uncertain and indecisive. On that basis, rather than rule out Te Pāti Māori's bottom lines altogether, he is likely to look to pouring enough cold water on them to soothe the concerns of anxious voters, while still leaving the door open to some form of post-election discussion.

Whether such a formula will defuse the issue is highly doubtful, especially if National, ACT and New Zealand First, as seems certain, seize upon it, and Jackson continues his record of unguided mouthing-off.

The Opportunity Party may yet hold the ultimate key, should it make it to Parliament. In what is describes as the interests of commonsense, it has already ruled out supporting any government that retains Winston Peters as Foreign Minister. So, it will now be interesting to see whether it chooses to apply the same yardstick to working with any government that embraces Te Pāti Māori's bottom lines to overturn New Zealand’s current constitutional arrangements.

  

In the wake of the rise of the Opportunity Party in recent opinion polls there has been much commentary about the role of smaller parties as kingmakers when it comes to forming governments under MMP. Most of it has been overstated.

The folklore is that New Zealand First is the party that usually determines whether National or Labour leads the government. However, in fact, this has been the case in only two of the ten elections held so far under MMP – in 1996 and 2017. In both cases New Zealand First conducted parallel negotiations with both National and Labour before deciding which party to anoint in government.

Labour chose to go with New Zealand First and UnitedFuture in 2005 which kept the Green Party out of office. In 2023 National invited New Zealand First to join it and ACT to get the current coalition over the line.  However, in neither 2005 nor 2023 was the other major party (National in 2005 and Labour in 2023) involved in any post-election government formation negotiations, meaning a kingmaker situation did not apply.

In its day, UnitedFuture was a more persistent player in government than any other smaller party under MMP so far. It was part of successive Labour- and National-led governments formed after the 2002, 2005, 2008, 2011 and 2014 elections, although it was never in the position of determining whether those governments were Labour- or National-led. (In 2005, there had been the brief possibility of UnitedFuture, ACT, the original Māori Party, and potentially New Zealand First joining National to form a government to displace Labour, but such a five-party coalition was too unwieldly a combination to have been seriously considered.)

Apart from 1996 and 2017, it has been clear on election night on each of the eight other elections held so far under MMP who the lead party of government would be. The post-election negotiations therefore have been about the configuration of support party arrangements, and what role, if any at all, smaller parties might play in the government that was being formed.

In 2014, National had an outright majority on election night, so did not need support partners, but decided to keep its existing partners anyway. It quickly signed agreements confirming their support on confidence and supply only and no other policy matters because it felt that was unnecessary, given its apparent majority. But when special votes were counted, National had lost that election night majority, giving its support partners (UnitedFuture, ACT, and the Māori Party) considerably more influence. The looseness of the confidence and supply only agreements National had signed immediately after the election meant that for the entire 2014-2017 Parliament every policy had to be negotiated separately with those support partners.

Although the Opportunity Party's pledge that, should it make it to Parliament and be in a position to determine the shape of the next government, it will begin post-election talks with the largest party first is a noble and sensible position, it may not ultimately be a practical one.

For example, some, but by no means all, recent opinion polls suggest Labour will be the largest party in the next Parliament. On that basis, the Opportunity Party could be expected to begin post-election talks with Labour first. But to form a majority government Labour would also need to involve the Greens and Te Pati Māori. Even then, the polls suggest the margin for such an arrangement would be only a seat or two, which would be very unstable. Compounding this potential mix would be the vastly differing positions of all four parties on tax, making it hard to see how a workable compromise could be achieved between them, especially since Labour has said the only new tax it is prepared to consider is its own capital gains tax.

But if the Opportunity Party decided that was all too difficult and the potential outcome so unworkable, that it would be better talking to National, the position would be no less challenging. For a start, National's leader has so far consistently and arguably unwisely ruled out any negotiations with the Opportunity Party, although his intransigence would surely change if realpolitik dictated otherwise. And then there is the position of New Zealand First and ACT to consider. Neither would be likely to want to concede any ground to the Parliamentary newcomer.

However, based on the experience of eight of the ten previous MMP elections, the Opportunity Party, should it win seats in Parliament, is unlikely to face having to make that choice. Instead, it is far more likely to find itself being asked, if needed,  by one or other major party for support to help make up the numbers to govern, but with no option to go elsewhere.

So, while commentators may like to confer kingmaker status on parties, it has seldom happened in practice over the last thirty years of MMP.  The far more likely prospect remains that rather than shape events as a kingmaker, smaller parties will continue to be invited by one or other of the major parties, and on their terms, to help them form a government.

 

This week's attempted National Party leadership coup quickly descended into disorganised farce. The immediate casualty was not Christopher Luxon as his Caucus detractors may have hoped, but Chris Penk. Despite his repeated denials and public pledges of loyalty to Luxon, he was widely reported to be the stalking horse for at least one of those wanting to depose the Prime Minister. However, he ended up not only failing to achieve that goal but destroying his own promising political career in the process. 

One of the most basic norms of Parliamentary politics is that everything is ultimately about the numbers - the numbers to form a government, through to the numbers to topple a leader. Without the numbers to do things, politicians are impotent and unable to achieve anything, something Opposition parties face every mind-numbing day they are out of power.

Yet that basic point seems to have been either overlooked or not understood by those Caucus members wanting to get rid of Luxon. Making the case against his continued leadership was one thing, made easier by Luxon's recent gaffes, but organising the numbers to make a change became a step too far. With up to four potential challengers, the odds always had to be on Luxon coming through the middle and seeing them off.

His task would have been far more difficult had his critics been able to look beyond their visceral distaste for Luxon's style and agree on a single ticket to make the challenge. The fact they could not says less about the respective abilities of the potential challengers than it does about their competing and uncompromising egos and ambitions, which does not bode well for future Caucus cohesion.

Only once before has National ousted a sitting Prime Minister. In 1997 Dame Jenny Shipley oversaw a Caucus revolt against Jim Bolger while he was overseas, but there were then still two years to run until the 1999 election, not just under three months as at present. The last time National changed its leader this close to an election was in September 1957 when ailing Prime Minister Sid Holland was persuaded reluctantly to stand down after eight years in office to make way for Keith Holyoake (who lost the election three months later).

Nevertheless, despite the unique nature of the current circumstances, there are some wider political implications arising from it. 

The most significant relates to the increasing tendency to look to “saviour” leaders to revive a party’s flagging fortunes and the consequent attraction to non-career politicians to provide the answer. Dr Don Brash, who became National’s leader in 2003 after less than two years in Parliament was arguably the first of these. His backers believed that his background as a respected Governor of the Reserve Bank would equip him to provide prudent, “nonpolitician” leadership, but the experiment did not work.

Brash was toppled as National’s leader in 2006 and replaced by Sir John Key. Key had been in Parliament for just four years, following a successful international business career and became Prime Minister two years later. He is the exception that proves the rule because he quickly realised the difference between a successful external career and success in politics and made the adjustment accordingly.

Christopher Luxon had a similarly successful international business career and enjoyed an even more stellar rise than Key to become Prime Minister after only three years as an MP. But unlike Key, he has seemed unable and unwilling to leave his corporate background behind and transition into being an effective national political leader. Luxon’s language and style always come across as much more akin to that of a chief executive rather than a Prime Minister and often therefore out-of-step with the average New Zealander.

Former Labour leader David Shearer, who was parachuted into the Labour leadership in 2011 after two years as an MP, and following a successful United Nations and diplomatic career, is another case in point. He also failed to make the impact his supporters had hoped for and resigned the leadership after just over eighteen months.

The point arising from each of these examples, which all parties need to contemplate, is that “saviour” leaderships rarely succeed. There is no real substitute for solid, political experience. Luxon’s frequent excuse when confronted with situations that had challenged governments of recent years that he “wasn’t around then” is inadequate and leaves him increasingly looking out of his depth. Unlike Key, who went out of his way to learn the reasons why previous decisions had been made, Luxon always seems not all that interested.

For all that, National has now made the choice to persevere with Luxon, at least until the election. But unlike the aftermath of April’s confidence vote, which Luxon interpreted as an unqualified endorsement of his leadership style requiring no change, there will have to be some changes if Luxon’s professed determination to lead National to victory is to be achieved.

For a start, he needs to understand that MMP is about power sharing between parties of like intent to make government work, not single party domination the way it used to be. In that regard, and in the light of recent polling, Luxon needs to revisit his foolish, precipitate ruling out of the Opportunity Party as a potential post-election partner.

After all, the difference between success and impotence in politics still comes down to getting the numbers.

 

You can’t beat Wellington on a good day” the saying goes.

It also seems you cannot beat Wellington, or at least its City Council, when it comes to public relations disasters.

Earlier this year, following years of mismanagement of and underinvestment in the city’s water system, the Council in conjunction with other local Councils, established a new entity, Tiaki Wai, to better and more transparently manage the region’s water resources. Part of the plan was that there would be a separation between what ratepayers paid for water services and their rates to local authorities, so that they could see more clearly the true cost of water services.

It all seemed reasonable and relatively sensible – which would have been a first in itself for Wellington Councils when it comes to service delivery – until it came to the implementation of the plan. Until that point, ratepayers appeared to have a measure of confidence that with Andrew Little as Mayor, unlike the shambolic regimes which preceded him, the process of change would run smoothly.

But Tiaki Wai and the Wellington City Council have managed to destroy that cautious confidence in one fell swoop. Little had been making some ground with his assurances that the impact on ratepayers’ pockets would be minimised because the removal of water services from the rates bill would lead to a corresponding reduction in rates payments.

However, when Tiaki Wai started sending out its first quarterly water bills to ratepayers late last month, the proverbial quickly hit the fan. Ratepayers were receiving bills for hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars for water services, leaving many to take the Mayor’s continuing assurances of a corresponding downwards adjustment in their coming rates bills with a large, grain of salt.

In recent years Wellingtonians have been paying some of the highest rates increases in the country – nearly 17% in 2024/25 and 12% in 2025/26 under former Mayor Tory Whanau. This year’s rates increase of just under 6%, the lowest for years, looked set to offer some relief until Tiaki Wai came along. It is already projecting that the average household cost for water will rise from nearly $2,400 this year, to nearly $4,000 in 2030/31 and almost $6,000 in ten years’ time.

Faced with these projections from Tiaki Wai’s faceless bureaucrats, Wellington ratepayers have every reason to be sceptical of the Mayor’s assurances on rates relief.

Having said that, most Wellington people know that water services in the capital have been mismanaged for decades and that change and additional substantial investment in infrastructure was long overdue. The frequent bursting of the city’s ancient pipes had made Wellington a bit of a national joke, so it was clear something had to be done.

That is not the problem. Rather, the issue is that Tiaki Wai and its new leadership seem to have gone about their task with the typical insensitivity and blind enthusiasm bureaucrats always show when they consider the cause they are working on more important than the concerns of the public they are working for. And because of that, they have left their political masters with large portions of smelly egg on their faces.

Surely, there could have been better co-ordination between Tiaki Wai and the Wellington City Council about the timing of bills being sent to ratepayers? Why was it not possible to send out the Tiaki Wai bills the week after the Council’s rates demands that people could see that the Mayor’s assurances were being honoured? Did none of the 22 communications staff Tiaki Wai employs and the City Council’s 50 communications staff foresee the angry public reaction that has now occurred and propose strategies to mitigate that? Were they not even talking to each other? And where were the city’s local politicians whose noses might be expected to be more acutely attuned to such things and notice the perception problem they were creating?

Given the performance of both the Council and Wellington Water, Tiaki Wai’s predecessor, over recent years, it simply beggars belief that anyone in either of those organisations could have seriously believed that sending out new, separate water bills in advance of a rates demand that may or may not contain a corresponding reduction in charges would be a winning strategy.

Yet, that is what has happened, and the Council’s response has been ho-hum at best, although admittedly somewhat better than Tiaki Wai’s callously dismissive “we’re just doing our job” response. The Mayor has plaintively repeated his assurances that people will see the full picture and all will be better when they get their rates bill. So far he has done nothing to proactively advance those assurances.

Under the Whanau regime, long-suffering Wellington residents became used to having a Council that was a byword for incompetence. They thought those days were over when the new Council took office last year. The Tiaki Wai fiasco is quickly disabusing them of that notion.

Wellingtonians are proud of the “you can’t beat Wellington on a good day” mantra. But they are far from proud that their city’s leaders continue to make them a national laughing stock by their insensitive and badly managed actions.

 

 

Christopher Luxon's ruling out any possibility of National working with the Opportunity Party after the election is not nearly as emphatic as it sounds.

This time three years ago Luxon was saying his party's strong preference was not to have to work with New Zealand First after the 2023 election, only to end up going into coalition together a couple of months later. In a similar vein, ACT's David Seymour originally specifically ruled out ever sitting around the Cabinet table with New Zealand First Ministers, only to join the post-election coalition because of the perceived greater good of keeping Labour out of office.

Luxon's seemingly unequivocal comments notwithstanding, there is absolutely no doubt National would turn to the Opportunity Party if it needed its numbers to form a government after the election. But there is still a long way to go before that prospect becomes a serious issue.

The Opportunity Party still must get elected to Parliament for a start. Although recent polls show it close to crossing the 5% party vote threshold, it is not there yet. Polls over the next few weeks will show whether the Party's momentum is strengthening on the back of recent publicity, or whether it has peaked and will fall back as there is more scrutiny of its policies and plans. Its most challenging time has yet to come.

It is a high stakes, all or nothing game for the Opportunity Party. If it fails to cross the 5% threshold and does not win an electorate seat (talk about its winning Mount Albert seem fancifully optimistic at this stage) all party votes cast for it will be discarded and therefore essentially wasted.  

This is also the real point behind Luxon's comments this week. Polls show that the biggest chunk – about one quarter – of new supporters for the Opportunity Party are people who voted National at the last election. They may think they are doing National a favour by supporting the Opportunity Party, giving it a potentially more reliable coalition partner than New Zealand First. But they are also voters National desperately needs to entice back into its column. Warning them that their votes will not help the re-election of a National-led government is an important tactic in this regard.

National fears that those voters hold the key to whether the centre-left bloc can get the numbers to form a Labour/Greens/Opportunity coalition that may not therefore need the support of Te Pāti Māori. It also knows that if the Opportunity Party fails to cross the 5% threshold all its votes – including those of previous National supporters – will fall into the electoral waste bin and be ignored.

The former National supporters now favouring the Opportunity Party could add up to 2 percentage points to National's current polling levels, were they to return home. With National polling on average just over 30% in current polls – down from the 39% of the party vote it received at the 2023 election – and the coalition running only marginally of the Opposition bloc in most polls, an uplift of up to 2% in National's fortunes could have a significant impact on the election outcome.

Moreover, if National can reclaim the bulk of those former supporters and the Opportunity Party falls below the 5% threshold, the support it has attracted from former Labour and Green Party supporters will fall into the same electoral waste bin, to the detriment of those parties’ election chances. That is why attempting to engineer this type of electoral outcome was the real reason behind Luxon's comments this week.

But this highlights an important aspect of MMP – that politicians and political parties do not have the control over the system they had previously. Everything they now say or do is constrained by the parties they are working with or seek to work with in government. There are no political absolutes anymore. So, when the Prime Minister said this week that the most important decision at the coming election was which party could manage the economy best, it was a far less absolute statement than when previous Prime Ministers have made similar statements in the days of the First-Past-the-Post system. 

Appearing to rule out working with the Opportunity Party is in a similar vein. It sounds emphatic and clear but is really at best conditional. If the coalition's options after the election are forming an albeit cumbersome governing arrangement with the Opportunity Party or going into Opposition, the outcome will be a no-brainer.

And Luxon's current coalition partners will expect to have just as much say as him in making that decision.

 

New Zealanders have an often-contradictory view about what they expect in their politicians.

At one level, they are frequently dismissive of those they regard as "career" politicians with no real life-experience. They barely tolerate the way they do things because they are just the "games politicians play." They deride all politicians for their perceived caution and tendency to see most situations through their own particular political prisms.

They say they yearn for leaders who will simply get on with the job, and deal with the things that matter to people, rather than keep pursuing their own political agendas. So, when Christopher Luxon came along, with no real political experience, but a solid business background and no apparent desire to morph into a political figure the way his mentor Sir John Key did, he was seen as a breath of fresh air, precisely because he was avowedly "not a politician".

However, despite the superficial appeal of a non-politician experienced business leader running the country, people still expected Luxon to quickly get to grips with the political game and how to play to it, in just the same way they expect players bursting into the All Blacks to immediately know how to play international rugby. Much of the criticism Luxon has faced as Prime Minister is because he has not adapted to his changed circumstances and continues to look, often curiously defiantly, like a political fish out of water.

Yet there remains a public view, despite the Luxon experience, that it takes no special skills to be a successful politician, and that virtually anyone can do the job, regardless of their background. It is the same sort of thinking that lies behind the ACT Party's recruitment of high-profile broadcaster Paul Henry as a candidate.

Without deriding Henry's broadcasting capabilities, it is worth noting that few people with impressive external backgrounds have made the transition to become successful politicians. Key and Steven Joyce would be the obvious examples of recent years, but others are few and far between. 

Henry's selection invites comparison with that of another high-profile broadcaster, Pam Corkery, who was elected to Parliament in 1996 as an Alliance MP. She quit after just one term, saying she found Parliamentary life frustrating and less rewarding than she had expected. Within minutes of his announcement as a candidate Henry was dismissing Parliament as "full of twats", suggesting that he too will quickly feel the same frustrations as Corkery did.

The point external stars recruited to Parliamentary parties often fail to grasp is that Parliament, and by extension government, is an environment unlike any other. It is unforgiving and constant, and its essentially collaborative processes leave little room or tolerance for excessive displays of individualism. That is because Parliament is basically a forum for the expression of diverse opinions, often to the point of tedium, but nevertheless critical to a functioning democracy. The real work of government occurs elsewhere – in Cabinet, its committees and select committees – where once again collaboration and compromise, sometimes accompanied by long and thankless hours of debate, are the order of the day, rather than flashy displays of self-proclaimed individual brilliance.

It could be argued that Winston Peters is the counter-factual to that point. After all, he has successfully carried off flashiness and shameless self-promotion like no other since the 1970s. However, that been less the explanation of his success than his deep understanding and application of how politics works.

And here is where New Zealanders’ contradictory views of politicians come together. They may not like Peters or what he stands for, but they acknowledge him as a skilled political operator. By contrast, in Luxon’s case, while his business background is known, he is not seen as a skilled politician, hence the criticism of him as Prime Minister. Unlike Peters, he is not behaving the way they think a politician should behave.

Corkery and Luxon expected Parliament to bend to their wills because of their backgrounds. Key, on the other hand, quickly worked out that while his impressive background was a significant asset, it had to be tailored to fit the Parliamentary environment, if he was to be successful.

Paul Henry may well to be an attractive vote-catcher for the ACT Party, at least in the run-up to the election, which is presumably why he has been selected. However, experience suggests that of itself is no automatic guarantor that a successful or substantial political career is about to follow.

The rock and the hard place that has defined New Zealand’s foreign policy for the last decade or so is getting ever sharper and more uncomfortable.

Since the thaw in relations with the United States after the 1980s nuclear row, New Zealand has been a reluctant friend. Consistent with what it holds to be an independent foreign policy, New Zealand has supported the United States on some issues and opposed it on others. For example, it provided significant military and operational support to the United States-led Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in the early 2000s but opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because it had not had the approval of the United Nations.

More recently, New Zealand opposed the United States’ intervention in Venezuela as not in accordance with international law. And although it had forthrightly condemned the recent actions of the Iranian government, New Zealand stopped short of explicitly supporting the United States-led attacks on Iran earlier this year.

While this nuanced ambivalence has served New Zealand’s interests well in recent years, it is easy to see how the United States, especially the current idiosyncratic Administration, might feel that New Zealand is at best a “fair-weather” friend. In this context, the recent comments by the War Secretary Hegseth that New Zealand was “freeloading” off the United States by not more significantly increasing its defence spending, and the new United States’ Ambassador’s expressed “disappointment” at the continuation of our long-standing anti-nuclear policy are not just idle comments. They clearly reflect a deeper United States’ frustration at New Zealand’s continued broadly friendly, but carefully distanced and wary approach to the bilateral relationship.

There are many reasons for this, beyond the anti-nuclear policy, which although still a sore point for the United States is largely a red herring, given the infrequence of nuclear ship visits here prior to the 1987 ban being enacted. For example, promoting two-way trade has long been an issue – from the time then Finance Minister Walter Nash unsuccessfully proposed a “reciprocal trade treaty” during talks in Washington in 1939, through to the more concerted, but equally unsuccessful, attempts from the early 2000s to secure a free trade agreement. Against that backdrop, President Trump’s imposition of “Liberation Day” tariffs on New Zealand’s exports to the United States was a doubly bitter pill for New Zealand to swallow.

Meanwhile, New Zealand’s relations with China have been slowly expanding since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1972. Improved political, cultural and economic links over the years led to a free trade agreement – China’s first ever – being concluded between the two countries in 2008 and ever closer political ties. The free trade agreement has been an outstanding success, so much so that China is now New Zealand’s major trading partner.

But at the same time New Zealand seems to have been none too bothered about being drawn ever more closely into China’s expanding political web, to the extent that successive governments have been almost pathologically scared stiff of saying anything that might upset China and threaten our economic security. And consequently, China, while occasionally making warm noises about how much it values its links with New Zealand, largely does as it wishes in this region, and places little value on anything New Zealand has to say. Whenever New Zealand dares pluck up the courage to offer even the mildest criticisms of Chinese policy, it is firmly rebuked by Beijing for interfering in China’s domestic affairs.

This year alone China has conducted unannounced naval exercises in the Tasman Sea, close to Australian territorial waters, and conducted a live missile firing test in the Pacific with only the briefest advance warning to New Zealand. On both occasions all New Zealand could do was stand by meekly and watch.

The sad, unintended outcome of our foreign policy is that at a time of heightened global and regional instability we are not trusted as reliable or committed by the United States and are being walked all over by China. Even our one true ally, Australia, has its frustrations with what it considers New Zealand’s less than full commitment to regional security.

As an independent nation, New Zealand has every right to pursue an independent foreign policy and should not abandon that ambition lightly. But at the same time, it must appreciate that it is not operating in a vacuum, and that there will be consequences, whatever options it chooses. The combination of an increasingly unpredictable and volatile United States, and a more activist China playing out their quest for global supremacy in our part of the world creates new pressures for countries like New Zealand.

That is why the challenges confronting our current foreign policy have become more pronounced. On the one hand, New Zealand cannot afford to become seen as too closely aligned with either of the superpower rivals, despite its economic reliance on China, and likely increasing pressure from the United States to modify its stance. But on the other hand, it cannot allow itself to be seen by either as irrelevant, or unreliable.

As the rock and the hard place become ever more uncomfortable, New Zealand needs to strike a new balance between upholding its independent foreign policy and being taken seriously as a regional player by the superpowers. Achieving that balance and protecting our national integrity will require our politicians and diplomats to exercise even more skilful diplomacy and careful leadership over the next few years than they have already done.

Yet it remains a goal worth striving for.