We can’t wait another three years to talk about national security – John Howard, Tim Ewing-Jarvie
THE FACTS
- Polls show economic issues dominate concerns, but national security remains underemphasised despite global instability.
- Andrew Hampton of the SIS warns of a “deteriorating global threat environment” impacting New Zealand’s resilience.
- Experts urge integrated planning for trade disruptions and infrastructure resilience to address future volatility.
Election issue polls tend to act more like mirrors than windows. They reflect today’s pressures, rather than what may be coming. Coverage of the latest 1News Verian poll bears this out, unsurprisingly ranking the cost of living and economy at the top of our worry list. What is striking is how little that reflection has changed over the past five elections. When you look across a broad sample of issue polling in each cycle, you see a consistent pattern of economic issues at the centre, followed by health, crime and education in varying arrangements.
What has changed over that same period is the world we live in. The United States–Iran war has punctured any residual belief that distant conflicts stay distant, with airspace disruption affecting flights through Middle East hubs and adding renewed pressure to the prices of energy, key imports and inputs. Set this alongside Russia’s war in Ukraine grinding into its fifth year, a pressured Nato, the weaponisation of trade and escalating tension across the Indo-Pacific. It’s hard to reconcile with 2011.
For decades, New Zealand operated in a rules-based order that generally rewarded open trade, functioning multilateral institutions, and supply chains optimised for efficiency. Our issue polls reflect that world in the mirror, despite the window showing a very different reality. As Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney put it recently at Davos, we are living through a “rupture in the world order” and “the end of a pleasant fiction”. Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte went one step further in December, warning allies they must be prepared for “the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured”. So far, the world is banking on Iran remaining a limited, geographically bounded war. But it is not implausible that it, or something similar in future, could link flashpoints from Eastern Europe to the Pacific on the scale Rutte has forewarned.
These developments are not lost on our officials. Just last week, the Director-General of the NZSIS (New Zealand Security Intelligence Service), Andrew Hampton, warned of a “deteriorating global threat environment” and “increasing complexities” in the risks New Zealand must navigate. It’s hard to imagine clearer proof than how quickly war seized our headlines in the following days. And yet, national security still struggles to register as an election issue here. This should be of concern.
It’s fair to say that national security is not a policy area most people encounter directly, in the same way personal experiences of a classroom, a hospital waiting room, or a burglary shape views on education, health or crime. But national security is not all about warships and intelligence agencies. It’s about protecting New Zealand’s freedom to prosper (economically, ideologically and physically) and the resilience of those systems and dependencies that underpin everyday life. From that perspective, it is already sitting inside the central issues that will likely decide this year’s election.
The cost of living
The cost of living is often presented as a contest of domestic settings, like wages, taxes, rents and supermarket competition. But it also has national security dimensions, since the shocks that hit household budgets are frequently generated offshore and transmitted through supply chains, energy markets and financial conditions. We can tinker with domestic levers, but the prices we pay are beholden to an open system that stretches far beyond our borders. Covid-19 brought this into stark relief, with freight disruption and higher import and input costs hitting businesses and consumers alike. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine layered in a second lesson, pushing up global energy and commodity prices and feeding inflation far beyond Europe.
We’re now seeing these shocks playing out again. New Zealanders are already being warned to expect the pump price response, with local industry commentary pointing to petrol potentially reaching $3 a litre in some places, and economists suggesting 20-30 cents per litre increases over coming weeks if the disruption persists. Under such circumstances, broader inflationary pressures are likely to follow.
The economy
New Zealand’s prosperity is built on trade, and trade is increasingly shaped by strategic competition as much as comparative advantage. Businesses and Governments now need to plan for a world where conflict disruptions, sanctions, tariffs and export controls are more prevalent, and where nations (including friends) act more in their own interest to secure preferential access or stockpile critical inputs. This is where the traditional divide between business risk and national security becomes problematic. Managing both well requires a more integrated approach across sovereign, sector and enterprise risk, and that should be better reflected in budgets and investment decisions.
So what can we do?
We can, and must, do more than monitor situations and debate diplomatic messaging. Addressing these challenges may, for one, call for broader public-private information sharing, greater contingency planning with critical sectors, and a more explicit national view of which dependencies (energy, medicines, critical minerals) warrant prioritised investment for greater resilience. We need to talk more about the potential function of government subsidies to offset commercial viability issues in the process, and the prioritisation of infrastructure resilience. Perhaps more challenging, we also need more nuanced discussions about our sensitivity to resource extraction at a time when the inputs needed to secure sustainable technologies could become increasingly unaffordable, or inaccessible, without valued chips to trade.
The harder point, especially in an election year, is that resilience is not free. It may be that to meet this Government’s goal of doubling export values by 2034, we also need to double our spending across national security and key risk-adjacent sectors. This would present difficult opportunity costs. But the fiscal capacity to fund health, education and social support ultimately depends on an economy that can keep operating through stronger and more frequent geopolitical storms.
Issue polls will keep holding up a mirror to what hurts now. But our democratic responsibility is to look through the window as well and ask the difficult questions about our plan for the volatility ahead. Historically, the smaller countries that do best in periods of instability are not necessarily the wealthiest or loudest. They are the ones that coalesce around their strategic aims, make clear-eyed trade-offs, and build resilience in the systems and institutions that secure their interests. We can’t wait another three years to have that conversation.
Major General (Retired) John Howard, MNZM, is a former chief of New Zealand Defence Intelligence and a former deputy director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency. Tim Ewing-Jarvie is a former Pentagon strategy adviser and the managing director of Horizon Lab, a New Zealand-based strategic intelligence and advisory firm. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of any organisations they are affiliated with.
Catch up on the debates that dominated the week by signing up to our Opinion newsletter – a weekly round-up of our best commentary.