Source: Radio New Zealand
Growing international threats prompted Assistant Transport Minister James Meager to ask for “no-cost, low-effort” options to counter the greatest vulnerabilities. RNZ / Nathan McKinnon
The government is taking 10 initiatives to protect vital undersea Internet and power cables.
Sabotage and accidental damage of cables in Europe and Asia have sparked efforts there to safeguard them better.
A newly released government report showed, compared to international best practice, New Zealand was “generally well set up”, but the growing international threats prompted Assistant Transport Minister James Meager to ask for 10 “no-cost, low-effort” options to counter the greatest vulnerabilities.
Eight were done or underway, but two depended on partners, the nine-page report said.
One of the 10 included the first exercise simulating a data cable break on 10 March.
Another was a biannual threat assessment, although in the report to Meager, most of the assessment was blanked out, apart from references to fishing, anchoring and earthquakes were the likeliest threats.
Officials presented the minister with the first threat assessment last October.
A third of the 10 initiatives was setting up a national surveillance warning capability, which was trailed successfully late last year. The MOT paper asked Meager if he wanted to launch a full system.
Last year, National Security and Intelligence Minister Christopher Luxon ordered a review of critical underwater infrastructure (CUI), saying, “A new threat has emerged“.
In 2024, officials had warned that submarine cables were “attractive espionage targets”.
The latest report to Meager sketched examples of compromised cables, including several in waters between Taiwan and China.
It said an exercise called ‘Iceland Unplugged’ last year simulated all four of the island’s telecom cables to Europe being severed and “is of such direct relevance that we judge that we do not need to model the impact on New Zealand currently”.
“Feedback from industry indicates that, if we lose one of the five current international cables, then we would not be noticeably impacted.
“This is because the cables are designed to have spare capacity and the companies work cooperatively, so that the disrupted cable’s traffic would be immediately rerouted.”
Iceland’s exercise showed, if more than one cable was lost, the main impact was overseas web pages would not load, causing loss of productivity.
For electricity, a long outage of the Cook Strait power cables – they provide up to 30 percent of the North Island’s power during peak demand – could “seriously impede” supply nationally and push up wholesale prices.
The “most effective hedge against disruption is having more CUI and having it more geographically dispersed”, said the latest report.
A new cable from the US to New Zealand would cost about $1 billion and the main thing companies wanted from the government was “an effective regime to protect these investments”.
Encouraging investment was “working well”, with work begun on one new international cable and planning advanced for one other.
One of the two initiatives not begun as of March 2026 was a ship-tracking system called AIS transmit – or Automatic Identification System – that would allow cable operators to detect vessels near cables.
Another initiative mentioned surveillance for “suspicious vessel behaviours”, but it was not clear if or how that was being done.
The country has cable protection zones and penalties aimed to discourage mariners from going in them, although not for all cables.
In the Pacific, under a marine maintenance agreement, a cable repair ship is either laying cable or on standby to respond to cable breaks from its home port in Fiji.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand