AM Edition: Top 10 Economic Articles on LiveNews.co.nz for September 21, 2026 – Full Text

Source: New Zealand Government

[Address to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, Old Legislative Council Chamber, Parliament Buildings.]

National Chair of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, Dr Sarena Kelly, Executive Director of the Council for International Development Todd Cleaver, Past-President of the NZIIA Dr James Kember, Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade Bede Corry, Deputy Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, Ambassadors and High Commissioners, board members of the NZIIA and distinguished guests, good afternoon.

With Parliament rising this week, we wanted to offer some reflections on the state of the international order and on aspects of New Zealand’s foreign policy response to the order-shattering times we live in. 

Context

But first, context. It is unchallenged that we face the worst international conditions since 1945. Back then, as a consequence of that dark time, a war-weary world came together in San Francisco to sign the United Nations Charter.

There was hope the world could be brought back to peaceful habits, and for eight decades one could sustain that hope, even as an often fragile, and sometimes precarious post-War equilibrium was maintained. 

Yet like all moments of creation, the seeds of future entropy – in the form of the Security Council veto – were also created, as Peter Fraser warned his colleagues in San Francisco.

Now, in 2026 we face polycrises, but with the United Nations’ ability to effectively respond hamstrung by abuse of the security council veto, and while it grapples with serious reform the UN is just muddling through, in a weakened state. 

Then, just before the 2023 General Election, Hamas attacked Israel. The Israeli response to the atrocities inflicted upon Israeli citizens on October 7 saw Gaza remain a focus throughout this term, as has the brutal and prolonged war of attrition arising from Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

The world’s attention on those two conflicts does not in any way diminish our alarm about humanitarian disasters occurring elsewhere – in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, and now, following the Strait of Hormuz conflict, the wider Middle East. 

We highlighted this concern in our 2025 National Statement to the United Nations General Assembly, when we shared New Zealand’s deepest unease; that the effects of such large-scale violence, displacement and famine will create further inter-generational cycles of violence in those countries already wracked by political instability and conflict.

We live in a deeply troubled world, and one whose global economy has been roiled by disruption, uncertainty and the unwelcome return of trade protectionism. The days of greater trade liberalisation, and more free, open and democratic societies have been replaced by an unwelcome level of economic disruption and political coercion.

Accelerating the global economic disruption has been the impact on oil prices from the ongoing conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, placing further pressure on already strained households in New Zealand, as elsewhere. 

The global impact flowing from the order-shattering character of our times conjures Shakespeare’s line from the Second Part of Henry IV, ‘The time, so misordered, does crowd and crush us to this monstrous form’. 

That monstrous form has produced great economic and political uncertainty, not just about present conditions, but about the direction they next take. That was our sense of things coming into office in late 2023. We have conducted foreign policy in uncertainty’s shadow ever since.

Fashioning our Foreign Policy

We came into office inheriting a moribund foreign policy. It was a sobering first couple of weeks, but we had experience so immediately got down to work. 

Our first major speech, in December 2023, was directed at overseas Heads of Missions in Wellington and Canberra, who we saw as critical enablers of relations between their countries and ours.

We thank again the serving Heads of Mission here. We have enjoyed our interactions, and we trust that we have played our part in advancing our mutual interests. We have always found your insights invaluable. 

In early 2024, Cabinet endorsed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s diagnosis of the three big shifts taking place in the international order – from rules to power, from economics to security, and from efficiency to resilience. Our foreign policy strategy was fashioned from that diagnosis.

Six priorities were identified, but more’s the point, we committed to pursuing a highly active foreign policy. We wanted our diplomacy injected with more energy, more urgency, and a far sharper focus on investing in relationships.

We’ve pushed ourselves to the brink this term, because we understand that a small state, geographically isolated from the great landmasses of Asia, Europe and the Americas, must be extremely energetic to promote, advance and defend our interests. It cannot be achieved from Wellington, so we have spent over eight months off-shore this term.

Extensive travel will also be the burden of any future Foreign Minister trying to mitigate against the perennial underinvestment in our diplomatic network. We have had our budgetary successes across three terms as Foreign Minister, but there remains a Sisyphean quality to our annual quest to get MFAT the resources it needs to adequately advance our interests in a world where the challenges to New Zealand’s interests are expanding and unrelenting.   

The six foreign policy priorities of the Foreign Policy Reset, allied to a highly active diplomacy, were underpinned by three conceptual pillars and one commitment we made to ourselves. 

First, we take the world as it is, not how we wish it would be. We have said throughout the term that we are unashamedly foreign policy realists. For a realist, one’s guiding light is prudence, and so we have, after forensically analysing New Zealand’s strengths and weaknesses, been cautious when facing our most complex situations and relationships.

We have received criticism for our response from time to time, but our responsibility as stewards of foreign policy is to see through the ravages of any given moment to better position New Zealand for when calmer times return. That has been our mission as we rebuilt our foreign policy. 

Second, we have an unshakeable belief in the positive role that diplomacy can play in our troubled world. The title of our speech says it all, ‘there’s always a way to talk,’ and we have, with countries who agree with us, and with countries who do not.

Why? Because as we’ve said before, those who share our values, and even those who do not, gain from understanding each other’s positions. From understanding comes opportunity, and from diplomacy comes compromise, a crucial building block for better relations between nations. We need more diplomacy, more engagement, more compromise. 

Our third conceptual pillar is holding the inviolate belief that small states matter. New Zealand believes all states, regardless of their size, are equal, and so we treat smaller states with the same respect that we would expect from larger states in their approach towards us. We have in all our diplomatic engagement these past three years never deviated from expressing that conviction.

A commitment we also made when beginning the term was to try to keep the country informed and educated about our foreign policy challenges and responses. As part of this, we have this term regularly brought journalists into the Office of the Foreign Minister to explain what we’ve been doing and to answer their questions. 

They are crucial translators to New Zealanders of our foreign policy, so we have shared our challenges with them. Likewise, we committed from the beginning to keeping the major opposition party informed about challenges we faced. We saw that as another core responsibility as prudent stewards of New Zealand’s foreign policy.

A final issue to raise concerns about is our much-mythologised independent foreign policy. We said in our speech to the Diplomatic Corps in late 2023 that every country rightly claims to possess an independent foreign policy. What differentiates countries’ independence are respective geographies, economies, populations, political systems, histories, ideologies, cultures, and relationships.

As realists, we view our independent foreign policy as a matter of agency. We are, at any given moment, or when facing any given foreign policy choice, constrained or liberated by our sense of agency. 

As good friend, Singaporean Foreign Minister Balakrishnan said in an eloquent speech delivered in February, small states must ‘determine our long-term national interests and then exercise our agency to chart our own path and choose our own destiny’. 

However, there is an old proverb also worth repeating here; nostalgia is the most seductive of liars. For some New Zealanders, especially for those on the left, their idea of an independent foreign policy conflates foreign policy solely with their own version of national identity and not with the national interest. At its core, it reacts only in one direction, against the United States, whether through the anti-nuclear policy or New Zealand not joining the Iraq War in 2003. 

The anti-nuclear policy and the construction of this in David versus Goliath terms bolstered our national self-esteem, no doubt, as it boosted our sense of national identity. 

However, a realist would ask whether the anti-nuclear policy grew or constrained our agency in the decades following, and the answer to that is far more mixed, because costs did occur.

The point here is that an independent foreign policy can never be unidirectional. However, for the left and a large section of our media, they define us acting independently only when we are disagreeing with the Americans. 

A truly independent foreign policy can only be multi-directional, and we have expressed it from time to time this term, notably on Palestinian Statehood recognition, where we differed from some of our closest partners, but for other policy choices too. 

The point we would make is that because an independent foreign policy is multi-directional, it means that the true measure of our independent foreign policy is the extent to which we have agency over decision-making. It can never be confined to pointing a megaphone in only one direction. And that agency is more often than not enhanced by alignment and working with others.       

We find the vocal critics of our foreign policy are never asked to explain with any rigour, whatsoever, what they think the costs might be if we followed their advice to use megaphone, rather than quiet diplomacy.

Our focus has been on restoring our foreign policy agency, so we have methodically gone about doing that.

We have been hugely committed this term – as the strongest supporter of the Defence Capability Plan and our vigorous advocacy to review and hasten the appropriations that must flow from it – to rebuild our national heft and capability so as to exert agency and better chart our own path as a small state. 

If our value proposition is strong, so too will be New Zealand’s voice. However, in times of heightened uncertainty such as we are experiencing, we have pursued a careful diplomacy as we seek to rebuild the strength of our national voice.   

We take seriously our role as stewards of New Zealand’s foreign policy, to bequeath to successor governments more choices, more agency than we inherited. 

Perspectives on our independent foreign policy may differ, which we accept with equanimity. But while some have the luxury to think you can say whatever you want, whenever you want, all without incurring costs, well, we are all too aware of the metrics others use to judge us, and we believe our approach has been a prudent one.

Even for foreign policy decisions taken amidst contested and strong public and political opinion, like the question of Palestinian statehood, we cannot be accused of not talking to all the affected parties, listening to their perspectives, and deliberating carefully over the decision.

We have found there is always a way to talk.

We also think the public understands better than their elected leaders how contested and challenging our security environment is. That is not down to just our efforts. It is because the public have eyes, ears and minds of their own, and they can see for themselves just how contested and malign New Zealand’s security environment has become. 

The unwelcome geopolitical manoeuvring in the Pacific is obvious to New Zealanders. From the testing of missiles without permission or adequate notice, to naval exercises edging ever-further southwards, and the terrible threat to our Pacific neighbours and us from organised transnational crime, New Zealanders get it that our environment is not benign, if it ever was.

New Zealanders also see the weekly costs they are bearing as a result of the order-shattering situation we face. These are hard times for many Kiwis. So, we are very conscious that for financial investments we make in foreign affairs, the long-term value to the taxpayer, in terms of making New Zealand a more secure or more prosperous country, is front and centre in our minds.                 

Navigating the Pacific

The Pacific, as it must always be, has been a core component of New Zealand’s foreign policy this term. Working closely with Australia, New Zealand’s only formal ally, we have over the past three years undertaken the most intensive programme of Pacific diplomacy in New Zealand’s history. 

We set the goal of visiting all 17 other Pacific Islands Forum countries. We got to 16 in 2024, with the last, Kiribati, achieved in January 2026. 

One deeply imprinted lesson that stayed with us after flying across the vast northern Pacific Ocean is the extraordinary distances between Forum member states. The tyranny of distance is very real once you’ve experienced it. 

And only if you have flown across this massive body of water, some 31 percent of the world’s surface, can one’s mind truly grasp the scale of the challenges our Pacific family face.

On our trip across Micronesia – first visiting the Marshall Islands, then the Federated States of Micronesia, and finally Palau – we listened to the absurdly gruelling travel contortions their leaders faced getting themselves to the Pacific Islands Forum. 

We hit upon an idea: an offer to get them all to the PIF via one of our Royal New Zealand Air Force transports. Since that trip in 2024 we have been providing this service every year. At the recent PIF in Palau we carried 12 delegations with us, a small investment by us but one that directly responds to the challenges of distance they face as well as our fidelity to PIF centrality. 

We shared this lesson with our Middle East, European, and ASEAN friends, with the message to come to our region, and travel across it to better understand the economic and security challenges the Pacific faces.

We encouraged them to engage and welcomed the positive responses we received from Denmark, Norway, the UK and the UAE, as new contributors to the Pacific Resilience Facility.

The hugely positive effect that New Zealand’s strong ongoing support for Ukraine’s defence has also generated in Europe renewed interest in our region.   

We worked hard all term to entice new development partners into the Pacific, and that opportunity was created out of the great disruption, because it created a heightened shared awareness that events in one hemisphere create ripples in the other.

And that was achieved through our diplomacy.   

Another strong memory this term was welcoming a study tour from New Caledonia in Auckland in mid-2025. The group, comprised of mostly young Kanak entrepreneurs and leaders, came at our invitation to learn how to better create employment and economic opportunities for young New Caledonians.

Now, there’s always a way to talk, and after New Caledonia exploded into violence in May 2024, we wanted to let the New Caledonian and French Governments know that we were there to help support our closest Pacific neighbour.

That was delicate diplomacy. On the one hand we’d viewed with dismay the collapse of New Caledonia’s economy, previously in the top three economies among PIF member states. Ongoing French support for New Caledonia’s economic revival, we considered vital. 

At the same time urgent and tricky issues of institutional and democratic legitimacy needed addressing. 

Citing Rousseau – that ‘there is nothing better than the encouragement of a good friend’ – we made clear that New Zealand stood ready to help. We stayed close to the New Caledonian Government throughout, and our enduring friendship with the French set the scene for the study tour, the first step in New Zealand’s ongoing support for our Pacific neighbour.

We have also faced foreign policy challenges within our region, with the Cook Islands the most prominent, and most taxing, of this term. 

Our signing of the Defence and Security Declaration earlier this year, which cemented a shared understanding of the Realm relationship, signalled a return to the close bonds that have existed between our peoples, and reaffirmed the enduring strength of our shared citizenship. 

The Agreement we then signed a couple of weeks ago in Palau with the United States and the Cook Islands, to develop a port in Penrhyn, was a rare triple win in foreign policy terms. 

All partners to the agreement benefit, and it’s what we can achieve with valued partners. We welcome the strong re-engagement in the Pacific of Deputy Secretary of State Landau, on behalf of Secretary of State Rubio. 

The United States is a Pacific power, and we need an engaged America in the Pacific in support of regional prosperity and security, including for their greater capability to disrupt the evil scourge of drugs washing across Pacific shores. 

We have talked a lot with them this term about the challenges facing the Pacific and the United States’ announcements in Palau were welcome recognition that they have listened and are responding.   

Final reflections

Our reflections have been Pacific oriented this afternoon, for good reason. Fully 60 percent of our aid budget is devoted to the developmental needs of our Pacific family. The Pacific Reset and the diplomacy that flows from it sit at the heart of New Zealand’s foreign policy. 

But we are also proud of our several foreign policy successes arising from our diplomatic uplift in South and Southeast Asia. Significant achievements flowed from it. 

We put a lot of diplomatic effort in and why wouldn’t we? As we said in a speech to the Asia New Zealand Foundation a few months back, in some respects we are living in the Asian century: what happens across the Indo-Pacific matters hugely for the trajectory of world affairs and for New Zealand interests.

Forging closer relations across Asia is even more poignant given the order-shattering nature of our times. Again, opportunities have arisen in response to the global disruption, and we have vigorously pursued them.

So, returning to where we began, leaders near and far have made their diagnosis about the order-shattering nature of the geostrategic environment. We made ours in late 2023, and immediately started responding to it.

Our view, whether the focus is on bilateral or multilateral relations, much of the ills faced in the international order can be seen as both leadership and institutional failures. 

A United Nations under severe pressure and failing domestic institutions – leading to inertia, fractured party systems, or to no institutional constraints at all – continue to hamper the international community’s ability to effectively respond to crises.

Institutional reform is desperately and widely needed if we are to restore stability to the international order, for while nothing is created without purposeful leadership, nothing lasts without institutions. 

So, there is much work to do, especially at the United Nations, and New Zealand will push hard to see the UN80 reform effort matches the scope and urgency that is needed. 

Institutional reform, on its own, however, is not sufficient. As we have accentuated in two National Statements at the United Nations this term, we need global, regional and local leadership that restores trust in democratic and international institutions.

We need leadership whose driving purpose is to find the common good in politics. And leadership underpinned by a leader’s strength of character – their courage, their purpose, and a commitment to educate, not dominate their citizens. 

We also believe conflict can lead to healing. There is always a way to talk. The trick, one as old as diplomacy itself, is knowing what to say, why you’re saying it, how to say it, and with what strength. 

In our last three years as stewards of foreign policy, we have done a lot of talking. But we have listened even more. With the greater understanding that comes from listening, we have been able to focus our scant resources on where they could make the most difference.

We also believe we have left the next government with more choices, and with more agency than we inherited, so have acted as prudent stewards of our country’s national interests. 

Original source: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/09/21/theres-always-a-way-to-talk/