Source: New Zealand Government
[Keynote speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs (NZIIA) national conference, Takina Convention Centre, Wellington]
Good afternoon.
National Chair of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, Dr James Kember, Executive Director Dr Hamish McDougall, members of the Diplomatic Corps, distinguished guests.
It is a pleasure to speak here today at the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs’ Annual Conference.
The NZIIA contributes to, and facilitates, discussion and debate about New Zealand’s foreign policy, and we thank you for hosting us.
In May last year, it was the NZIIA that hosted us in Parliament for a speech that addressed the challenges we face in a more fractious world and outlined how the Coalition Government was bringing more energy, more urgency and a sharper focus to our foreign policy.
Just over a year later, we thought we’d reflect on the Government’s Foreign Policy Reset, where progress has been made, and the foreign policy themes we have accentuated in the year since we last spoke to you.
This is also the time for a clear-eyed appraisal of New Zealand’s strategic circumstances, and the sharply deteriorating international outlook, as evidenced by the protracted illegal war in Ukraine and in the catastrophic escalation of the conflict in the Middle East.
Twenty-five years ago, New Zealand enjoyed a world that was becoming more open, more democratic, and more free. Trade liberalisation was gathering pace. Effective multilateralism helped underpin a liberal- oriented international rules-based system.
Turning to the world of today – and looking out to tomorrow – the changes are stark. Uncertainty is now pervasive across the globe. We face an international operating environment under serious strain, one that poses complex challenges while exposing structural weaknesses in that operating environment.
While geography remains a constant, distance is no buffer. There is no opting out from the geopolitical realities we face. So, this is a timely reminder of what is at stake, and why our foreign policy matters for all New Zealanders.
Foreign policy can often be perceived as far removed from New Zealanders’ daily lives. But recognising how our foreign and trade policy underpins New Zealanders’ security and prosperity is crucial to the open and mature national conversation we must continue to have in our vibrant democracy.
While operating for the most part quietly and in the background, our foreign and trade policy helps deliver outcomes that matter for all of us.
From the export dollars our farmers and manufacturers earn in key markets and helping to remove barriers for our exporters.
- To new international market opportunities being opened for our innovative services firms.
- To the international rules that provide us with our Exclusive Economic Zone and its resources, preserve Antarctica as a zone of peace and science, and which govern behaviours in outer space and cyber space.
- To the international security partnerships that enable us to tackle common threats, such as the flow of illegal drugs into our country, or terrorist threats.
- To the standards that underpin everyday fundamentals we all rely on, whether international air and sea shipping, our telecommunication devices, or biosecurity measures.
- And to the opportunities for young New Zealanders to travel and work overseas and return with new skills and experiences.
So while foreign and trade policy may seem abstract, how we act in the world matters for New Zealanders every day.
This fundamental link between how we advance our interests abroad, and our security and prosperity at home, is why the Coalition Government prioritises foreign policy as a crucial instrument to achieve both. That, after all, is how we maintain support from the taxpayers who underwrite our efforts.
This demands being present, engaged, and explaining ourselves. There remains no substitute for in-person diplomacy, relationship building, and educating the public about the choices we face.
Now, our critics complain that we are leading a radical repositioning of our foreign policy. But only in one very narrow and important respect are they right. We have radically increased the tempo of our diplomacy, in recognition of our predecessors’ torpor, but also because of the sheer magnitude of the challenges we face.
Since being sworn into office in November 2023, we have visited 46 countries, several more than once, met with well over 100 Presidents, Prime Ministers, Deputy Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers, and had over 400 political engagements.
Through this engagement we are better informed about the world around us, as are counterparts about New Zealand’s foreign policy perspectives and the values that underpin them.
And we continue the important duty of communicating New Zealand’s foreign policy priorities to the public and explaining the nature of our changing strategic circumstances and the choices that flow from them.
We push ourselves to work harder, and explain ourselves better, because New Zealand has understood these past 80 years, that as a small state geographically isolated from the great landmasses of Asia, Europe and the Americas, only through the conduct of a highly active foreign policy can we advance our national interests, defend our region, and make it more prosperous.
Foreign Policy Reset: Progress
Distinguished guests, in our speech to you last year we outlined the six priorities that form the Government’s foreign policy reset. Today’s speech is an opportunity to recap the ambition that Cabinet set out and highlight key areas of effort and progress.
First, we are significantly increasing our focus and resources applied to South and Southeast Asia.
With 34 outward Prime Ministerial and Ministerial visits to the region since February 2024 – advancing new business and investment opportunities, while expanding defence and security cooperation, and upgrading a range of key relationships – we are investing in the wider region, commensurate with its strategic and economic significance.
In 2025, we have upgraded our Viet Nam relationship to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, and we are working hard to similarly achieve upgrades in our ASEAN and Singapore relationships.
It was a pleasure to again visit India last month, and to contribute to this important and growing relationship, including welcoming the negotiations underway towards a comprehensive free trade agreement.
Complementing this investment in South and Southeast Asia, the Government also remains focused on the depth and breadth of our important relationships across North Asia. Our bilateral relationship with China is New Zealand’s largest trade relationship. It’s proven mutually beneficial and significant for both countries. The relationship is supported by regular people exchange, including political dialogue, business, education and tourism links. And we are pleased that with the Prime Minister visiting China this week we will have completed reciprocal visits between our respective counterparts over the past two years.
Our long-standing political connections enable frank and comprehensive discussions on areas of disagreement, including those that stem from our different histories and different systems. Indeed, it is a sign of healthy relationships that we can and do express disagreement on important issues.
Japan and Korea are two likeminded democracies in the Indo-Pacific, who view the region and the world in the same way we do and are increasingly central to achieving our interests.
Second, we are renewing and reinvigorating meaningful engagement with traditional and likeminded partners.
Our circumstances underscore the importance of an even deeper strategic partnership with Australia as well as other partners with which we share a deep history and enduring interests.
Consultations with Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong in Adelaide last month highlighted that New Zealand has no closer or more important partner that Australia, our one formal ally, with whom we share interests across the full expanse of regional and international issues.
We have grown the important partnership with the United Kingdom, including advancing trade opportunities and reiterating our shared commitment to tackling international security challenges.
Similarly, enhanced engagement with the European Union and its member states is a significant focus for New Zealand.
The change in the US Administration in January has inevitably generated changes in the priorities and direction of US foreign policy. But the significance of the US’ continued role in the security and stability in the Indo-Pacific and as an essential economic partner remains, and this continues to be the focus of our engagement, including during discussions with Secretary Rubio in Washington and Admiral Paparo, Commander of US INDOPACOM in Honolulu.
Third, we are sustaining a deeper focus on the Pacific, working in collaboration with Pacific Leaders to protect and advance our interconnected security, economic, social and environmental interests.
In a more complex global environment, coming together as a region is even more important. Which is why Pacific regionalism sits at the core of our Pacific approach, with the Pacific Islands Forum at its centre.
We will always be members of the same Pacific family. A series of cross-party Parliamentary delegations into the region, alongside our exhaustive travel around Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia, have demonstrated that New Zealand’s commitment to the region spans the political spectrum and is foundational to who we are as a country.
Our Pacific-focused International Development Cooperation programme – reshaped to achieve more impact by doing fewer, bigger, projects better – is helping to build climate and economic resilience, strengthen governance and security, and to lift heath, education and connectivity.
Fourth, we are targeting our multilateral engagement on priority global and transboundary issues, working to defend and preserve core principles of international law that underpin our security and prosperity.
Respect for the UN Charter principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the prohibition on the use of force is essential to avoid a return to a world where the exercise of hard power reigns supreme.
Where these principles are flagrantly violated, such as in Russia’s continued illegal invasion of Ukraine, we must stand against such aggression and lend our efforts to achieving a just and sustainable peace.
New Zealand’s response to the Israel-Hamas conflict is also grounded in upholding international law, including international humanitarian law.
While the multilateral system has served us all well for many decades, it most certainly is not without flaws. We recognise that defending, strengthening, and modernising the rules-based system also means supporting reform of multilateral institutions.
We actively support efforts to make these institutions more responsive, efficient and effective to ensure they are focused on making a difference for our citizens, and we feel an urgency around necessary reform.
Fifth, we are supporting new groupings that advance and defend our interests and capabilities.
The relationship between the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4) countries – Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand – is an example of this new support.
Deeper political-level engagement between NATO and the IP4, begun by predecessor governments, has allowed us to raise the profile of shared strategic challenges in the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific, and to drive enhanced cooperation on priority areas including cyber, artificial intelligence, and defence capability.
This effort will be given further momentum next week, when the Prime Minister travels to The Hague for engagements with fellow IP4 partners and NATO countries, during the NATO Summit.
And sixth, we are working hard to advance the Government’s goal of seriously lifting New Zealand’s export value over the next decade.
This means harnessing every potential gain from our trade and economic agenda; promoting New Zealand as a place to do business; and creating opportunities for our world-class exporters.
This Government has conducted eleven successful trade missions, as we work towards the target of 20 missions involving New Zealand businesses during this Parliamentary term.
New trade agreements concluded with the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf Cooperation Council will open doors and provide greater certainty as well as create more chances for our exporters to grow and diversify their businesses.
As will our efforts to leverage and expand existing trade agreements – such as through the United Kingdom’s accession last year to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).
Mid-term reflections
In recent speeches we have outlined that the priorities identified in the foreign policy reset are underpinned by three key concepts:
- The realism that informs the Government’s foreign policy.
- Our view of the crucial role that diplomacy needs to play in our troubled world.
- And our unshakeable belief that small states matter and that all states are equal.
In fashioning foreign policy responses, the realist tendency is to err on the side of prudence. That is, we are careful in what we say, and when and how we say it.
We leave it to the small cabal of ill-informed critics of our foreign policy approach to shout impotently at clouds. They are good at that. Take AUKUS. In our speech to the NZIIA last year we were candid about what AUKUS Pillar 2 was, why the Ardern/Hipkins Governments launched work on it, and we laid out the necessary pre-conditions for participation.
A year on, there is nothing new to report, which you might think says something about the current dynamic, but still critics insist dark clouds have formed around our independent foreign policy. Their arguments were ill-informed and rubbish then. They’re ill-informed and rubbish now.
We said we would update New Zealanders on Pillar 2 when there was something new to say. And we will.
In conditions of great uncertainty and disorder, such as we are currently experiencing, prudence is a both a logical and necessary guiding principle for a small state like New Zealand.
We see our responsibility to the New Zealand people, in conducting foreign policy, as making cool-headed calculations of the country’s own strengths and weaknesses as we fashion our responses to events large or small that impact upon New Zealand’s interests.
For a small state like New Zealand, the role of diplomacy is a crucial instrument of our foreign policy. In our complex geostrategic environment never has effective diplomacy been more needed.
Summing up our wide foreign policy discussions in our National Statement to the United Nations last year, we said it has never been more apparent just how much diplomacy and the tools of statecraft matter in our troubled world.
Since war and instability is everyone’s calamity, diplomacy is the business of us all. We have observed that at this moment in time the ability to talk with, rather than at, each other has never been more needed.
Those who share our values, and even those who do not, gain from understanding each other’s position, even when we cannot agree. From understanding comes opportunity and from diplomacy comes compromise, the building block of better relations between nations. We said we need more diplomacy, more engagement, more compromise.
As Churchill also said in his later years, “meeting jaw-to-jaw is better than war.”
The inherent tensions and imbalances in the global order – between the desire for a rules-based order that protects small states against aggression, and the unjustified exercise of power by certain Great Powers – have only grown over the last past eight decades.
Yet small states matter now as much as they did then. New Zealand holds the foundational belief that all states are equal and that our voices matter as much as more powerful states. Adopting a prudential approach to our diplomacy also means not reacting to everything that happens around us.
In closing, it’s fitting to return to the broad theme of the event – New Zealand’s foreign policy in a contested world.
The outlook is challenging, to say the least, and we – government and public alike – must grapple with the reality of the fraught strategic circumstances that New Zealand faces.
We have many friends in the world, but no-one owes New Zealand a living. It is incumbent upon us to chart our course, assert our priorities, cultivate our partnerships, and pursue our interests with the vigour we have injected into our diplomatic efforts these past 18 months.
Amidst serious challenges and risk, there are also opportunities. Realising these means that we must continue to bring energy, urgency and a sharper focus to our foreign policy.
Through the Foreign Policy Reset, we are focused on doing exactly that and ensuring that we continue to deliver security and prosperity for all New Zealanders.
Thank you
