Attack on defence spending causes offense
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What issues does New Zealand's Defence Force face?
When it comes to the New Zealand Defence Force, there's a decades-long list of problems. Barracks that aren't fit for purpose, aeroplanes that keep breaking down, and the big one, a ship lost on a reef in Samoa. And then last year, the government's spotlight fell on our armed forces.
We're back home now and the government has released the 2025 Defence Capability Plan, which sets out a spending blueprint for the next 15 years.
The government set out a goal to increase our defence spending to just over 2% of our GDP within eight years. It also plans to spend $12 billion across the 2025 to 2028 budgets. By New Zealand standards, that's a lot. But by the United States' expectations, that's not enough.
We demand 3.5% from our allies and partners, and we are going well beyond that number.
That's the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Higsyth.
Listen, I mean, if I'm being honest, 2% is not enough. And so 2% is freeloading. But I don't have anything against New Zealand. I want partners to step up. I didn't intentionally leave it off my list. I look forward to working with the new defense minister there and enhancing those capabilities. I think that relationship has been a very fruitful one for a very long time.
There are plenty of countries on that list that he spoke fairly warmly of that aren't spending 3.5%. So I don't think New Zealand is going to get to three and a half percent and nor do I think it should. But I think what it needs to do is to say, hey, what do we need to spend for our own reasons, for our own interests?
What is the 2025 Defence Capability Plan for New Zealand?
And I think that is significantly more than we have been spending in recent decades.
That was David Cappy, the director of the Centre for Strategic Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Later on in the podcast, I'll talk to him about how much we spend on our defence and whether the money is being put in the right places. Kia ora, I'm Shalise Tansey and today on The Detail, we're talking defence spending. How much is our defence costing us? Where is that money going? And why is it so important? I start by talking to Anna Fifield. She's an independent New Zealand journalist and a non-resident fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. She recently got back from Singapore, where she attended a summit on defence called the Shangri-La Dialogue, where she asked the question that thrust New Zealand's defence spending onto the world stage.
But before we get to that, I asked her about the summit itself.
The Shangri-La Dialogue happens in Singapore every year and it's the biggest kind of regional defence forum and usually the meeting place for the American and Chinese defence secretaries, ministers to get together and have a conversation. So it is in this very luxurious Singaporean hotel. It is bristling with... military officers in epaulettes and white shoes, diplomats, officials, arms dealers, you name it. And the name of the game is kind of what's going to happen in Asia in terms of the security environment over the year ahead. But this year, of course, it was very geopolitical, focused on the world as a whole, because as we've seen with the Strait of Hormuz, these big crises are no longer geographically constrained.
At this conference, you asked Pete Hegseth, who is the Secretary of War for the US, you asked him a question which ended up spotlighting New Zealand's defence spending. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
I was in the ballroom as Pete Hegseth gave his speech to the forum, and it was pretty moderate by his standards in terms of the language on China, but it was pretty offensive, frankly, by everybody else's in terms of him standing up there and telling... officials from all of these sovereign nations that they need to be spending more, much, much more on defence if they want to remain a friend of the United States. And he unilaterally declared that 3.5% of GDP was now the global norm for defence spending. Now, very few countries in the world spend that level of their GDP on defence, and no country in Asia currently does that.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What issues does New Zealand's Defence Force face?
0:02–1:37
2
What is the 2025 Defence Capability Plan for New Zealand?
1:37–4:40
3
How does New Zealand's defence spending compare to global expectations?
4:40–6:02
4
What was the reaction to the US Secretary of War's comments on New Zealand?
6:02–11:54
5
What insights did Anna Fifield provide about the Shangri-La Dialogue?
11:54–24:40