Category: Politics

Geoffrey Miller looks at New Zealand’s growing relationship with the Middle East and North Africa – and contemplates its future Amidst New Zealand’s level 4 coronavirus lockdown in March, all but a handful of the country’s troops stationed in Iraq returned home, three months earlier than scheduled. The New Zealand personnel had been deployed to Camp Taji since 2015 to train Iraqi soldiers, as part of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS. The end to the deployment was officially unrelated to Covid-19, but it was heavily overshadowed by it. Yet the overall lack of fanfare was perhaps also symbolic of...

Over the past 30 years, ministerial responsibility for New Zealand’s foreign affairs has changed hands remarkably rarely. Since 1990, just four individuals have dominated the portfolio – Don McKinnon (1990-1999), Phil Goff (1999-2005), Winston Peters (2005-8 and again from 2017 to 2020) and Murray McCully (2008-2017). Only two others have held the role, and then only very briefly – Gerry Brownlee (for five months after McCully retired in 2017) and Helen Clark herself (in 2008, after she stood down Winston Peters from the position).  By contrast, over the same 30-year period, New Zealand has had no fewer than 12 different...

News is not in short supply in the Middle East, and at the weekend, Arabic-language media remained firmly focused on the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh. Nevertheless, the New Zealand election – and above all Jacinda Ardern’s personal success – still received significant attention from Arabic-language TV news channels, newspapers and particularly on social media. Echoes of March 15 mosque attacks In this respect, the election coverage was a small echo of the attention New Zealand received in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque attacks in 2019. For a brief moment in March that year, the New Zealand...

By Geoffrey Miller New Zealand should continue to champion human rights in Belarus amidst an ongoing crackdown on protests by the country’s regime, former Prime Minister Helen Clark says. Protests in Belarus – often referred to as ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’ – erupted after the country’s disputed presidential elections on August 9 and are now entering their seventh week. The regime, headed by President Alexander Lukashenko, has responded to opposition protests with a brutal crackdown. Thousands of demonstrators have been beaten or arrested since last month’s vote. Numerous accounts of torture inside Belarusian prisons have also emerged. Helen Clark told the...

By Geoffrey Miller A former Minister of Defence says the government was too slow to involve the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) in New Zealand’s response to Covid-19. But Wayne Mapp, a National MP from 1996-2011 who served as Minister of Defence for three years during John Key’s first term as Prime Minister, told the Democracy Project podcast that a New Zealand First plan to shift the entire managed isolation and quarantine programme into military facilities would be a step too far. “I think that the government was way too slow in using the NZDF capability in Covid, and I...

By Geoffrey Miller Winston Peters has made his first comments on the ongoing crisis in Belarus, following rigged elections in the country often referred to as ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’. Belarus’s President, Alexander Lukashenko, is refusing to give up power despite days of mass protests following presidential elections that have been widely seen as fraudulent. Official election results from the August 9 vote saw Lukashenko win 80% of the vote. There have been widespread allegations of vote-rigging in the Eastern European country. The main opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, remains in hiding in neighbouring Lithuania after fleeing the Belarusian capital Minsk in...

New Zealand needs to speak out against allegations of mass torture and brutality in Belarus following the Eastern European country’s recent elections, a Belarusian national living in New Zealand says. Last Sunday’s election – which saw strongman Alexander Lukashenko claim 80% of the vote in a result that is widely seen as fraudulent – has triggered days of mass protests throughout Belarus, often referred to as Europe’s last dictatorship. Lukashenko has been in power since 1994. Over 6000 protesters have been detained since Sunday’s rigged vote, with many detainees reportedly being beaten or tortured in the country’s prisons, according to...

By Geoffrey Miller Prominent refugee advocate Murdoch Stephens says he is disappointed by Judith Collins’ reaction to Immigration New Zealand’s decision to grant refugee status to Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani. Judith Collins told media last month that “there’s a lot of concern in New Zealand about what they see as queue jumping and so I’m putting in quite a few questions today…to clarify whether there was any preference given to him over all the other United Nations certified refugees.” But in a wide-ranging interview with the Democracy Project podcast, Murdoch Stephens said that he was disappointed by the comments. “[Judith...

By Geoffrey Miller A former MP and Associate Minister of Defence says that New Zealand’s Covid-19 border and quarantine issues illustrate why a new dedicated national security agency is needed. Heather Roy, a former deputy leader of the Act Party who held the associate defence portfolio from 2008-10, told the Democracy Project podcast that a new national security agency would assume a key co-ordination role across existing departments – a function that she believed the recent border problems and New Zealand’s overall response to the coronavirus pandemic had demonstrated was severely lacking. “I think that the problem initially for New...

By Geoffrey Miller A New Zealand academic specialising in Latin America believes that NZ’s relationship with Latin America will remain strong, even if direct flights do not immediately resume to the continent after the immediate coronavirus crisis subsides. Nikita Kent, a Victoria University of Wellington graduate who studied in Peru and recently completed a UN internship in Chile, told the Democracy Project podcast that the NZ-Latin America relationship would continue even without direct flights to the continent. Until last month, Air New Zealand operated a non-stop Auckland-Buenos Aires flight that started in 2015, while LATAM Airlines flew from the Chilean...