When Jacinda Ardern came to office, her empathic progressivism was a beacon in the reactionary populism of the time. She wasn’t the only sensible person on the world stage. Emmanuel Macron arrived as the president of France in the same year, and Angela Merkel, the European titan, exemplified the sensible centre right.
But the young New Zealand prime minister came to power in the era of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison – a time of post-truth insanity in Washington, Brexit in London, and climate wars in Australia.
Roll forward five years. Trump and Morrison are gone, and Johnson, in a fitting farewell farce, bowed out provisionally on Thursday night to the soundtrack of the Benny Hill show. Ardern has remained in power, and has been joined by another couple of progressive empaths, Joe Biden in Washington and Anthony Albanese in Canberra.
Clearly she’s a formidable politician. Recent negative opinion polls in New Zealand suggest “Jacindamania” has peaked and likely passed domestically. As she noted during an appearance at the Lowy Institute midweek, it had been a “long” five years. But despite being waterlogged domestically, and weary – incumbency will do that – she retains the lustre of globetrotting progressive wunderkind.
Ardern delivered her foreign policy speech at Lowy with the intelligent effervescence that has become her signature. This was a cameo in an Australian visit recalibrating trans-Tasman relations for the Ardern-Albanese era – which translates to more cooperation on climate policy, and, for New Zealanders in Australia, voting rights, a faster pathway to citizenship and increased protections against deportation.
So much bonhomie obviously, and most of the foreign policy speech was about expressing common trans-Tasman positions using different locutions. But there was one interesting point of substantive divergence.
Before we get to that, we need to set the scene.
During his final couple of years in office, Scott Morrison told Australians two things about the world: we were living through the most dangerous geopolitical times since the second world war; and Australians, as denizens of the Indo-Pacific, lived in the hot zone of great power competition between our friends in Washington and our primary export market in China.
As we hurtled towards the May election, Morrison used the invasion of Ukraine to underscore his point about the world regressing back to the 1930s, where fascism threatened democracy.
Morrison framed the illegal invasion of Ukraine as a battle of autocracy versus democracy (which echoed the rhetoric of the Biden administration). He then parlayed remote events to more proximate risks; if Russia could grab Ukraine, China could take Taiwan. Or Australia. Or somewhere not far away.
After defeating Morrison on 21 May, Albanese inherited this framing of geopolitics. We’ll return to Albanese’s inheritance in a moment, but first we need to explain Ardern and the interesting point of divergence at Lowy.
Just as Australia does, Ardern began by characterising the war in Ukraine as “unquestionably illegal, and unjustifiable” and insisted that Russia must be held to account.
But then, New Zealand’s prime minister unfurled a different story. Ardern said the current conflict wasn’t a war of Russia versus the West, or a clash of democracy versus autocracy.
Ukraine was something simpler: an act of territorial aggression by Russia. She said there was no inevitability that China would follow Russia down the path of unprovoked aggression in this region. What was required at the moment was diplomacy and de-escalation and that became harder to achieve if our shared region became “increasingly divided and polarised”.
So, to summarise Ardern’s view: the world is definitely “messy” (her word). But if we hype up these terrible events into a meta-narrative about an inexorable clash of civilisations, this could easily become a case of “beware what we wish for”.
Now let’s bring Albanese back into the picture. I said a minute ago Albanese had inherited Morrison’s narrative on China and Russia, and all the domestic political conditioning that flowed from it. Given that narrative aligns broadly with Washington’s, and the US is our most important security partner, the new Labor prime minister isn’t telegraphing any radical departures while he’s still building rapport with global peers who matter to Australia’s national interest.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder what Albanese would have done with a completely blank canvas – what he might have said about all this if Washington was disengaged and if Morrison hadn’t tried to cast the alternative prime minister and key members of his frontbench as Xi Jinping’s useful idiots. But this speculation doesn’t get us far. Best to stick with what’s actually happening.
At the moment, Albanese is on the continuity and change pathway. Avoiding radical departures with the past, he’s finding his own language to describe Arden’s “messy” times, and projecting his own values-based foreign policy on the global stage. So is Penny Wong, the new foreign minister. Wong is currently circumnavigating the region, trying to bridge differences between the hawkish US-Australian view of China’s motives, and more hedged sensibilities in south-east Asia.
Now, we’ve reached the nub of the thing. This week, Australia and New Zealand offered separate parables about Ukraine, from different starting points, to cultivate a sense of collectivism in the region.
The Australian version of the parable (unfurled by Wong in a major speech in Singapore midweek) is about sovereignty and the right of smaller states to live in peace and prosperity. Australia says if Putin can take Ukraine and nobody says boo, then Xi can copy cat “might is right” in this region.
Australia’s objective is to find common principles that can buttress a group of countries as they navigate inevitable differences of culture, economic development, or political systems. If we can all agree that sovereignty and the rules defending it matter, then we can happily disagree on a bunch of other things.
Adding to the degree of difficulty, Australia is currently promulgating the view that it’s OK for countries to worry about China’s aggression while simultaneously trying to execute a hedged rapprochement with China (that Wong prefers to call “stabilising the relationship”).
Ardern’s alternative collectivist pitch was it’s OK to have a different view about the state of the world.
It’s OK for regional actors to believe this is not 1937; to want to opt out of great power competition, to avoid picking a side.
At a basic level, she’s offering camaraderie by reinforcing the existing regional scepticism about the Washington/Canberra line.
It would be easy at this point to lapse into some binary declarations. Australia and New Zealand are fundamentally at odds. Ardern is defying Biden and Albanese.
After all, the discussion of foreign affairs in this country has become very black and white since China lurched further into authoritarianism and aggression. China’s step change triggered Manichean assessments in Canberra’s defence and intelligence communities which erupted in outbursts of McCarthyist politics. Foreign affairs has become a zone of goodies and baddies and heroes and villains.
Maybe there is a screaming argument playing out across the ditch. Perhaps Ardern and Albanese might come to blows at the Pacific Islands Forum next week.
But I suspect Ardern’s alternate parable reflects the fact New Zealanders view China similarly to the way Western Australians view China – predominantly as an export market. In Australia, there’s an east coast view of China, and a west coast one.
Ardern has certainly faced accumulating pressure in recent times to take a tougher line against Beijing. Given the times genuinely are dangerous (rather than “messy”), I suspect that pressure isn’t going anywhere.
But perhaps the thing that keeps old friends close in complex times is creating some productive space where people of goodwill can disagree.
