A curious bird is the kiwi: reflections on NZ's election

A curious bird is the kiwi. Doomed to pedestrianism, it never gets to soar. And its voice is a natural coagulant. One’s blood freezes. Altogether unfortunate, it has turned its politics into a facsimile of itself. The New Zealand election last Saturday saw both the major political coalitions claim indecision as success, and confusion as deliberation. A curious bird is the kiwi. 

It may not be obvious from the land of the wedgetail, but New Zealand matters — to Australia as much as to the rest of the Pacific. Without the NZ bit, most of our myth-making would be hollow. The ANZAC myth of indomitable heroism would instead be a distant memory of Churchillian hubris, and ANZUS would be even more tokenistic than it already is. David Lange, un-kiwi like in his hyperactivity, might have taken the NZ out of ANZUS four decades ago, but the treaty remains a sacred symbol of Australian security dependency on America, an article of strategic faith. 

In reality, New Zealand is something of a bellwether for Australia. When the relationship with NZ is good, things are well with Australia. When it’s not so good, Australia is unsettled. Generally speaking, New Zealand is more effective than Australia in the Pacific. Kiwis listen to the Pacific nations. Australia lectures them. Kiwi diplomacy in the Pacific is more subtle than Australia’s, reflecting the Māori influence in endowing a Polynesian character to NZ regional policy. 

On climate issues, for instance, NZ is significantly more empathetic towards the Pacific nations, and significantly more generous is signalling a welcome to Aotearoa when ocean levels rise to curtail human habitability.  

Even on defence matters, NZ is consistently more in tune with the security preoccupations of the Pacific countries than is Australia. Like the Pacific countries, NZ does not share Australia’s paranoia regarding “the China threat”, focusing instead on the risks to local social cohesion resulting from poor educational, health and social security outcomes. Given its cultural sensitivity, NZ is able to generate a greater sense of cohesion in the Pacific, which works to Australia’s advantage as well as its own.  

So, what kept the kiwis so electorally earthbound? Essentially, the New Zealand economy has tanked, and that is ultimately the only thing that matters politically. And with poor wages and even poorer prospects, young Kiwis are leaving in droves, about two-thirds of them headed for Australia, taking their education and their skills with them. They don’t go back. On conservative estimates, there are more than 1.2 million New Zealanders living in Australia, and like South Africans, they seem to love living in WA and Queensland. 

And while New Zealand’s net immigration is climbing, albeit slowly, the newcomers are treading the same economic stairway as those who are departing. They’re coming from countries, especially in the Pacific, where there is less opportunity, to enjoy the greater relative opportunity that NZ affords them. Their kiwi counterparts are on the same economic stairway to opportunity in Australia. 

New Zealand’s economic prospects remain bleak. There’s just enough in-bound tourism and out-bound Pinot Noir, not to mention Icebreaker merino “jersey” trade, to keep the economy comatose. And jandals are made in China anyway. While it is a bitter prospect for New Zealanders, and not so very welcome in Australia, trans-Tasman economic integration is probably NZ’s best way forward, as it probably is for the Pacific as a whole. And at this juncture, New Zealand is just not ready for that particular challenge. 

Until NZ is prepared to address the proverbial fork in the road — when you come to a fork in the road, take it! — political gridlock, a result of its meticulously democratic electoral system, is inevitable. As a very successful multi-racial society, New Zealand has a strong sense of its national identity. That identity matters, and while it continues to lack the kind of leadership that can resolve the tension between national identity and trans-Tasman economic integration, its politics will continue to exhibit inertia. 

Perhaps Professor Dame Jacinda Ardern’s translation to the University of Sydney and domicile on New South Wales’s central coast is a harbinger of things to come. A kiwi has taken flight, with a voice that can be both heard and listened to. The emu is equally earth-bound, and not much of a vocalist either. There’s room for both on this magnificent continent.  

Allan Behm works in The Australia Institute’s International and Security Affairs program.