Australia-Us Defence Relations

Listen, I don't think anyone should be offended by Pete Heggseth saying that New Zealand is freeloading off the American military. This is not a controversial thing at all to say. The Australians have been privately complaining about us sponging off them for decades. They've urge us to lift our spend to 2% of GDP for decades. We have kept on spending at only 1% or thereabouts for decades. Wayne Mapp, the former defense minister, probably said the quiet bit out loud when he said yesterday that we don't need to lift our spending any higher than it is because we have so much water between us and everyone else that it makes us basically the safest nation on earth, which is a probably what most of us think anyway about why we don't need to spend more, and B, an unbelievably short-sighted thing to say. When we know the world is heating up out there, right? From Ukraine to Iran to Taiwan, we know Xi wants to take Taiwan. Some reckon it's going to happen in months, not years. Worst case scenario. We also know that we don't know what that sets off in our part of the world. Now, Mapp is right in what he's implying. Invasion of New Zealand is not really a concern, but shipping routes are, aren't they? Just look at what's going on with the Strait of Humus. Imagine that's us trying to get our food out and our fuel in. We would not be able to keep a shipping route open by ourselves. We would need Australia or the states, and they are not going to help us if we're not prepared to help as well. Our gear is getting old, our frigates need replacing, they're old tech anyway. A billion-dollar frigate can be sung by sunk by a $300 drone nowadays. So we're going to need drones and we're going to need lots of them. And we can't look around the world in 2026 as our only ally, Australia spends more on defense, and as NATO lifts its spending and see China making inroads into the Pacific and think we don't need to up our dollars as well. Of course we do. Say what you like about the shortcomings in the errors of the Trump administration, and there are plenty, but there is one thing they have been right about and have actually managed to start fixing, and that is that Western countries need to spend more on defense, and that includes us.