Rt Hon Winston Peters
Minister of Foreign Affairs

President Adeang, Prime Minister Rabuka, fellow Minsters, honourable Diet Member Horii, Ambassadors, distinguished guests.

Minasama, konnichiwa, and good afternoon, everyone.

Distinguished guests, it’s a pleasure to be here with you today to talk about New Zealand’s foreign policy reset, the reasons for it, the values that underpin it, and how it relates to the challenges and opportunities in the Pacific, the vast blue continent we in New Zealand call home.

We call it home because New Zealand is a Pacific country, linked by history, culture, politics, demographics and indeed DNA. Over a quarter of New Zealanders have Māori or Pasifika heritage, and this demographic is growing. These are basic facts, and they have profound influence on how the New Zealand Government regards the Pacific region.

We see the Pacific as a family of nations and like any family each member wants to stand on their own two feet, as an equal. And that is how we view them, and how we hope to be viewed, as equals. They want to make their own choices, and have their own distinctive voices heard on the global stage.

Within these fraternal bonds, we also come together to support each other during difficult times, work together on many areas of common interest, while exhibiting our unity and diversity in moments of national triumph or celebration.

Our speech today is entitled ‘Pacific Futures’ to underscore that history is not fixed. Many Pacific futures are possible, depending on the quality of our leadership responses to the social and economic forces shaping our countries.

Decisions made by sovereign governments help shape the direction of history but those decisions, made by states large and small, reveal a dynamism in our structured but fractious world that makes prediction difficult and certainty impossible.

Dynamism in the realm of global affairs reinforces the need for each generation of decision-makers to have their ‘eyes wide open’ as to their country’s challenges, their constraints, and the often-complex situations they face. To take the world as it is, in other words, but also being alert to opportunities that materially advance the prosperity and security of their citizens.

It is a privilege to be New Zealand’s Foreign Minister for a third time, spanning the past three decades. It has never been more apparent just how much diplomacy and the tools of statecraft matter in our trouble world.

And troubled it is. And since war and instability is everyone’s calamity, diplomacy is the business of us all. In a recent speech, we observed that at this moment in time the ability to talk with, rather than at, each other has never been more needed.

In the eight months since taking office, our programme of international engagements reinforces that those who share our values, and even those who do not, gain from understanding each other’s position, even when we cannot agree.

From understanding comes opportunity and from diplomacy comes compromise, the building block of better relations between nations. We need more diplomacy, more engagement, more compromise.

The call for renewed and vigorous diplomatic engagement provides the context for New Zealand’s foreign policy reset. The security environment had deteriorated sharply during the three years since last being foreign minister, accentuating an even longer-term deterioration of the rules-based order.

The geopolitics taking shape post-Covid accelerated longer-term shifts already underway during the past quarter century – the rolling back of democracy, increasingly restrictive market barriers, a populist response to technological change and political stasis, and a sharp increase in conflict.

These concerning trendlines have presented challenges that are stark; the worst in the almost 80 years since the end of World War 2. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, alongside the utter catastrophe still unfolding in Gaza and the risk of greater escalation in the Middle East, have further destabilised global security. New Zealand has joined the international community in condemning these brutal violations of the international rules-based order.

Closer to home, in the Indo-Pacific, we face the arch-concern of North Korea’s evolving nuclear capability and ambition, which are flagrant breaches of international law and UN resolutions. Its bellicose, aggressive rhetoric and behaviour, including escalating ballistic missile tests, directly attack the rules-based order.

We are also concerned by North Korea and those others either directly or through their export of dual-use technologies supplying military-related technologies to Russia or supporting its war industries to fuel its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Looking southwards from the Korean Peninsula, with 80 percent of New Zealand’s annual exports to Indo-Pacific countries and over one third of all global shipping transiting the South China Sea, safe navigation is of critical importance for our trade-dependent country.

Ongoing confrontations around the Second Thomas Shoal reinforce the fragility of an unstable equilibrium that could easily degenerate into a full-blown crisis if miscalculations are made and calls for de-escalation are ignored.

UNCLOS, the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, provides the legal basis for managing overlapping sovereignty claims. We are concerned, therefore, by this further example of the rule of law, and maritime security, being recklessly challenged.

Just as these challenges facing the Indo-Pacific region and indeed the world have become more complex, so too are those issues facing the Pacific and its peoples, many of them exacerbated by global trends, and some of which they are ill equipped to respond to.

Across the 165 million square kilometres of the vast Blue Continent, we face greater strategic competition and challenges than at any time in living memory. Our region is not benign, far from it. Relentless pressure is being exerted across the Pacific as beachheads are sought, influence peddled, and interference campaigns waged.

Furthermore, economic recovery post-Covid is slow, worsened by persisting inflation, supply chain constraints, and growing debt burdens. Increased geostrategic competition risks distracting from key Pacific priorities, notably in those areas of continuing social and economic development needs, particularly in health, education and employment.

Then there are the significant infrastructure challenges across the region, concerns about rising transnational crime, and the serious, and in some cases existential, threat posed by climate-induced sea level changes, their resource effects and responding to climate-related disasters.

In our region we are also witnessing a crisis of democratic legitimacy unfolding in New Caledonia. New Caledonia is New Zealand’s nearest neighbour, so we feel its troubles keenly. More to be said on that shortly, suffice to say that while disruption ripples across the Pacific, in every one of these challenges there also lies opportunities for like-minded countries to promote and defend their values.

Our foreign policy reset is a response to what New Zealand sees as three big shifts underpinning the multi-faceted and complex challenges facing the international order:

• From rules to power, a shift towards a multipolar world that is characterized by more contested rules and where relative power between states assumes a greater role in shaping international affairs.
• From economics to security, a shift in which economic relationships are reassessed in light of increased military competition in a more securitized and less stable world.
• And from efficiency to resilience, where we see a shift in the drivers of economic behaviour, and where building greater resilience and addressing pressing social and sustainability issues become more prominent.

Under New Zealand’s still-new government, we have responded to these shifts by resetting our foreign policy in six important ways.

First, we are significantly increasing our focus and resources applied to South East and North Asia, including our good friends Japan.

Second, we are renewing engagement with traditional like-minded partnerships, again including Japan.

Third, we are sustaining a deeper focus on the Pacific by reinvigorating the 2018 Pacific Reset by working with Pacific leaders and the Pacific Islands Forum to bolster development and security collaboration across the Pacific and in responding to regional crises.

Fourth, we are targeting our multilateral engagement to global or transboundary issues.

Fifth, we are supporting new groupings that advance and defend our interests and capabilities. The IP4, where we work closely with Japan, and NATO, is an example of this new support.

And sixth, we are promoting our goal of seriously shifting the dial on growing New Zealand’s export value over the next decade.

We also knew we needed to give more energy, more urgency, and sharper focus to three inter-connected lines of diplomatic effort: investing in our relationships, growing our prosperity, and strengthening our security.

That is what the New Zealand Government’s senior leadership has been doing these past eight months, reinvigorating our foreign policy engagement with the urgency that our challenging times demand.

Take our deeper focus on Pacific engagement and reinvigorating the 2018 Pacific Reset. This has involved reinvigorating back to basics, old school diplomacy. Upon taking office, we set ourselves the ambition of visiting all other seventeen Pacific Island Forum members during our government’s first year in office.

Since visiting Suva late last year, we are on track to do precisely that. These travel plans reflect our belief that the Pacific Island region is richly diverse and that every country, no matter its size or location, is a treasured member of the Pacific family.

Five principles that underpinned our 2018 Reset drive these engagements. They are:

• Demonstrating our understanding of the Pacific, by listening to Pacific concerns and drawing upon our accumulated knowledge of the region.
• Exhibiting friendship, including honesty, empathy, trust and respect through frequent political engagement, treating all as equals, and having frank and open conversations with our Pacific counterparts.
• Seeking solutions of mutual benefit when developing domestic and foreign policy with impacts on the Pacific.
• Achieving our collective ambitions with Pacific partners and external actors on a shared understanding of what we are trying to achieve together.
• And seeking sustainable success by focusing on the region’s long-term goals, to play our part in promoting greater autonomy and resilience among our Pacific friends through their social and economic achievements.

Importantly, we also realise that we can do much more together with, and in, the Pacific. By working collaboratively, we can achieve more than any single country can hope to on its own.

More effective collaboration among like-minded countries boosts the opportunities to scale up our Pacific ambitions, allowing us to contemplate projects that individually we could not deliver.

Like-minded countries with interests in the Pacific must improve their coordination and raise their ambition for what can be achieved collaboratively. That is the key to enduring and successful change. The stakes are too high and challenges too urgent for us to be duplicating each other’s efforts or competing against each other for projects.

We need to talk more and raise our collective ambition. Aligning and working with partners in service of Pacific priorities is critical, which fuels New Zealand’s desire to increase our cooperation with Japan across a range of trade, defence, security, and political areas in the Pacific, as well as in the Indo-Pacific, and globally.

We want to collaborate with partners like Japan in the service of Pacific priorities and towards a peaceful, stable, prosperous, and resilient region. The Pacific is our home, we have deep people-to-people and cultural links, and it is where our interests are most at stake and where we have the greatest influence. New Zealand serves as a bridge to partners wanting to understand the Pacific and provide assistance to our region.

Pacific countries and territories, and the blue continent surrounding them, hold immense human and natural resource, the well-being of which is critical to the world’s overall resilience and prosperity.

Hence our prioritisation of senior level political visits to the Pacific this year, including, where we can, taking parliamentary colleagues from across the spectrum of New Zealand’s political parties to reinforce that our friendship is bipartisan in nature and that our Pacific focus is enduring.

Pacific regionalism sits at the core of our Pacific approach. Here we acknowledge the critical role played by the Pacific Islands Forum, to bolster regional development and security and to use our collective voice to hold bigger countries to account.

As a Pacific country and as a founding Pacific Islands Forum member, we are committed to advancing the Pacific’s priorities, as set out by Pacific Leaders in their 2050 strategy. New Zealand hosted the inaugural Forum meeting in 1971 in Wellington, and for over half a century we have placed the Pacific at the heart of our diplomacy. We will continue to seek to address the region’s challenges, in close alignment with Pacific Leaders’ priorities.

Already, 60 percent of New Zealand’s $1 billion annual International Development Cooperation fund is allocated to the Pacific Islands region, to improve its sustainable development and reduce poverty. This includes at least half of our climate financing funding through 2025.

The Pacific voice is important and talanoa – the Pacific way of coming together for talks and discussion – must be regular and meaningful. We welcome Japan’s approach to its Pacific engagement and its willingness to give space to these Pacific meetings and sharing of experiences, as evidenced this week by Japan’s successful hosting of PALM.

The ongoing focus of our international development cooperation to the Pacific will continue to accentuate the importance of mature and respectful discussions on sensitive issues, and our intention to step up our defence, security, and trade engagement with the region.

Nonetheless, the other needs of the region are significant – infrastructure deficits, concerning GDP forecasts, still limited access to power and internet services, along with health and education services.

But New Zealand cannot meet these needs alone. We will increasingly look to cooperate with our traditional partners and other close partners that share our values and interests.

We see Japan as a key partner in the Pacific because we have a close bilateral relationship, based on a strategic cooperative partnership, and shared values. We share similar assessments of the challenges facing the world, and in the Pacific, and know we need to effectively work together to address them.

Japan too has a deep and genuine interest in the Pacific. It has for over half a century contributed extensively to the development objectives of the region. Japan is the region’s fourth largest bilateral donor, with a particularly strong assistance presence in Fiji, Palau, PNG, the Solomon Islands and Tonga.

Japan has secured an excellent reputation for delivering quality infrastructure and technical assistance, respectful diplomacy, and being a generous donor to the many multilateral banks and organisations supporting the region.

Japan also engages constructively with the Pacific Islands Forum, as a dialogue partner. PALM is the absolute gold standard for external countries’ engagement with the Pacific through existing regional architecture, aligned to the priorities set by Pacific leaders, and in a consultative and respectful way, even when the issues are challenging, such as Fukushima.

We look to deepen our cooperation with Japan to advance Pacific priorities, to strengthen existing regional architecture, to protect the international rules-based order, and to ensure the prosperity of future Pacific generations.

In terms of existing New Zealand-Japan Pacific engagement, we already have in place necessary architecture, including the Pacific Declaration and Statement of Intent on Pacific Defence Cooperation.

And we have successfully cooperated on a range of development projects, humanitarian responses, and defence deployments.

For example, our Joint Declaration on Pacific Cooperation has seen us work collaboratively on the construction of the Betio Hospital in Kiribati, which aligns with the people-centred development area of the 2050 strategy.

This joint project advances positive health outcomes for Kiribati’s people, offsets costs to New Zealand, strengthens bilateral relations with Kiribati and Japan, and demonstrates well our shared commitment to the Pacific.

Another important joint project we’ve worked together on is the Pacific Climate Change Centre, which opened in Apia in late 2019. We visited the Centre earlier this year, were impressed by it, and we were happy to back Japan’s construction of the Centre through human resource and capacity development support. Another recent example of our collaborative work with Japan is the Pacific Connect Cable, which enhances internet connectivity in Tuvalu.

Development assistance is only one dimension of humanitarian assistance in the Pacific. The growing presence of Japan in disaster response and relief and in humanitarian preparedness is also greatly appreciated. Most recently, Japan provided immediate humanitarian supplies and support to PNG after its devastating May mudslide. Following the volcanic eruption and landslide in Tonga in 2022, Japan provided significant assistance, including air and maritime assets.

We are also working more closely on regional security issues. The New Zealand-Japan Statement of Intent on Defence Cooperation in the Pacific, signed by respective Defence Ministers in June 2023, focuses on cooperation areas such as maritime security, Women, Peace and Security initiatives, humanitarian and disaster relief, and capacity building activities relating to climate change.

New Zealand and Japanese defence forces continue to work together on UN sanctions monitoring on the Korean Peninsula. Exercise Tropic Twilight, a regular training exercise focused on Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief resilience with Pacific partners, included Japan for the first time in July 2024.

Japan has also been active through its Official Security Assistance programme, which provides grants to Pacific militaries in the Indo-Pacific to further international military cooperation, including naval support in Fiji.

Furthermore, Japan is an observer at the South Pacific Defence Ministers’ Meeting, and has been invited to attend this year’s event, hosted by New Zealand in Auckland in October. Japan also hosted the second Japan Pacific Islands Defence Dialogue in Tokyo in March, attracting 22 countries including those Pacific nations with military forces.

So, Japan is an active and valued partner in the Pacific. But we want and need to do more together to meet the region’s need. Throughout, we will be looking for ambitious cooperation opportunities, in infrastructure, Maritime Domain Awareness, mitigation and adaptation to the effects of climate change, and projects that help Pacific economic resilience.

We have raised many of these opportunities with counterparts during our visit here in Japan and we will continue to do so. In times like these we need friends like Japan. And it is in all our interests to ensure the Pacific’s priorities are advanced. We look forward to increasing cooperation and coordination with Japan to achieve this outcome.

During the past week while here in Tokyo one important regional issue raised has been the unrest in New Caledonia. We have been listening very carefully to the concerns expressed by our Forum partners and from representatives of the French Government and of the Government of New Caledonia.

New Caledonia has been, since 2016, a full member of the Pacific Islands Forum. Accordingly, it is only right that all Forum members pay close attention to what is happening there and offer whatever assistance we can to help find a positive pathway forward. This is in keeping with how the Forum has responded, over the past half century, whenever one of our members has faced a significant crisis.

The crisis in New Caledonia challenges us to step up as a region to offer our support for a peaceful, mutually agreeable, and enduring solution between both pro-and-anti-independence forces in New Caledonia. A solution that is consistent with the United Nations Committee of Decolonisation Report in 1986 and lives up to the promise of the Agreements reached between the parties in 1988.

Those Agreements from the 1980s saw France and New Caledonia recognise the urgent need to help establish civil peace so as to create the conditions in which people could freely choose their own political and institutional future.

The Nouméa Accord, signed in May 1998, set forth a twenty-year pathway to achieve precisely that. The preamble to that Agreement gave justice to all, by recognising colonisation as well as the contribution of the different communities that call New Caledonia home.

Two independence referendums were successfully held, in 2018 and 2020, with voters rejecting independence by narrow margins on both occasions, with 57 percent voting ‘No’ in 2018, while 53 percent voted ‘No’ in 2020. Importantly, these two referenda attracted high voter turnouts: 81 percent in 2018 and 86 percent in 2020.

However, the third referendum, held in December 2021, saw voter turnout collapse. There was a serious Covid outbreak in September 2021, and indeed the vast majority of the around 300 COVID fatalities in New Caledonia occurred in the few months prior to when the third referendum was due to be held.

Pro-independence Kanak leaders asked for the third referendum to be delayed, so that they would have an opportunity to mourn their dead, according to their customs. The third referendum was not delayed, so pro-independence forces boycotted it.

As a result, almost 97 percent of voters to cast a ballot in the third referendum voted ‘No’ to independence. Delegitimizing the result, in the eyes of pro-independence forces and some neutral observers at least, was the low turnout of only 44 percent.

Technically the third referendum followed the Nouméa Accord pathway, in letter if not spirit. But, to any outsider, the obvious democratic injury of a vastly reduced, and therefore different, sample of voters engaging in the third referendum raises questions about its legitimacy.

Compounding the sense of democratic injury for pro-independence forces was the decision by the French Government to progress legislation in Paris to broaden New Caledonia’s voter eligibility. This would see the electoral roll, frozen under the Nouméa Accord, open to people who have lived in New Caledonia for at least 10 years since 1998, adding an estimated 25,000 eligible voters.

Those two decisions were among the reasons, alongside growing inequalities and lack of prospects for the indigenous Kanak population, especially their youth, that led to the precarious situation that exploded into unrest in May.

With that said, voting is at the core of one’s civil and political rights. So, for those who have lived in New Caledonia for over a decade, putting down roots and contributing to its social and economic life, it is understandable such people likewise feel a democratic injury from their ongoing disenfranchisement.

The situation has reached an impasse, and one not easily navigated given the violence that broke out, and democratic injuries that have reopened old wounds, and created new ones. So today we ask, as the old book says, “Can two walk together, except when they be agreed?”

We think not, so in New Caledonia, we hope to see more diplomacy, more engagement, more compromise.

We raise this crisis here because the situation in New Caledonia is a test of the effectiveness of our regional architecture in dealing with a crisis response. It also creates an opportunity for the Pacific Islands Forum to serve as a constructive force, helping to bring the parties together for an essential democratic dialogue about the path forward.

In this role, the Pacific Islands Forum needs to find an appropriate mechanism and the best person or people to help facilitate dialogue, engagement or mediation as a path forward between the different actors in New Caledonia.

That work has begun in Tokyo, and New Zealand supports the Forum’s efforts. It is critical that pathways to understanding are kept open and that all sides approach their dialogue with open, not closed minds.

Based on our conversations in Tokyo this week, we are confident that the different actors in Nouméa and Paris will see any offer of dialogue, engagement or mediation as an opportunity to access the deep wisdom and experience that exists in the Pacific Islands region.

We think there exists good faith and flexibility on all sides of this issue. We welcome recent discussions between President Macron and Prime Minister Luxon on New Caledonia, on the role that the Forum might play, because we want the region to do all that it can to help move the situation forward in a positive direction. New Zealand also welcomed the opportunity recently to hold discussions with President Mapou of New Caledonia, which enabled us to better understand how he views the situation and what role the Forum might play.

Pacific Islands Forum countries by virtue of our locations and histories understand the large indigenous minority population’s desire for self-determination. We also respect and appreciate France’s role in the region and understand France’s desire to walk together with New Caledonians towards a prosperous and secure future.

We stand ready to assist the Forum and respective parties in whatever way we can, to serve as a bridge, because another lesson drawn from our first eight months in office is that small states matter. Forum countries may be small in size but collectively they represent our vast Pacific voice.

Our voice in relation to the situation in New Caledonia urges the parties to act in good faith, be open to resolving the democratic injuries felt on both sides and let us help you forge a new and enduring social contract.

In conclusion, global and regional security has never been more important. It is the rock upon which economic prosperity depends. Since coming into government we have been asking hard questions of ourselves. Are we doing our share? What can we do better?

In troubled times first principle questions matter because contributing to global and regional security is not a luxury, it’s a necessity given the number and severity of challenges faced across the Indo-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.

New Zealand’s foreign policy reset is our local response to challenges both near and far.

You will see New Zealand over the course of this government step up its diplomatic engagement, grow its development assistance, seek more collaboration opportunities with partners, and establish a credible path for our defence contributions to regional and international security. That is our statement of intent and how we wish to be judged.

This week in Tokyo has felt like visiting friends. We enjoy our government-to-government, people-to-people, and rugby player-to-rugby player relations.

Japan’s engagement in the Pacific is warmly welcomed and greatly appreciated. It is known for its respectful diplomacy and commitment to quality in delivering development assistance projects. New Zealand looks forward to continuing our collaborative work together.

To return to where we began, in troubling times friends are important. The future is not fixed, so our foreign policy reset, in the Pacific as elsewhere, has us wanting to do more with those who share our values, and who think those values are worth defending, so that all are free to forge their own futures, in their own way.

Thank you.

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