Chris Trotter visits Fortress Aotearoa and the $20b military spend up
Comrade Trotter did me the privilege of visiting my Fortress Aotearoa blog last week and righteously questioned why I, a dyed in the wool pacifist, wanted to expand the Military budget.
My argument is that the radical shift to climate crisis adaptation demands a significant step change…
To survive climate change we must embark upon Fortress Aotearoa…
- Move away from intensive farming and look to become domestically self sustainable in terms of food.
- Immediately ban all water exports
- 5 year Parliamentary term.
- Upper and Lower House (Upper House 50-50 split between Māori & Pakeha that can hold up legislation if unhappy about Treaty issues)
- Massive investment into R&D from Government with the understanding research is to benefit NZ first before sold offshore.
- Large scale increase in Navy, Army & Airforce.
- Mass limiting of tourism numbers with increased tourist taxes.
- Only citizens can vote.
- Sustainable immigration and an end to exploitative international student workers.
- Resettlement Programms for all pacific island neighbours.
- Increase refugee in take to 5000 per year
- Fully funded public services.
- Mass Green housing rebuild.
- 100% renewable energy for entire country.
- Massive tree planting across previous farming land.
- Wholesale re-write of state services act to end commercial values.
- Investment into basic pharmaceutical production.
- Financial transaction tax
- Wealth tax
- Multinational tax
- Inheritance tax
…the reason we are going to need to need an enormous increase in military spending is that the type of catastrophic storm damage we are expecting will require an enormous military capacity for disaster relief not just in NZ, but for the Pacific.
NZ has announced a $20 billion programme of capital investment out to 2030, and while the replacement of aircraft is welcomed, the total capacity of the armed forces is not being geared up nearly enough to meet the challenges of a dangerously warming planet.
An extra multi-role sealift vessel is fine, but we are gong to need far more of them as well as a large increase in patrol ships.
Why?
This.
With our enormous economic zone, it won’t be long before desperate nations are trawling our seas for demising fish stock. We need to be in a position to protect those fish stocks.
As for Comrade Trotter’s larger existential question behind expanding the military when a larger power could simply roll up and take what we have, apart from a vastly diminished ability to project power when the planet is burning, if we can not fight to retain what will be the last lifeboat on Earth, we don’t deserve to be in the lifeboat.
For too long we have allowed corporate interests and political spinelessness to squander time that could have been spent finding solutions. The time is over. We only have decades now.
The fear and anger that will erupt once the acceleration of crisis begin will empower Fortress Aotearoa values whether we want them or not.
This I would never support: “Investment into basic pharmaceutical production.”
As a NZRN, I “dished out” pharma drugs to too many unwell NZers. These are ALL TOXIC POISONOUS CHEMICALS. They heal/cure NOTHING. They only SUPPRESS SYMPTOMS. People think they are getting better, but in truth, their health is worsening. What the unwell body needs are NUTRIENTS – vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fatty acids & etc.. But the allopathic medical profession is taught only about pharma drugs – not about how to better sustain health & wellness. Nurses also are not taught about health & wellness. I find every opportunity to advise people to learn about the drugs they are prescribed at “drugs.com”. Perhaps the website would be better named “drugs.con? Farmers’ animals get better nutrition because farmers put minerals on their paddocks.
I learned independently about health & wellness because that was my greater interest. Thank goodness for the “old” Goodey’s Bookshop in Auckland.
I see national are jealous cause they didn’t get to do the much needed long awaited military upgrade. We are not war mongers like national but we need to have decent military capabilities and capacity and we need to stop bludging of our allies. Our soldiers need to be safe and so do we if this requires us to upgrade our outdated equipment then so be it. China is building a port in Samoa and we should be worried.
Climate Change is a secondary or even a tertiary role for the New Zealand Defence Force. Digging ditches and erecting medical tents is something they do casually while they’re being payed to run laps all day.
NZDF’s primary role is to defend against pirates, criminality, poachers, maintain Antartica’s demilitarised status and perform peace keeping operations in all threat environments from non-violent civil evacuations to violent civil evacuations and peace reconstruction missions.
The focus I think should be focused on is the ideology of Fortress Aotearoa. It isn’t IMO the violence or the violent reactions that should be focused on, it should be on the texture of kiwi values that sit a top of geopolitical shenanigans between greater more wonderful powers.
Our first reactions should be aren’t we beyond this ideological bullshit yet? Not the ideology of big ideas but are we not sick of the ideology of small differences between the way things function and how it may or may not make people feel at a particular time of day and other deep identification essays.
Most would remember the ideology of the Defence Force because it was endlessly reproduced when John Keys famous “get some guts” line was rolled out basically he was claiming superior knowledge and other known known things, and things that we claim that we know and then a few years latter opps a Kiwi nurse has been held hostage by ISIS all that time and all of a sudden we are impotent again. Now we understand that ISIS is the boss of Syria.
Then there are the known unknowns and other things that we know that we don’t know. So now I know that there are white supremacists in New Zealand but I know that I don’t know how many will commit an act of terrorism. Then there are the unknown unknowns and other things that we don’t know. That is how the 6th or 7th dimensions of warfare will effect New Zealand’s national security posture in outer space. Gets a little tricky when an alien envision ruins all our well laid out plans.
But then this is where the paranoia is laid out bare. Hope becomes hopium when justice has not been dished out properly and then hope becomes perpetual. So if you’ve got a little bit of a sense for structural analysis you’ll see that something is missing from this. We’ve got all of the known so on and so forth but we also have one other thing that is missing which is the things that we know but that we don’t know that we know. All of the silent prejudices that determines how we act and react to things like climate change or an alien invasion. As if to say what! An alien invasion, impossible. In this way there is so much texture to kiwi values that we literally don’t even know that we know them.
I think this is why NZDF is in such a poor state. All the unconscious military and police bias as it were determined there activity which is mocked endlessly on left wing blogs and I hope that gives military decision makers some pain but I still think these unknown knowns works perfectly. And this structure of woman in the military is ideology and I think it works perfectly in that NZDF is mocked endlessly while at the same time working to improve the lot of woman in the military and improve the general capability sets of defence as a way of making the pain go away.
I hope I didn’t simplify these concepts to much but what we should get is 3 military services that are fully integrated into the New Zealand economy from manufacturing to assembly and training and recruiting that everyone can be proud of.