AGENDA
Presented by RAWDON CHRISTIE
RAWDON Twenty million dollars to fix the Canterbury, new helicopters now 200 million over budget and nearly four years behind schedule, and Orion upgrade 90 million dollars over its original budget, Army missiles that still don’t work ten years after they were bought. At first glance our Defence Forces look like Dad's Army. As if that wasn’t enough even our nuclear free status is under siege with one phone call from George Bush to Helen Clark apparently enough for New Zealand to abandon its opposition to New Zealand's nuclear bomb. Defence Minister Phil Goff is with Guyon Espiner.
GUYON ESPINER
Well Phil Goff it's a long list of deficiencies there and when you look at the annual report that was released on the Defence Force, there's talk of severe staff shortages, of lack of equipment, are you satisfied with the state of our Defence Forces?
PHIL GOFF – Minister of Defence
Well I'm going to continue a tradition and say I disagree with just about everything that Rawdon put in that list. Missiles that don’t fire – you ran on Television One the other night the maverick missile hitting a target at long distance a small sea container. You ran a story …
GUYON Let me ask you this question which is the question I asked you first, it's your report, it's your department, your annual report says that there are severe staff shortages and a lack of equipment, I'm asking you are you satisfied with the state of the Defence Force?
PHIL Okay, first of all most of what Rawdon was saying was wrong and can be proved to be wrong factually including the Nuclear Suppliers Group but we'll come back to that. Secondly the Defence Report. The Defence Report is a progress report from 1999 on the rebuilding and the modernisation of the New Zealand Defence Force. At that time you'll remember the Select Committee Report in parliament that said most of our equipment was obsolete, there'd been cuts in the Defence Force and staff by 24% and spending by nearly a third. We've since that time put nearly eight billion dollars into Defence but it's a ten year plan, we're not through that ten year plan, we have put a thousand more people in the Defence Force than existed there just four years ago…
GUYON Let me pick you up on …
PHIL … and we have – let me just finish on this point – the helicopters that Rawdon was talking about, how could they be four years late when the NH90s have only just come off the production line a year and a half ago, those however are 21st century capacity for the Royal New Zealand Air Force replacing Korean War era Sioux helicopters and Vietnam War era Iroquois helicopters. That is a massive change in what the New Zealand Defence Force now has to operate with.
GUYON Let me quote from your own report. It talks about deficiencies which would quote "impair effectiveness in conventional military operations and even the more challenging peace support operations," I mean they're basically saying that we're not actually fit for combat.
PHIL But you know that’s not true. We've got a company – you can't ask me a question Guyon and then not let me answer, so let me answer first. You know that that’s not true that they're not fit for combat, you know that we have a company operating right now in Bamian, a company strength regarded as the best PRT in Afghanistan, you know that we have a company strength group operating in Timor Leste, praised by the Prime Minister of Timor Leste when he was here two weeks ago, you know that there is a company now training in Germany 174 strong people, you know that the SAS got the presidential citation for their gallantry and for their combat skills in Afghanistan and that Willie Apiata got a VC, so how can you possible claim that our New Zealand Defence Force is not fit for combat and not fit for carrying out peace keeping duties when we get praised by all of our friends and allies at the United Nations for what they're doing.
GUYON Well why did they write that then?
PHIL You saw also what the Chief of Defence Force said, he said the media had not got this in context, he said that there was a long term plan for the rebuilding of the Defence Force, yes there are things that still need to be done, yes we have shortages in tradesmen, what New Zealand company doesn’t when we've got the lowest unemployment in 20 years, but we have made massive progress in rebuilding and modernising, that is a fact, that simply is not a debatable point, it's proven.
GUYON Let's look at another report that came out just days ago on the Canterbury. Now you spent 177 million dollars on this multi role vessel, now an independent report comes out and says it'll cost 20 million to fix design faults, I mean isn't this another botched acquisition by your department?
PHIL No this is another case of you not telling the full story. Yes, there will be 20 million dollars ceiling of work that needs to be done, most of that will be covered by warranty claims because the contractor has to produce the ship that we ordered. But let's look at what else they said about this ship, they said it was intrinsically safe…
GUYON No no, the ship is safe? Is that as good as…
PHIL No because the media and the opposition have said it's not safe, this report…
GUYON But it said it couldn’t operate in heavy seas as well.
PHIL No, let's see what it says, it says that it will be able to discharge all of its operational roles as required, that’s not what the media printed, that’s what the report says. It says that it's intrinsically safe, it says that it's cost effective, versatile, and a valuable military capability, what is it about those words Guyon that you don’t understand?
GUYON What I don’t understand is why the Navy has ended up with a ship which is extremely limited to operate in heavy seas?
PHIL Look, it has three roles, first of all it's sea lift, we haven’t had sea lift before except the ill fated Charles Upham episode, it does that perfectly well. It has a training function, it does that perfectly well. It has a third function to back up the other six patrol vessels and project protector and the two frigates for patrolling. What this report says that if it's in high seas in the Southern Ocean it will be a safe ship but it won't be a comfortable ship, that’s what John Coles reported on that, he said yes there's some work that needs to be done, we know about the rib alcoves as design flaw that the contractor should not have made, that is being remedied. Every problem that we have with that ship is capable of, has been or is being remedied and then at the end of it the Coles Report said it is versatile, valuable and militarily capable.
GUYON Okay let's move this away from equipment and those issues to the nuclear issue with India and the United States. Now the Nuclear Suppliers Group has been debating this for some time, basically for 30 years the world has been banned from selling nuclear fuel and technology to India because it refuses to sign up to the major international treaties which are aimed to limit the development of nuclear weapons.
PHIL So have many of the countries within the Non Proliferation Treaty. The United States for example has not ratified the comprehensive test ban treaty, nor have some of the other countries.
GUYON Well according to the New York Times George Bush has quotes "bullied his way to international approval to get this deal with India," was New Zealand bullied into this?
PHIL No I think the Americans understand from long history that as Mike Moore once said New Zealand will do anything you ask and nothing that you tell it. We have a strong politician which is designed to oppose nuclear armaments and designed to oppose proliferation. There are 45 countries in the Nuclear Suppliers Group, New Zealand together with Ireland and Austria were the three countries that were staunch all of the way through that negotiation that there had to be conditionality applied on giving India access to nuclear materials for a civil nuclear programme. We got that conditionality to the greatest extent.
GUYON What did that achieve?
PHIL Well what we've achieved is an assertion by India that it will maintain its unilateral moratorium on testing.
GUYON But it's not forced to is it, it's not forced to?
PHIL No, but we have also, if I can finish the sentence, have an understanding that if nuclear testing resumes the exemption for India for the supply of civil nuclear material and technology will come to an end. We have the review clause that we sought, we have the commitment by India to sign the additional protocol of the International Atomic Energy Agency which increases the power of monitoring and inspection. All of those things are valuable Guyon and they would not have been got but for three small countries and other countries that stood up and said we will allow this agreement to be exempt but only on the basis that there is a conditionality there that this agreement will have a net benefit for non proliferation not a net disadvantage.
GUYON What worries some people looking at this though is how can New Zealand and the world continue to criticise Iran for having its nuclear ambitions yet we allow India to flout international treaties in this regard and still engage in nuclear commerce.
PHIL Well look ideally we would like India to sign up to the Non Proliferation Treaty and to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. We'd like the United States to sign up to the latter as well and we'd like all of the nuclear weapon states to not only – they’ve certainly stopped their testing with the exception of North Korea and that issue is being dealt with separately, but they still possess nuclear weapons, in fact they possess nuclear weapons that would blow the world up several times over. New Zealand will continue to be a strong campaigner not only for non proliferation but also for disarmament, but what we have acknowledged about this is that for the first time India's civil nuclear programme comes under the IAEA safeguards, that is a plus for non proliferation.
GUYON Okay, George Bush isn't gonna be around much longer, we've got the titanic battle between McCain and Obama. When journalists travelled to Washington in 2006, New Zealand journalists, we heard McCain talk very effusively about New Zealand, positive about free trade, thought the nuclear issue was dead, surely it will be in New Zealand's advantage to see McCain in the White House after the November election?
PHIL Well New Zealand doesn’t express an opinion on what the American people should or should not do. John McCain has certainly come out and said explicitly to me that he is in favour of a Free Trade Agreement between the United States and New Zealand, I'm working on that right now and I do not expect a Democratic administration should there be one to oppose New Zealand for a Free Trade Agreement, maybe through the P4 grouping with Chile and Singapore and Brunei, because the Democrat administration says that what they want in a Free Trade Agreement is proper provisions to ensure that there are trade and labour safeguards and trade and environment safeguards. New Zealand has never been a problem for any party in the United States on those fronts.
GUYON Trade and Defence your two portfolios are not usually big election issues in New Zealand, what role are you going to play in the campaign?
PHIL Well I've got a number of portfolios, I think Defence and foreign policy generally are important issues, and for the Labour Party I'll be fronting on those issues as the Prime Minister will be as well.
GUYON Foreign policy?
PHIL Well in terms of debates that are out there, our Acting Foreign Minister is the Prime Minister, she is not in a position to appear in all of those areas.
GUYON So you will?
PHIL Well there are things for example at Auckland University I've been invited to debate with other party candidates on that issue, but Corrections is also a key portfolio that I have, law and order will be an issue at this election. People who say that the government is soft on law and order ignores the fact that our prison population has actually increased by 71% in the last eight years.
GUYON Helen Clark says that this election is going to be about trust. Your government has trusted the job of Foreign Minister to Winston Peters who along with his party is now under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office, by the Police, by the Privileges Committee and the Electoral Commission, and you're going to the country on trust?
GUYON Well Winston Peters is Foreign Minister and I'm not criticising the job that Winston has done, I think that he has done a good job in foreign policy, but the foreign policy that he carries out is the foreign policy of the government, there has been no change in foreign policy because he acts as a Minister bound in that portfolio by the collective responsibility to carry out the foreign policy of this government which he felt he was more comfortable with for example in regards to non intervention in Iraq, non involvement in Iraq than he would have been with the National policy, which of course in the early days of John Key was to send troops to Iraq. Fortunately we had Helen Clark's judgement not John Key's judgement in that regard.
RAWDON Now it's the chance myself and the panel to have a few questions. First of all Virginia.
VIRGINIA LARSON – North and South
In light of the India exemption Minister are you concerned about the Cluster Munitions Treaty which I think is up for signing in December and obviously was in Wellington early in the year, and the US is now setting up some kind of an opposition, another process, where is that going is that going to be stymied by their actions at this stage?
PHIL No, I'm not concerned about the Cluster Munitions Agreement, I'm very proud of it, we dot 100 countries in Ireland in Dublin, in May to sign up to this which effectively bans the use of cluster munitions that have unacceptable effects on civilian casualties. What we had was what was called the Oslo Process that took over from the UN process that was going nowhere. The United States still wants to work through the UN process but my belief is that the Dublin Convention will have the same effect for cluster munitions as the Ottawa Convention had for land mines. Not everybody will sign up to it but it will create a stigma about the use of cluster munitions and we will find that countries are reluctant to use cluster munitions in the same way that they now do not use land mines because of that social stigma that was created.
VIRGINIA So you don’t think the US can unravel that treaty by setting up their own process?
PHIL No no, what they're actually saying is we want to keep within the UN process. The UN process and I'm usually in favour of UN processes but it acts by consensus. For ten years we went nowhere on cluster munitions in the UN process, so six small countries including New Zealand and Norway and Austria and some of the other countries that we've been with with the Nuclear Suppliers Group, went out together, created the momentum to get a ban on cluster munitions to countries that signed to this treaty have got more than a 100 countries including most of the NATO countries signed up to it, and now already have those countries destroying their stocks of cluster munitions. That was I think a huge step forward for all of us and I'm very proud of the role that New Zealand played in that.
SHAYNE CURRIE – Herald on Sunday
I'm interested in our own, or your own Defence policy, we've seen eight billion dollars I think put in since – in the last six or so years, how much more money is required because it is clear despite what you were saying before the ad break that there are still operational issues within the Defence Force. How much more money will the Labour Party put into it?
PHIL Well I guess Defence is a little bit like Health and Education, you can keep spending more and more money to try to get to an area of perfection. What we've said is that New Zealand is not a medium size or a large size military nation, we have a role to play it's a niche role, we play it very well, we do more than our size would probably justify in terms of peace keeping and security but there's gotta be a limit because in the end when you sit down in the budget process you say listen if I'm gonna put another billion into Defence that’s a billion that’s not available for other areas, and it might be Health or it might be Education. So what we've done is we've said we play a valuable role in the world, we have to make sure our people are equipped, and you'll probably recall the stories that I do in Bosnia when we had armoured vehicles that were meant to be acting as patrol vehicles for convoys and they couldn’t keep up with the convoys and they had to be towed back to the base when they broke down by the British. We couldn’t go through that sort of farce of having a Defence Force that wasn’t capable of doing what we were asking it to do, that’s why we've got new light armoured vehicles, that’s why we've spent money, you know some 1.6 billion across the Air Force, why we've done Project Protector, but it is a niche capacity and we're not gonna be competing with the big military nations in the world to have that expensive hitech capacity that we really can't afford.
SHAYNE But are we gonna see eight billion more dollars put in the next say six or seven years, what sort of money are we gonna need?
PHIL No, I'd like to see pretty much a steady state, that we've got the eight billion dollars set out over a ten year plan for both capital expenditure and operational expenditure. I want to build on that, I want to see the New Zealand Defence Force increase in its personnel size, we've increased it by a thousand, I'd like to see maybe a further 10% increase in Defence Force numbers and I want to see these projects rolling through, and we're doing them all the time, the frigates for example are coming up to a midlife refurbishment. Because vessels are built ten years after they're designed the technology on the frigates is already 20 years old so for self defence purposes we'll have to spend money there, we'll have to replace the Army truck fleet. There are things like that that will be done. But will we go back to an air combat force? Well no, not even the National Party thinks that that is sensible today.
RAWDON Can I ask you about the recruitment size, you said that recruitment's going in the right direction, last time you were on this programme you were talking about 10 to 12% increase in salaries, has that happened?
PHIL Yes, yes, 1st of July this year the New Zealand Defence Force on average the personnel received an increase that will be 10 to 12% on average across the board.
RAWDON And has that made the difference, how is the recruitment process?
PHIL I can't tell you on the figures yet because we haven’t had the evaluation of what's happened with the recruitment and retention but anecdotally what the Chiefs of Services tell me is that that has given a big boost in the morale of the services and what we've done is we've targeted even bigger increases into those key areas such as marine technicians and some of the trades and technician skills that we're competing with against the private sector and overseas.
VIRGINIA Do you think Australia still sees us as a strategic liability?
PHIL No. No, I meet regularly with Angus Houston who is the Chief of Defence Force in Australia and before that Peter Cosgrove. I've gotta say they’ve been a delight to work with, they have been full of praise for what New Zealand has been able to do in terms of increasing the capacity of what the Australians can do on the ground in places like the Solomon Islands and Timor Leste. So you know the sort of criticisms that marked the 1990s you're not seeing today. We're not spending as much as the Australians, nor do we intend to spend as much as the Australians on a percentage of GDP, but we are committed to raising the capabilities and the capacity of the New Zealand Defence Force to work alongside our friends and our allies and Australia in that regard is our closest ally.
RAWDON In the intro before Guyon interviewed you I talked about how one phone call had come from the President of the US to Helen Clark and that seemed to have been the turnaround, I mean that’s been quite widely reported this week in a couple of papers and yet nothing's been sort of said about it, it's sort of been allowed to stand. How did the process actually happen, you know we've gone from staunch anti nuclear stance to compromise.
PHIL Well politics is the art of compromise, you go for the best deal that you can get in the circumstances that will take your country and the world as far forward as you can get.
RAWDON Your country and the world, so what do we get out of it, what does our country get out of it?
PHIL What New Zealand gets out of it is what I said right at the beginning of the process. There were things that were desirable about the Indian/US Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, it mean that India was going to bring its civil nuclear facilities into this under the safeguards of the IAEA.
RAWDON Has it damaged our brand though?
PHIL No it's strengthened our brand. New Zealand, Ireland and Austria were the three countries, none of us more than seven million I think Austria's probably within that category, all small countries that stood firm on the need for conditionality. All of us said we are not trying to be obstructionist, we understand that India has limited options for the production of energy, that they want to use nuclear energy, we personally don’t agree with nuclear energy but we don’t make the decision for India, we would rather have those facilities safeguarded than not safeguarded but there was a downside and we wanted to counteract that downside by putting in place conditionalities. We didn’t get everything we wanted but we got a long way down the track towards it.
RAWDON Okay thanks very much Phil Goff, I do appreciate you coming in.
