N.Z. and Australia, ‘one strategic entity’

Press, 12 May 1984, Page 13

N.Z. and Australia, ‘one strategic entity’

From

Stuart McMillan,

in Canberra

The question of how far New Zealand and Australia wanted to go to combine their defence planning was raised by Mr D.B.G. McLean, the New Zealand Secretary of Defence, in a paper given to a conference at the Australian National University.

Mr McLean said that the two countries constituted a single strategic Entity. They had overlapping interests in the South Pacific, each was dependent for its own prosperity and development on the maintenance of stability in the Pacific basin, including the lines of communications, each had to avoid being cut off by adverse developments in South-East Asia, and each was aware of the importance of a constructive approach to Antarctica. Mr McLean considered that future governments in New Zealand and Australia, regardless of their political colour, were unlikely to diverge in their approach to such issues. He argued that within the South Pacific effective surveillance and monitoring was essential so that all the Pacific countries would know what was going on. “It is our first defence policy objective,” Mr McLean said. “To be able to achieve the necessary patrolling by air and sea to this end. A basis for fuller co-operation with Australia in this field could be worked out.”

Mr McLean said that the statement that the two countries constituted a single strategic entity was daunting. “From Perth to Gisborne, on the East Cape of New Zealand, is a huge area, approximately 4500 miles wide and 2500 miles deep ... it is, to say the least a challenge to contemplate in defence terms that we spread across an area about the same size as the United States or the People’s Republic of China. Yet we constitute together approximately 18.6 million people — about as many in North

Korea and half as many in South Korea.” The 85,000 people in the Armed Forces of New Zealand and Australia could be compared with the 102,950 in the Netherlands but the Dutch population, which was 4.5 million less than the combined populations of New Zealand and Australia, had territory one-eighth the size of New Zealand, he said. “Simply in a common perception of strategic space there is more than enough to urge New Zealand and Australia towards some common action in the strategic fields,” Mr McLean said. He said that the question now was “whether we wish to go further — for example in a joint approach to force development and even to command. Then we shall surely have gone beyond the Anzac connection to the Anzac partnership.” The conference Mr McLean was addressing is called “the Anzac connection” and has been organised by the strategic and defence studies centre at the Australian National University