Kerre Woodham: It's crunch time for our defence force

As Chinese naval ships are firing live rounds in Pacific waters, sending far reaching ripples of consternation around the Asia Pacific region, Defence Minister Judith Collins hinted that defence would see a significant boost in spending come the next budget, which is a matter of months away.

This was the Defence Minister on with Mike Hosking this morning:  

It is simply not credible for us to expect defence to keep on going after they've had, you know, essentially 35 years of every government hoping that everything's just going to be fine, and they wouldn't need to do anything. It is an enormous task to rebuild, and our people are doing it.

Is it billions over many, many, many years? In other words, it's not the here and now. Or is it billions right here right now, and we’ve got to do something fairly big.

It's a sustained effort is what I can tell you, and it is a lot of money. It’s a heap of money. But we also know that the world is changing, and we also need to be able to look at that again and say do we need to do more again? So, it's actually about how we do these things and being very aware that without national security, there is no economic security, there is nothing else.

She's right. Without national security, there is no economic security. So an investment in our defense forces is long overdue.

It will certainly help Judith Collins case having the Chinese ships floating around our waters. The firing of live rounds has been the catalyst for much diplomatic toing and froing and canvassing of experts.

But everybody is very, very cautious, very precise in their language, no inflammatory statements. China's actions are believed to have complied with international law. The Australian Defence Force has advised there was no imminent threat to its assets or those of New Zealand’s. Analysts believe that this was an attempt by Beijing to project power and to send a message to Canberra about China's capability.

Australian PM Albanese on Saturday defended China's right to carry out the exercise as it had not breached international law. He said, they could have given more notice. Yes, they could have given commercial flights had to be diverted, but as Albanese and then Judith Collins said this morning, their respective countries have a presence from time to time in the South China Sea and the activity took place outside of the exclusive economic zone, notification did occur.

Soit's all very ‘let's all be nice and let's all be calm about this’,let's not be silly.

Australia has coordinated its response with New Zealand, but they haven't spoken with the US since the incident. Chinese naval ships in our waters. It is clearly sending a message. More likely to Australia than to us. But I would argue the French did far, far worse.SoI think probably the temperate approach is right.

I’mglad people aren't getting exercised at this point about the Chinese presence. But it will help Judith Collins case to restore our beleaguered Defence Force. It'stimely, too, that Australia's announced it's going to be spending a record $55.7 billion on defence, which equates to about 2.02% of gross domestic product. The most we've spent in 12 years is 1.45% of GDP. It's tough. I mean, everybody is screaming for more money and defense, like health, like education is a bottomless pit into which you could pour money, and you would still need more.

And Judith Collins is right that everything you buy in defense is expensive, including the personnel. You know the wages are expensive, everything you put on them, that you put in their hands, that you station is expensive.

Where do we start though? There is just so much to do when it comes to defense. Every time we talk about this, I get emails or texts from people who are living on bases, who say there is just no way any of these houses could pass a healthy homes test, that they've been allowed to run down to the point that they're unhealthy and unsafe for the people within them. People are leaving, there's no opportunity for promotion. Everything is so run down, it feels like they're not valued, they're not given an opportunity to show what they can do, and that's in every arm of the forces.

The equipment is not just old, it's unsafe. But there's only so much we can do. The Greens would probably argue we shouldn't do anything. We should be spending any defence money on candles and combined choral choirs singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’. But in these uncertaintimes, II would argue we have to do our bit, we have to value our defence force and not allow it to be devalued, as has been the case with successive governments over the years.

While there is no imminent threat, it's easy to postpone it and you can understand why governments would. You've got health, you've got education wanting more and more. And while there is no imminent threat to New Zealand's national security you can argue we don't need to worry about spending money.

But I think it's crunch time. We either don't have a defence force, and I say we either commit and build up our defence forces again to do our bit to help with global security or we abandoned it altogether.

We can't go on in this kind of semi/demi world that the defense force is living in. They haven't got enough to do their job properly, they're not valued. Either value them and commit or put the money into the choirs and the candles and be done with it.

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