The navy ship Te Kaha left Auckland on 12 February, to join a task force alongside military partners, in the Middle East. Photo: Royal New Zealand Navy
From peacekeeping on the Russia-Ukraine border to defending our own waters, experts say it can't come soon enough.
Two defence experts are warning that New Zealand's ageing navy is woefully inadequate and underfunded when it comes to protecting our waters.
Warnings like this have been shrugged off before because we are too far away to worry, but yesterday came news that three Chinese navy ships were sailing in international waters east of Sydney, and could be headed toward Pacific Islands countries, in a move that's been called 'unusual' and 'provocative'.
"We seem to think that if it all goes wrong we'll be safe down here," former Defence Minister and former NZ First MP Ron Mark tells The Detail.
"The world is a volatile space and it's been increasingly so and the one thing that you can absolutely bank on is that what you think today is going to be the situation tomorrow, will not be."
New Zealand's exclusive economic zone covers 4 million square kilometres of the earth's surface, and Mark says the country is not doing enough to look after it
"We think we can protect it by penny-pinching our way forward. The only people who pay are our military personnel," he says.
Victoria University's director of the Centre for Strategic Studies, David Capie, says the increasingly dangerous world means that New Zealand will "have to do a lot for ourselves and working with our ally Australia".
Meanwhile, China's naval ships were sailing 150 nautical miles off Sydney. Defence Minister Judith Collins said the Chinese naval task group was being monitored.
Professor Rory Medcalf of the Australian National University's National Security College told Australia's ABC that "a confronting strategic future is arriving fast".
"It would be hard to find a more tangible sign of the need for Australia to increase defence spending and to sustain our campaign of statecraft aimed at stopping China establishing a military base in the Pacific," he said.
New Zealand's own defence budget is in the spotlight again with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon this week responding to questions about raising it to two percent of GDP, which would nearly double the current funding and bring it in line with Australia's allocation. At the same time, US President Donald Trump has been pushing for NATO members to raise their defence spending from two to five percent.
"We will be getting as close to two percent as we possibly can," Luxon said. He declined to give the exact timing of the funding boost, saying, "we are working that through with our defence capability plan."
The government's soon-to-be-announced Defence Capability Plan is the final part of the process in reviewing New Zealand's defence policies and expected to specify the areas where investment is most needed.
Capie says our naval vessels are in dire need of upgrade.
"One of the areas that clearly is going to get attention is New Zealand's maritime assets," he says. "Every ship in the Royal New Zealand Navy apart from the tanker Aotearoa needs to be replaced by the mid-2030s.
"That's pretty confronting for a country that has something like the fifth or sixth largest exclusive economic zone in the world."
Capie says a document already released by the Chris Hipkins-led government covered the need to have a combat-capable defence force that could work concurrently in civil defence or coastguard roles.
"So we need to have a force that is able to respond if we have a natural disaster in the Pacific, if we're doing something in Antarctica and also we're contributing to a global security operation somewhere else.
"That means we might need multiple assets and platforms."
Mark says New Zealand needs to step up for its own security, but also the safety of countries with which it wants to trade. He wants the focus on personnel who have paid for years of "penny-pinching".
"They pay for it in the lousy pay and conditions that they have to put up with because they don't have a union like the teachers and the nurses, they can't fashionably be on television at night advocating for their own conditions of service.
"There are soldiers living in barracks that I was in when I was a 16-year-old soldier and they haven't changed.
"You've got to invest money, and if you don't think it's worth it then think about what other people think of you when you are asking them for free trade agreements and for better concessions and better access to their markets.
"Why would they want to help you if you're not particularly concerned about their safety and security?"
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