LINE IN THE SAND

The threat China poses in the Pacific is real, and NZ must act, says ex-Australian PM and China expert Kevin Rudd.

- BERNARD LAGAN

Australia's former Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd - long a scholar of China and its threat to the West - has urged New Zealand and Australia to pool military resources, beginning with joint maritime and air force patrols of the South Pacific.

“That's not really an option in my mind. It is now necessary for both of us," Rudd told the Listener in an interview to promote his new book, The Avoidable War. The book sets out a road map by which the former politician and diplomat hopes China and the United States might avoid war, and what he terms “global carnage on an industrial scale".

Now president of the Asia Society - a well-funded and influential New York-based think tank - Rudd is regarded as one of the West's foremost China experts. He did, after all, graduate from the Australian National University with honours in Chinese studies, and is fluent in Mandarin. As well as his two and a half years as Australia's prime minister, he also served as foreign minister, before resigning from Parliament in late 2013.

Rudd notes that Russia's invasion of Ukraine has prompted some Western nations - notably Germany - to urgently increase defence spending. Coincidentally, Japan and Australia have also announced larger defence outlays.

"How much more New Zealand should do is a matter for the Kiwis," says Rudd. “But I think we are all just responding to the realities. Whether it's Tokyo, whether it's Berlin, whether it's Canberra - everyone's responding to, as it were, the changing nature of the world and the region.”

The arrival next year of New Zealand's fleet of new P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft to replace the six ageing P-3K2Orion aircraft offers an opportunity, he believes, to combine Pacific Ocean patrol operations with Australia. It has acquired the same aircraft, based on the Boeing 737 airframe.