By Joanne Wallis and Anna Powles*
Australia and New Zealand engage in wide-ranging daily cooperation, butseldom refer to the alliance between them. Has the alliance become irrelevant? Or is it so taken-for-granted, and the habits of cooperation so entrenched, that it is seen as unnecessary to emphasise it? (The Australian Institute of International Affairs.)
In late November 2024, the chiefs of the Australian and New Zealand navies signed the Tasman Navy Framework, intended to formalise a “strategic dialogue for engagement” and to “advance specific combat capabilities, personnel initiatives and interoperability.” This followed the Australian and New Zealand armies signing Plan ANZAC in 2023, similarly intended to “increase capacity to operate together with a framework for engagement, enabling the two armies to exchange views and share situational awareness, capability, training and readiness.”
These initiatives build on wide-ranging daily cooperation—whether by defence forces, police officers, diplomatic corps, or development officials. But, despite this, Australia’s 2024 National Defence Strategyand 2023 Defence Strategic Review—which are intended to outline the “Government’s strategic framework”—both characterised New Zealand as Australia’s “partner,” rather than “ally.” The latter term was solely reserved for the United States. This is despite Australia being a formal ally of both countriesunder the 1951 ANZUS Treaty.
What does this reluctance to refer to New Zealand as an “ally” say about Australia’s understanding of its alliance with New Zealand? Has the alliance become irrelevant? Or is it so taken-for-granted, and the habits of cooperation so entrenched, that it is seen as unnecessary to emphasise it?
Australian deputy prime minister and minister for defence Richard Marles said at the 2024 ANZMIN that: “the character [of the relationship] between Australia and New Zealand is one of family. There’s no country in the world with whom we are closer than New Zealand.”
But the perceived and practical closeness of Australia and New Zealand can also mean that policymakers and scholars on both sides of the Tasman assume that the alliance is unchanging, and that the other country will always share their worldview and be available to assist when needed. While this is largely true, Indo-Pacific geopolitics are rapidly evolving and tensions between the US and China are likely to escalate under the incoming Trump administration. Australia and New Zealand are already taking, at times, differing approaches to the two great powers.
This suggests that it is important to put the alliance under an analytical spotlight to check whether comfortable assumptions still hold and to identify what challenges may lie ahead. To do this, we conducted interviews with leaders and officials and brought together experts from both sides of the Tasman in workshops in Canberra and Wellington. A selection of these experts’ papers are published in a special section of the Australia Journal of International Affairs we guest-edited, to be launched online on 5 December.
The process of convening these workshops itself told us a lot about how the two countries view their alliance. In Australia, we had difficulty identifying scholars who work on New Zealand, and ultimately, we invited scholars who primarily focus on Australia’s alliance with the US, since they are well-acquainted with the scholarly alliance literature. We were grateful to the generosity of these scholars, who sought to make their broader research relevant.
But the dearth of scholars writing about the alliance in Australia revealed how few people in the Australian foreign and strategic policy space are thinking about, and ideally, researching, Australia’s alliance with New Zealand.
This may be partly because many Australian thinkers have come to see New Zealand primarily through the lens of the Pacific Islands region, rather than of broader importance to Australia’s foreign and strategic policy. As New Zealand diplomat Rob Laurs observes, New Zealanders “interacting with the Australian government may be surprised to find responsibilities for the New Zealand bilateral relationship sitting within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Office of the Pacific” and Department of Defence’s Pacific Division.
In contrast, reflecting Australia’s importance to New Zealand, the bilateral relationship is managed by the standalone Australia Group within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and straddles both the Ministry of Defence’s Pacific Division and its Policy and Planning Division, with the latter handling the broader alliance relationship. In many ways this dynamic reflects the tripartite nature of the US-Australia-New Zealand alliances: Australia is occupied with retaining the attention and support of the US, while New Zealand is increasingly concerned with maintaining its relevance to Australia.
We also had less difficulty identifying scholars interested in the alliance in New Zealand. The question of New Zealand’s foreign and strategic policy relationship with Australia was (and still is) garnering significant attention in the context of debates about whether New Zealand should seek to join pillar II of the AUKUS (Australia-United Kingdom-US) trilateral security partnership. This is captured by the range of views represented in our special section.
While Australians’ attention may be focused northward, not eastward, this does not mean that the Australia-New Zealand alliance does not warrant greater attention. As Brendan Taylor suggests, there is a need to deepen and strengthen the alliance, and wider relationship, through dialogue exchanges, university study centres, and university curriculum. Indeed, there are currently few formal mechanisms to foster policy and academic understanding beyond the infrequent Australian Strategic Policy Institute – Centre for Strategic Studies track 1.5 dialogue (the last of which was held online in 2021).
Australia has two partly-government-funded university-based think tanks devoted to studying its alliance with the US – the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and the Perth USAsia Centre at the University of Western Australia, but no comparable research centre focused on its alliance with New Zealand. The government-funded Pacific Research Program and the Pacific Security College, both at the Australian National University, have no specific research programs focused on New Zealand. There is a clear need for a separate, dedicated New Zealand studies centre in Australia, linked to a counterpart in New Zealand.
Moreover, the settler-colonial identities of the two countries remain a defining feature of their relationship. There is a critical need to understand how Māori and First Nations Australians perceive the alliance and the various ways in which they have been co-opted into it.
We conclude in our article that the Australia-New Zealand alliance is “now so intuitive and habitual that it is unthinkable for leaders, officials, and citizens on both sides of the Tasman that the two countries would not militarily support each other and not be deeply integrated.” But, as recent trans-Tasman defence initiatives suggest, the alliance requires reinvigoration, reinvestment, and, perhaps, given escalating tensions in the Indo-Pacific, recalibration.
Joanne Wallis is Professor of International Security and director of the Stretton Institute Security in the Pacific Islands research program at the University of Adelaide. She is also a Senior Nonresident Fellow of the Brookings Institution and an Expert Associate of the National Security College at the Australian National University. More info here.
Anna Powles is an Associate Professor in the Centre of Defence and Security Studies at Massey University. She is also a Non-Resident Fellow of the National Bureau for Asian Research and an Expert Associate of the National Security College at the Australian National University. More info here.
