A few weeks ago Bryce Edwards wrote an interesting column
called ‘New Zealand’s Military future[i]’.
He provided links to numerous recent articles which discussed the current
government’s Defence Review, and the question of how much New Zealand should
spend on its military. The most prominent commentators Edwards linked to were
Chris Trotter and Karl du Fresne, both of whom argued that New Zealand should
seriously consider increasing its spending on “defence”.
I’m going to declare my cards very clearly before going any
further: I think that increasing New Zealand’s “defence” spending is both wrong
and absurd, and I agree with commentators like Bob Jones and Richard Jackson
that New Zealand’s “defence” budget should be zero dollars. I think that a much
better and more historically appropriate term for “defence spending” would be “offence
spending”. But for the purposes of this blog article I am going to strive to
put my ideological position to one side. I will use the neutral term “military
spending”, and I will refrain from making any comments about imperialism,
nationalism, how nasty and dangerous China might be in the future, and so on.
Instead, I will focus very narrowly on some claims both du
Fresne and Trotter make about the size of New Zealand’s military spending and
how it compares to other countries. Both commentators blithely and confidently
claim that New Zealand doesn’t spend very much at all on its military,
especially in comparison to its major allies: the US, UK and Australia. Trotter
says:
