NZIIA - Annual Lecture 2024 - Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters

Held at Parliament Buildings 1 May 2024. Our Annual Lecture featured Rt Hon Winston Peters, Minister of Foreign Affairs as the keynote speaker.

An excerpt from the speech is below, read the full text: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/sp...

"Shut off from the world and amidst pervasive global uncertainty, we tasked senior officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade to put their minds to the foreign policy challenges that would emerge post-pandemic.

It was a useful exercise as it placed our daily conduct of foreign policy, at the height of a global crisis, into a wider context. It also gave us a sense of how the world would re-emerge post-Covid.

The resulting advice alerted us to the heightened foreign policy challenges that would emerge, challenges that have been borne out since.

It confirmed worrying trends that if we look even further back, over several decades, become even more disconcerting.

Back when first Deputy Prime Minister, in the mid-1990s, New Zealand benefited from a strategic environment and an international system that was delivering for us and our interests.

The world was becoming more open, more democratic, and more free. We enjoyed effective multilateral institutions. There was impetus for trade liberalisation and a liberal oriented rules-based system.

But these foundations, which underpinned New Zealand’s foreign, trade and economic policies in decades past, have seismically shifted in the first quarter of the 21st Century.

Over the past 25 years, we have witnessed a rolling back of democracy, increasingly restrictive market barriers, and an increase in conflict.

These deteriorating trendlines take us further away from past assumptions about the global environment that New Zealand is operating in.

Overall, we see three big shifts in the international order:

- From rules to power, a shift towards a multipolar world that is characterized by more contested rules and where the relative power between states assumes a greater role in shaping international affairs.
- From economics to security, a shift in which economic relationships are reassessed in light of increased military competition in a more securitised and less stable world.
- And from efficiency to resilience, where we see a shift in the drivers of economic behaviour, and where building greater resilience and addressing pressing social and sustainability issues become more prominent."