BOOKS

PRUDENCE, PRAGMATISM AND PRINCIPLE

New Zealand’s Security in the 21st Century

Author: Jim Rolfe

Published by: World Scientific, Singapore, 2025, 320pp, US$118 (hb).

How do you determine whether the national security system is robust enough to withstand the shocks it might experience, and fleet-footed enough to respond to the black swans?

This important book highlights two issues: first, whether the government’s national security system focuses more on the right processes than it does the right people, and second, whether the system ‘lacks imagination’ and, in doing so, might be making New Zealanders less secure.

Jim Rolfe is both a former defence and national security practitioner and scholar (he was the director of Victoria University of Wellington’s Centre for Strategic Studies in 2013–15) and has worked in a defence advisory capacity for the New Zealand, Australian and UAE governments. He is a very careful writer. A certain gruffness is evident in his style, which the reader comes to appreciate is just his desire to be methodical and fair. He engages with two frameworks to help guide us through the book, the 4Rs — risk reduction, readiness, response and recovery; and — as per the title of the book — prudence, pragmatism and principle. The book is encyclopedic in format: Rolfe is precise in his definitions and sorts the issues and case studies into neat categories. It is ideal for a textbook with which to teach national security, and perhaps more importantly a guide to how to think about it.

The book’s method is its strength and, if there is a weakness, it might be its aforementioned fairness. Often Rolfe challenges something he believes the government has not thought about properly, has contradicted itself over or has performed poorly on, only to balance it with an alternative view. The prudence, pragmatism and principle framework itself tends to explain away any questions raised, because the government nearly always arrives at a policy that is either prudent, pragmatic or principled. This sets up an expectation that the national security system is one that selfcorrects, at least over time. Rolfe, however, seems to be not wholly convinced that this will hold to be true.

The risk reduction, readiness, response and recovery mantra (Rolfe believes there should be five, including review) has developed into a national security system built around processes that can be activated according to need, and which devolves responsibility down to local government and even private enterprise if the issue is not serious enough to deal with at a national level. If it works well as a system, there are questions whether it works consistently well as far as human resources are concerned. (And it is worth remembering that any recruitment strategy based around hiring the ‘best and the brightest’ is also dependent on employees who have high expectations of quick promotion and a global market to turn to if these are not met.) The human resources issues seem to revolve around three things: senior leaders not having any handson experience of dealing with a crisis or even exercises practicing for a crisis; the silo effect of agencies not co-operating or sharing the same mindset; and Rolfe’s idea about lack of imagination — that policy-makers tend to ringfence national security rather than dealing with its wider societal implications. These are all human problems rather than process ones.

Of the hands-on problem, Rolfe makes the point that, although practice exercises exist for just about every event (mass immigration, cyber, bio-security, water contamination eruptions, floods and earthquakes), senior leaders are likely to delegate these to juniors and have little on-going experience of being in the trenches. In preparation for a Covid-like event, an exercise had been run in 2017 but ‘by the time the pandemic struck, staff turnover had been such that there was little personal memory within senior leadership of what was prepared for, what should be done and what responsibilities were held by whom’.

Of the mindset problem, it is evident that much of the system relies on the efficient conduct of all-of-government committees. The Covid response ended up working well, although there were clashes of culture (policy-focused agencies like the Ministry of Health dealing with operational counterparts who wanted things to happen faster and with more effect). During the 2008 global financial crisis, the national security system was not activated, either because it was not enough of a threat or ‘officials from the economic agencies had no belief that sharing their thinking… would help them solve the problems’.

This comes down to the need for mutual confidence between people working on the issue within government. It also speaks to another factor that military leaders and first respond- ers already recognise: the need to be able to measure cognitive readiness, including the individual’s capacity for situational awareness, ability to work in teams, to lead others, to make decisions in changing and often volatile environments and to be able to critique one’s own decision-making process. These are processes that measure human frailties, rather than weak systems. They are as necessary in determining leadership readiness in our national security sector as they are for front-line readiness, like search and rescue officers and farmers watching for foot-and-mouth disease.

Rolfe says he started writing the book thinking the task a simple one, but this changed after the New Zealand Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s national security strategy was revealed. He shares with other national security watchers a disappointment that the 2023 Secure Together strategy redefined the mission to be about preventing harm, rather than the prior view that national security was about providing citizens with the ability to go about their lives safely and to prosper. Rolfe introduces a concept he calls ‘societal security’, which he employs when discussing the mounting challenges of climate change, social cohesion and national identity. This is distinct from human security, and an appropriate separation because it focuses on the stability of society and the effects of its possible fracture or the possibility of civil conflict.

I am not sure we needed another conceptual category here. But Rolfe has done something important by drawing attention to the very natural assumption that national security planning is an evolution, and that there are cans we can kick down the road. The danger of this is that the very gaps that Rolfe has so painstakingly identified are left alone until there is a government that has the time, money and patience to invest in figuring them out. Or is prompted by another crisis.

PETER GRACE

A TEAM OF FIVE MILLION?

The 2020 ‘Covid-19’ New Zealand General Election

Editors: Jennifer Curtin, Lara Greaves and Jack Vowles

Published by: ANU Press, Canberra, 2020, 286pp, $60 (also available as a free download).

A POPULIST EXCEPTION?

The 2017 New Zealand General Election

Editors: Jack Vowles and Jennifer Curtin

Published by: ANU Press, Canberra, 2020, 286pp, $60 (also available as a free download).

The cover of the book by the New Zealand Election Study (NZES) on the 2020 New Zealand election shows the re-elected prime minister Jacinda Ardern on the centre left and leaning to the left. She is not there because she ‘won’ the election but because she coined the phrase ‘team of five million’ as a part of New Zealand’s response to the 2020 Covid pandemic. The book is organised around the question of how the pandemic earlier in that year influenced the election outcome.

Certainly, it was a remarkable outcome. Against all expectations, the winning party secured 50 per cent of the list-vote, ending up with a parliamentary majority unprecedented in an MMP election (although the study rightly compares it to Labour’s 1938 win in a preMMP election format). Leftish parties won 60 per cent of the vote; the centre voted Labour in 2020.

The commentariat revels in elections, with accounts replete with anecdotes and opinions disguised as hard analysis. The 2020 NZES survey was based upon a sample of 3730 voters (the 1246 (over-sampled) Māori are usual size of a political opinion poll of the entire population).

It provides some factual content which may disturb the conventional wisdom. For instance, over a third of voters switched parties between 2017 and 2020 (a similar proportion applied in earlier elections). Allow for those who contemplated changing their party vote but did not, and the conclusion must be that true party-loyalists are less than half of voters. The likelihood is that the party-fickle voters are loyal to some principles. In each election they consider which party is closest to them. Perhaps the parties shift rather than the voters.

The NZES has not explored this. The logistics of each election survey are so challenging that it takes about three years to get their book out (delayed in this case by Covid-19). By which time the commentariat is getting bored with the previous election — the book on the 2023 election is due in 2026 — and turning their mind to the next one.

Which is a pity. Other than the Census of Population and Dwellings — limited in what opinions it can ask — there is no larger regular social survey in New Zealand. Unfortunately, New Zealand social science has neither the resources, nor, often, the mind to exploit the data base. (This is the ninth survey; NZES’s first was in 1990. Once it was funded by the public good research funding; when that funding was cut, a number of funding sources were cobbled together.)

Such election studies go back to 1960. Their grandfather is Bob Chapman, who used the results to provide a stunning insight to the social and political structure of New Zealand in a 1962 Landfall article tracing the changing class structure of the evolving political economy. I shall do the same with the NZES 2017 and 2020 results on a much smaller canvas.

There is a tendency for New Zealand’s public conversation to treat Māori as a homogeneous group. It is not necessarily so. To do so leads to a distorted account of Māori in society and the political economy, where their considerable diversity is ignored and where the community is presented as having few internal differences. (The discussion does the same for most other groups.)

The NZES enables us to compare the views of those of descent on the Māori roll with those Māori on the general roll (the two groups are about equal size). On some dimensions there is little statistical difference, but often it is substantial. In 2017, 73 per cent of Māori on the Māori roll rated their culture as ‘quite’ or ‘very important’, but only 29.6 per cent of Māori on the general roll did so. Only 3.4 per cent of Māori on the Māori roll rated it as ‘not important at all’ versus 20.2 per cent of Māori on the general roll.

Typically, those on the general roll tend to have views which are closer to those of non-Māori than their relatives on the Māori roll. Less than 10 per cent of Māori on the Māori roll are opposed to Māori electorate seats, while in 2017 around 35 per cent of Māori on the general roll were opposed to them, almost comparable to the 43 per cent of non-Māori.

At first this may seem no great insight, but consider how often you hear someone describing a view as ‘the Māori view’. Whether they are Māori or non-Māori, they are wrong. (As a political example, those who voted for Te Pāti Māori may have reasonably cohesive views, but less than a quarter of those of Māori descent list-voted for it, even in its successful 2023 election. More Māori voted Labour — in fact Labour got more list votes in every one of the seven Māori seats.)

There is a wealth of insights to be unlocked by investigating the unit records of the NZES (anonymously, of course), going back to 1990, not only about electoral behaviour but also on a wider spectrum of social and political issues. There is not a lot of enthusiasm for providing the resources to do so. The commentariat prefers anecdote and opinion, even if it means getting it wrong — nobody is going to find out. In any case the NZES reports are not easy reading, even for a social statistician.

But there are nuggets buried in them. Consider ‘Ardern’s [campaign launch] speech did not mention Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi), nor did issues specifically defined as Māori register among NZES respondents’. What a contrast with the policies which she followed.

I draw a parallel with David Lange, whose 1987 launch played down the neo-liberal policies which his second term government would accelerate. In both years there was a controversial report which, although not published during the election, greatly influenced post-election policy; in 2020 it was He Puapua. Lange could not resist a small coterie in his caucus determined to pursue those policies. Ultimately his tank ran out and he resigned. The political history of the Ardern–Hipkins Labour government is yet to be written — my Not in Narrow Seas is a policy history — but perhaps the same thing happened to Ardern’s control of Māori policy. The NZES 2023 and 2026 election reports should tell us more about the popular response. Alas, we are likely to have to wait until 2026 and 2029 for them.

BRIAN EASTON

Notes on reviewers

Dr Peter Grace’s forthcoming book The Intelligence Intellectuals: Social Scientists and the Making of the CIA will be published by Georgetown University Press. He is a co-director of the Otago National Security School.

Dr Brian Easton is an economist, social statistician and public policy analyst (www.eastonbh.ac.nz). He is the author of Not in Narrow Seas, The Economic History of Aotearoa New Zealand (2020).

Former Defence official Andrew Wierzbicki is a member of the NZIIA’s Board.

Angus Middleton is chair of the NZIIA’s Wellington branch.