We haven’t had a foreign policy consensus in 60 years

Wednesday, 8 October 2025

Henry Cooke is deputy political editor of The Post, and writes a column every Wednesday.

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OPINION: There’s a patch of grass out the back of Parliament where one cross-party interest group consistently meets: Smokers.

MPs, their staffers, journalists – they all come together in this safe space, with some trees for protection from the elements and a few benches of seating if one is tired of standing.

It’s truly common ground, and unlike the other meeting spaces in Parliament you don’t need to book it in with anyone. Plenty of people don’t even smoke or vape, but simply stop there and talk on their way elsewhere.

So it’s unsurprising that this was the spot where Winston Peters’ adviser Jon Johansson offered Labour chief of staff Chris Bramwell a briefing on New Zealand’s position on Palestinian statehood.

Yet the meeting never happened. When that extremely contentious stance was finally revealed to the world the weekend before last, it came as news to Labour. Bramwell had headed back to her office expecting an invite to come from NZ First, while Johansson had gone back to his, expecting an email to set a meeting up from Labour.

This missed connection was convenient for both parties. It kept Labour from looking like it had real input on a decision that would have alienated much of its support base. It kept the Government from worrying about that position leaking. And it let both parties pretend that they had pushed for a bit of bipartisan foreign policy consensus, which is supposedly a New Zealand tradition.

In truth, our “bipartisan foreign policy consensus” has long been far more a myth than a reality.

You can certainly see why it is such a powerful myth. It is certainly far easier to deal with the big bad world if you leave politics at the water’s edge and go out with a single simple brand to the world, like a Zespri, but for foreign policy. Mfat would certainly prefer if their diplomatic staff worldwide could work on projects for decades without a change of government imperilling it.

The myth also has some backing. Our biggest free-trade agreements of recent vintage have generally had backing from both Labour and National. Similarly, both parties generally believe that for a small export-dependent nation at the bottom of the world the existence of a “rules-based” multi-lateral system is in our best interests. But this is a bit like Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon agreeing that water is wet or murder should be illegal – it’s hardly very contentious and almost any capitalist party in any small Western country would say the same.

Most importantly, these are not issues that have a high salience to many voters. Governments agree on plenty of things voters don’t really care about, but when their voters are highly energised about an issue parties have a way of being highly energised themselves, usually into disagreement with each other.

This is not new. As protests against the Vietnam War picked up steam in the 1960s Norman Kirk’s Labour sought to harness this movement and define itself against the National government’s decision to participate, announcing in 1966 it would seek to withdraw troops, a goal not managed until he won power in 1972.

Much like in later times, the withdrawal was far too little for some activists – the Canterbury Federation of Labour called for Kirk to break off ties with the US completely. And when Kirk moved to formally protest France’s nuclear testing in the Pacific, National leader Jack Marshall accused him of going to “extremes” of “emotionalism”.

This pattern of partisan disagreement on matters of import for voters never really went away. Kirk’s decision to bar the apartheid South African rugby team from touring in 1973 was reversed when National came to power, to huge protest. When Labour in turn came to power in 1984 and left the Anzus alliance after pursuing its nuclear-free policies, National leader Jim Bolger heavily criticised him and said he would be able to get us back into the alliance.

Bolger eventually acceded to the Labour position on nuclear ships, but the issue retained huge salience all the way through to 2004, when in the midst of the War on Terror Labour released notes suggesting Don Brash had signalled the policy would be “gone by lunchtime”.

From the 1960s through now, a big part of this partisan debate on foreign policy has been fuelled by internationalism. Kiwis on both sides of contentious issues see themselves not just as Kiwis but as parts of large international movements – whether that be as a staunch ally in the fight against communism or a staunch ally in the anti-nuclear movement.

Undoubtedly this has been massively accelerated by the internet. Peer into the social media profiles of some of the most committed activists on any side of New Zealand issues and you will often find far more tweets about American and British politics than our own. MPs themselves also have incredibly internationalised politics, as similar to their sister parties overseas as to their fellow Kiwi politicians. Once you feel you are part of global fight like this it becomes far easier to see the politician sitting across from you as not just your opponent, but as a representative of everything you are fighting against.

Is this lack of consensus really so bad? The internet didn’t create the images of dying children that have pushed so many people to protest in the last two years, it just distributed them. The lifeblood of our politics is vociferous disagreement, not comfy consensus, and there is no democratic reason that disagreement should only extend to our actions within New Zealand, or indeed to the actions of New Zealand itself.

It might make life a bit difficult. It might mean changes of government are noticed by others around the world. It might make those briefings that foreign ministers usually offer the Opposition a bit more tense. As long as they can work out how to organise them, we should be OK.

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