Defence in Washington is not the same as Defence in Wellington

Conservation draws the protected areas. Fisheries signs the treaties. Customs and biosecurity guard the border. None of them can enforce a metre of it at sea without the Navy.

That is the conversation we should be having. Not 2 per cent against 3.5.

The percentage misleads because it borrows a foreign idea of defence. In Washington, defence means warfighting. Force projection. A high-end fight. For NATO countries facing a land war, 3.5 per cent buys exactly that.

New Zealand has no land war and no frontline. We have an ocean, 4 million square kilometres of it, one of the largest exclusive economic zones on the planet, patrolled by a Navy with no coast guard behind it. Ours is volunteer.

So defence here is not a war machine. For a maritime nation, sovereignty is practical: the ability to protect our security, our people and our national assets across an ocean we are meant to hold. One force does all three.

It protects our security. Our borders, our approaches, and the region we belong to. Last year, our Navy worked alongside Fiji’s against illegal fishing and trafficking because what reaches Fiji reaches us. Pacific nations hold more than 30 million square kilometres of ocean against barely 550,000 of land. We hold it together or not at all.

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It protects our people. Drugs, illegal weapons, people smuggling and biosecurity threats all arrive by sea. Methamphetamine alone costs an estimated $36 million a week in social harm, on police figures, with cocaine climbing. And when a cyclone hits, the people landing aid and medics inside three days wear a uniform. Nearly a thousand did after Gabrielle.

It protects our national assets. Under the Global Biodiversity Framework, we signed up to protect 30 per cent of our waters by 2030. We protect under half a per cent today. Days ago, Papua New Guinea went further, announcing a UK-sized marine sanctuary at the Melanesian Ocean Summit. Designation is not protection.

The people who announce the lines owe honesty to the people who patrol them. Drawing a sanctuary is easy. Saying who enforces it, and how it is funded, is the part we leave out.

It is not the Navy alone. The Air Force flies the surveillance, the Army lands the engineers, and all of them train for a fight we hope never comes. But at sea, the hull on station is the Navy’s, and there are too few. New technology and surveillance extend the force; they do not replace it. Procurement is the easy part. Personnel, sustainment and training is what gets glossed over. And it is not only our problem: across the Pacific, neighbours are handed advanced systems they cannot crew, sustain or maintain.

The prime minister told Newstalk ZB the choice of Defence spending is ours, and he is right. He has called 2 per cent only a start, and he is right about that too. But we will not reach even 2 per cent for eight years, rebuilding a force run down for 30, while the work piles up now. And the work is changing.

The hard part is no longer seeing the ocean. It is turning what we see into evidence that holds and possessing a response severe enough that we never have to use it. That is where sovereignty is won and where we have barely begun to spend.

So when Washington asks whether we are paying our share, the sharper question is ours. Are we funding the force that holds what is ours, or freeloading off it ourselves?

Robbie Adams is a maritime security and defence technology executive, and founder of Cerberus Marine NZ.