Against joining Australia

Some Costs Are Not Compensable

Photo by Pin Adventure Map on Unsplash

David Farrar has made an argument in The Post for New Zealand becoming a state of Australia. His views are thoughtful and offered in good faith. We should acknowledge it as a serious attempt to think clearly about New Zealand’s place in the world.

But it is also revealing, not of foolishness, but of a certain characteristic in liberal political thinking.

Farrar’s core claim is simple:

• The so-called “rules-based order” that protected small countries like New Zealand has collapsed and this means power now matters more than rules.

• New Zealand is small, distant and militarily insignificant. Australia is larger, richer, and a recognised middle tier power.

• Therefore, in an era of renewed nationalism and great-power competition, it would be safer and more prosperous for New Zealand to fold itself into Australia as one of its constituent states.

There is nothing obviously wrong about this reasoning as reasoning. It is coherent. It proceeds logically from its premises. It is exactly the sort of argument that intelligent people make when they approach politics as a problem to be solved rather than a practice to be maintained.

The difficulty is that it treats a political community as if it were a device for producing outcomes like security, prosperity, influence and suggests we should redesign the device when it underperforms.

This is, in my view, to misunderstand what a country is.

New Zealand is not an enterprise association formed to deliver specific substantive goods. It is not a firm, a treaty organisation or a trading bloc. It is a collection of families and communities occupying the same land and bound together by inherited practices, procedures and understandings that constitute us as a people and a place.

These practices and understandings were not designed. They were not chosen from among alternative arrangements after careful deliberation. They emerged from history, were modified, were adapted to circumstance, and came to constitute what we recognise as self-government in this place.

We did not select them. We received them. And we remain free to the extent that we continue to practice them.

Political independence is not something that can be traded away while leaving the rest of our identity intact. It is the condition under which these practices are sustained. Once final authority over their interpretation, development and enforcement is located elsewhere, those things no longer belong to us in the same way.

At most, they are reduced to local variations within a larger political order, rather than as the expression of a people governing itself.

In other words, our political independence is not a means to an end. It is an end that has grown out of the means by which we have lived together politically. Independence does not exist to make us richer or safer. It exists because it is how we have learned to make decisions for ourselves, as a people. We cannot give it away without giving something of ourselves away with it.

The promise that New Zealand would retain control over health and education is beside the point. What matters is not the allocation of administrative responsibilities but the question of ultimate political authority. Once the framework of law and the locus of sovereign decision-making no longer reside with the people who must live under them, the character of the association has fundamentally changed.

You are no longer governing yourselves. You are being governed, however benignly, by arrangements designed for other purposes and responsive to other constituencies.

The attraction of Farrar’s proposal rests on the assumption that political arrangements are provisional and that when circumstances change, we should recalibrate. This is the rationalist error: the belief that practices exist to serve purposes and should be modified when they no longer serve them well.

But the transition would not be reversible. Federations centralise. Not because anyone intends it, but because that is what federations do when faced with crisis, efficiency demands, or the simple logic of scale. Power ratchets towards the centre.

Constitutional guarantees slow this process but only in the way a scarecrow keeps a field safe from the birds. That is not a prediction. It is an observation about how such arrangements actually behave over time.

Our status as an independent state is not to be regarded as sacred, of course. History is full of peoples who have been forced by circumstance to alter or abandon forms of self-government they once took for granted, including on these islands before the establishment of “New Zealand” as a political concept at all.

It is conceivable that conditions could arise under which independence could no longer be sustained in any meaningful sense. But not only are we not there, we can’t see there from here.

David is right that New Zealand is small. It always has been. He is right that we lack military might. We always will. He is right that the international system is becoming more transactional and less restrained. Which is true but not unprecedented.

And so what has yet to be established is why any of this reaches the threshold of dissolving self-government in favour of participation in someone else’s political order.

Will we manage on our own? That is far from certain. There are serious strategic and economic challenges ahead. There is no room for isolation, naïveté, or moral vanity in our responses. If New Zealand is to navigate the world as it is, we must be careful, realistic, and willing to compromise where necessary.

The mistake in David’s proposal is not that it is insufficiently hard-headed, but that it is too tidy. It assumes that political life can be reorganised in the same way we might reorganise a company, by identifying objectives and selecting the structure most likely to deliver them.

Difficulty is not a reason to abandon a form of life that has grown, imperfectly but recognisably, in this place. It is a reason to take it more seriously.

If independence is to end, it will end because it has become impossible to sustain, not because a cost-benefit analysis shows we might do better as someone else’s state. Until then, the task is not to redesign ourselves, but to do our very best to adapt and thrive giving up as little about ourselves as possible.

Before you conclude that this is all abstraction disconnected from real life, I'd invite you to do something simple. Watch this old montage that used to play on Channel One:

Now tell me, honestly, that we can fold ourselves into Australia’s federation and that the people in that montage, and what they represent, will remain fundamentally unchanged. Tell me we can become Australians without becoming different.

If you can do that sincerely, then perhaps David’s proposal deserves more consideration than I’ve given it.

But I don’t think you can.