Anzac Day marks six months since this Government took office. Professor Robert Ayson argues it's time for our silent Defence Minister to begin staking out the positions on military policy and capability – before our bigger allies do it for him.

Jacinda Ardern’s first prime ministerial term began with a novel policy experiment. Courtesy of the post-election agreement with NZ First, the Labour Party subcontracted Wellington’s external engagement to its smaller coalition partner at the end of 2017.

Not only did Winston Peters get Foreign Affairs, a portfolio he previously held in Helen Clark’s third term. But Ron Mark got Defence, the role he had spent much of his political life preparing for.

That experiment ended three years later with NZ First’s thumping electoral defeat, and Labour’s equally compelling victory. The two portfolios in question were brought back into the fold. In Foreign Affairs, the change in personalities has already had obvious consequences.

In the build-up to Waitangi Day, Nanaia Mahuta gave a speech that created a real distance from Peters. Geopolitical considerations have taken a back set in a foreign policy of peoples including a call for indigenous voices to be given more say around the globe.

But Mahuta has also become the second term government’s main voice on China. On not one but two recent occasions she has expressed concern with her Australian counterpart about the human rights situation (in Hong Kong and Xinjiang respectively). But these and other efforts have not deterred claims that New Zealand is going soft on Beijing. These accusations are based principally on whether New Zealand’s Foreign Minister joins her Five Eyes partners in joint criticisms of Beijing.

This was a squeeze Peters managed largely to evade. After all, Ardern went on record in clarifying her government’s position on China after her first Foreign Minister was found calling out for America’s help, a sentiment that undoubtedly appealed to Washington and Canberra.

Sometimes lost in these comparisons is the role played by Ron Mark and defence policy in New Zealand’s evolving position. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has a long tradition of not publishing overall statements of policy. And so it was the Strategic Defence Policy Statement, launched by Mark in the middle of 2018, that assembled New Zealand’s growing concerns about China’s impact on regional security.

And just a few days after highlighting Wellington’s increasingly robust viewpoint on the South China Sea, Mark did something no Defence Minister had achieved since the 1980s decision to purchase two ANZAC Frigates. He announced the decision to acquire a major new defence capability, the Poseidon P8s which would (at long last) replace the ageing P3s. Before his term was over, he would repeat this rare occurrence with Cabinet’s agreement to replace the equally venerable Hercules C130 aircraft with modern C130Js.

Both decisions meant New Zealand would have hardware similar to its traditional defence partners. And they both mean big expenditure, which brings us to Ardern Government 2.0.

Even without the unique demands placed on the budget by the Covid-19 crisis, nobody would have expected Defence to be a spending priority when Peeni Henare took over the portfolio in October. It’s almost certain that Treasury has been signalling that Defence’s time in the sun was over for the time being.

And despite the Defence Force’s high profile role in quarantine efforts, there has been little in the way of international deployments to remind Cabinet of why military capabilities might be useful. Under Mark, New Zealand had wound up its commitments at Taji Base in Iraq, and had reduced its role in Afghanistan to a small handful of personnel.

It was left for Ministers earlier this year to announce the withdrawal of the last of these commitments. Henare joined Ardern and Mahuta in a moment that attracted a modest amount of attention. Yet this relatively low profile media event nonetheless counts as a notable outing for the new Defence Minister. A quick look at Henare’s presence on the government’s Beehive website confirms that after the noisy era of Ron Mark, the second holder of the Defence portfolio under Ardern has been remarkably quiet.

That means we don’t know what Henare thinks about defence policy and defence’s place in New Zealand’s international engagement. Does he want to alter Ron Mark’s extensive capability shopping list now that defence is unlikely to be a capital expenditure priority in a post-Covid environment? Does Henare share his predecessor’s enthusiasm for preparing the Defence Force for combat missions?

Or might he align himself with the emerging Mahuta doctrine and emphasise capabilities and missions designed to relieve human suffering? Do close defence links between New Zealand and Australia provide Henare with an opportunity to offset the problems in transTasman relations? And how does the new Minister want the Ministry of Defence and NZDF to approach the great power picture in the region?

At some point Henare is going to be in a spot that has become all too familiar to Mahuta: dealing with expectations from traditional security partners to take a common public view on China, including in Five Eyes contexts. We can expect those expectations to come from the other side of the Tasman, especially now that Peter Dutton (the Australian politician New Zealanders most like to dislike) has become Defence Minister in Scott Morrison’s constantly evolving cabinet.

And we can expect that at some point Joe Biden’s national security team will come knocking. Lloyd Austin and Antony Blinken began with Japan and Korea, and Jake Sullivan has been signalling US support for regional ally Australia, but New Zealand will be on Washington’s list of close partners. Kurt Campbell, Biden’s Indo-Pacific advisor, is very well known in these parts. He will be back.

Does Henare really want to wait for New Zealand’s partners to shape his public agenda with their expectations? Does he want to wait for the next regional flare-up (which might happen in Southeast or Northeast Asia or elsewhere)?

It would be better to have a form of words set out in the public domain before he has to give the impression of making policy on the hop and before journalists begin to query his silence (something that has happened before).

Anzac Day 2021 will mark exactly six months since the start of Jacinda Ardern’s second government.

That might be a good opportunity for her second Minister of Defence to begin staking out public positions on the policy and capability choices that all holders of this challenging multi-billion dollar portfolio eventually need to grapple with.