Aukus: I loved David Lange, but that was then and this is now - Lovina McMurchy

Prime Minister David Lange at the Oxford Union in June 1985, arguing that "All nuclear weapons are morally indefensible". Still photo / TVNZ

OPINION

I loved David Lange. I first met him in the mid-70s at a barbecue for Labour Party faithful in Māngere when he was an incoming MP.

I distinctly recall running crazily through his garden and literally bouncing off his tummy as I tried not to be “it” in a childhood game of chase.

Years later, when he was Prime Minister, I looked back and felt I had touched greatness.

I loved his idealism and his great wit.

I admired his boldness in reforming NZ from a socialist country to one of the most deregulated in the world.

But most of all, I was proud of how he stood up to the Americans by not allowing nuclear submarines into our harbours.

“I can smell the uranium on [your breath]”, he jibed at Jerry Falwell during a 1985 Oxford Union debate. We were all proud of that David vs Goliath moment. It reminds me of the Love Actually scene in which Hugh Grant stands up to the US president played by Billy Bob Thornton. It’s the power fantasy of a smaller nation flexing its muscles to a larger ally. It’s the sort of scene that makes for great speeches and great movies.

But that was now 40 years ago and, frankly, it’s time New Zealand got over its David Lange moment. Forty years is almost a half century and our context and challenges are radically different now.

In the 1980s, we still lived with the sense of a nuclear winter as a potential reality. Chernobyl had just happened and the French were still testing nukes at Mururoa Atoll far away from their home but uncomfortably close to ours.

Nuclear weapons were proliferating and there was an active movement to stop their course. Lange rejected the notion of nuclear weapons being a deterrent and stood up against proliferation.

It was a fair opinion at the time but I am an empiricist. We have had nuclear weapons in the world since the mid-1940s and, aside from their tragic debut in Japan, they haven’t been used in the ensuing 70 years so it looks like they were a pretty good deterrent after all.

Our nuclear reality now is less defined by nukes as weapons and is more about nukes powering clean energy.

With climate change now the main existential threat, nuclear power offers a cleaner and more sustainable method of power generation and is backed by leading global climate thinkers such as Bill Gates. Nuclear micro-grids are planned to pepper-pot the US over the next 10 years, along with solar and wind, as we try to reduce the climate impact of burning carbon.

Nuclear energy is becoming destigmatised everywhere else in the world, so it might be time for New Zealand to reconsider its ragged “Nuclear-free Pacific” banner hung over the country.

The other big context change is in the “neither confirm nor deny” policy of the US.

New Zealand’s effective ban on all US ships and submarines stemmed from our insistence that it tell us whether a specific ship was nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed.

The Americans rightly considered that classified information and the policy difference has put us at loggerheads for 40 years.

New Zealand was downgraded from a close ally to simply a “friend” (the thing you call your ex).

Today, the submarines being deployed in our regional waters as part of the Aukus relationship have been openly declared to be nuclear-powered but not nuclear-armed.

Given this is open knowledge, the logic for why we won’t allow them into our harbours is much less clear.

Our policy amounts to free-riding on Aukus since we clearly have an expectation that Australia and the US will come to our aid if we are attacked, even as we hold our heads up proudly about not participating in Aukus.

It seems only fair that we should make some gesture towards avoiding this double standard.

The US and Australia are not asking that we buy our own ships or host their ships (so-called “Aukus pillar one”).

All they are asking is that we find some meaningful way to participate in regional security through “pillar two”. This includes some pretty innocent stuff like working with our allies on cyber-security projects.

Lovina McMurchy is the chief operating officer for Wellington-based start-up Kry10.

For full disclosure, I work for a cyber-security company so I am naturally supportive of that idea. Right now, we are working with several governments and advanced research institutes around the world on cutting-edge cyber-security for national infrastructure. We would love to do something here but it’s all pretty quiet on the home front and sales always involve getting on a plane and going somewhere else.

I guess I have my beloved David Lange to thank for that.

Perhaps if he were still alive, he would suggest we stop for a cup of tea and reconsider who we want to be best friends with.

I think that would lead to a very different regional security policy. One fit for this century instead of the last.

Lovina McMurchy (Ngāti Rongomai) is the chief operating officer for Wellington-based start-up Kry10. Based in Seattle, she was previously a general partner for Movac and held senior roles with Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks in the US.