OPINION
When Christopher Luxon was a high-flying, wealthy business executive, he and his wife Amanda wanted their kids to understand poverty as well as privilege so in 2015, Amanda took daughter Olivia to Manila to work in the slums.
Luxon knew Manila well. He has lost count of the number of times he has visited the Philippines’ capital.
When he was with Unilever, he set up an innovation centre there – and he loves the place, the vibrancy of the place and its people, who number 110 million, speak English and are largely Christian.
Today, having visited Singapore and Thailand, he returns to the Philippines as Prime Minister in what is the first bilateral visit by a New Zealand leader in 14 years.
He will be accompanied by Filipino and MP for New Lynn Paulo Garcia who in his own God-fearing way, summed up the bilateral relationship in his 2019 maiden speech.
“We thank our loving God that he has given his children the opportunity to serve New Zealand not just in nursing homes and hospitals, in dairy farms and construction sites, in IT and engineering and hospitality but also now in the New Zealand Parliament,” Garcia said.
The importance of the Philippines in the region has grown vastly since the last prime ministerial visit, so much so that its negligence by New Zealand borders on neglect.
Certainly, Luxon has much bigger ambitions for the bilateral relationship.
“I just think there is a huge untapped potential there.”
“It’s a market I do want to see New Zealand business leaders start to build their understanding of over the coming years.”
But there is also China and security.
While trade and untapped potential will be high on Luxon’s agenda with Philippines President Bongbong Marcos - the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos and shoe-queen Imelda Marcos - security and defence are also likely to figure large in their private talks.
The Philippines has grown in importance not only for its untapped potential but also because it has become a flashpoint for conflict with an increasingly aggressive China over contested territory in the in the South China Sea.
The South China Sea is the conduit for about $5 trillion of trade each year – including billions of exports from New Zealand.
But the acts of confrontation are growing with the most recent occurring last month. A Chinese Coast Guard vessel used a water cannon to try and stop a Philippines vessel at the Second Thomas Shoal from resupplying Philippines soldiers posted there on a ship intentionally grounded there 25 years ago.
In those times, the United States was wary about the Philippines using US obligations under the Mutual Defence Treaty (MTD) to protect it from territorial skirmishes in the South China Sea, but no more.
The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US President Joe Biden have declared that the MTD is “ironclad” and it would come to the Philippines’ defence in any conflict in the South China Sea.
Maritime exercises in the region are increasing and while New Zealand officially does not take sides in the territorial claims, it may be pressed into joining exercises and other efforts to uphold freedoms of navigation.
The United States is making the most of Marcos, who was elected in 2022 for six years and replaced the slightly bonkers Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte’s daughter Sara withdrew from the presidential contest and joined the Marcos ticket as his vice-president.
But the families aren’t on great terms. The news agency Rappler reported former president Duterte in January as accusing Marcos of being “a drug addict and the son of a whore.”
Like the US itself, the change in personnel at the top has meant a huge lurch in foreign policy. Donald Trump downgraded almost every alliance the US had whereas Joe Biden’s primary foreign policy ambition is to strengthen alliances and create new ones.
Rodrigo leaned heavily towards China and kept that problem temporarily contained - but Marcos does not.
Marcos has given the US access to four more military bases since becoming president.
He has also just returned from Washington where he was part of the first trilateral talks with the United States and Japan on defence and security.
The United States has five formal defence allies in the Asia Pacific – Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and Australia. The US signed its treaty with the Philippines in 1951, the same year the Anzus treaty was signed with Australia and New Zealand.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who contends not just with China but an aggressive North Korea, has increased defence spending to $88 billion a year and plans to double defence spending to 2 per cent of gdp by 2027.
There is no rocket science in why the US got Japan and the Philippines together in Washington – they sit to the north and south of Taiwan, the other flashpoint for conflict with China.
The trilateral talks are in themselves not an alliance, at least not with a capital A. But they are part of a series of groupings and links between countries the overall effect of which US officials now like to term “a lattice” – designed to counter the expansion of China.
Other groups that are part of the lattice are Quad (the US, India, Japan and Australia), Nato’s Indo Pacific 4 (New Zealand, Australia, Japan and South Korea), Aukus (US, UK and Australia) and potentially Aukus Pillar Two (potentially Japan, South Korea, Canada, India and New Zealand).
In the lattice strategy, informal groupings still carry much weight because whether they are formal alliances or not, they are aimed at containing China’s military influence.
But plenty believe that such a strategy is more likely to encourage conflict than discourage it.
That is one of the reasons the possibility of New Zealand joining pillar two of Aukus (supposedly to get access to modern military equipment) is so contentious. Former Act leader Richard Prebble is the latest political figure to argue against it, in today’s Herald. Former Prime Minister Helen Clark and former National and Act leader Don Brash have done so as well.
On the same day the Prime Minister visits the Philippines, the Labour Party is sponsoring a seminar at Parliament on Aukus 2 which will include Clark, former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, former Tuvalu Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga and Otago University professor Robert Patman.
Described dismissively by some critics as “China’s useful idiots,” whatever the outcome, they are at least ensuring there is some debate about Aukus and that any decision is not sprung on the country.
The debate has widened to whether or not the Anzus defence treaty underpins New Zealand’s relationship with Australia as recently stated by Foreign and Defence Ministers - despite most New Zealanders believing it was dormant.
“This becomes a prop on which you can build this further architecture about Aukus pillar two,” she told the Herald.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has suggested in media interviews that Labour’s position in 1984 was that New Zealand could be anti-nuclear and remain a member of Anzus so it should have no beef with it being mentioned as it was in dispatches.
Ironically, when former US Secretary of State George Shultz announced the suspension of New Zealand from its obligations under Anzus in June 1986, he was in Manila.
Audrey Young is the New Zealand Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was named Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018.
Expectations tempered around return to surplus in 2027/28.