Making a difference: Phil Goff discusses New Zealand's role in the world.

• Author: Goff, Phil

I want to look first at the things that define our place in the world. On that basis I want to consider how we have responded in the past to events internationally and the role that we can play as a small nation to pursue our values and interests.

New Zealand's first and obvious defining characteristic is our size. With 4.3 million people, we are roughly a third the size of cities like Delhi, Moscow and Sao Paulo, and one-eighth the population of Chinas Chongqing municipality. We are neither a big power nor a middle-level power, such as Australia would define itself. But our smallness is something we share in common with over half the member states of the United Nations.

Half of the world's countries have a shared interest in working to ensure that global decision-making occurs within a framework that takes account of their interests and needs and not simply those of large and powerful countries. That leads us to focus on and promote multilateralism and entrenching an international rules-based system.

New Zealand's second defining characteristic is our relative geographic isolation. We are, as David Lange once quipped, 'a strategic dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica'!

Isolation has at times been helpful. It has protected us against invasion. It has kept us free from territorial disputes with our closest neighbours. Australia and Pacific Islands countries are three or more hours away by air, Peru and Chile eleven hours distant and South Africa fifteen hours. It has helped protect us against bio-security threats, people smuggling and international crime, though globalisation and modern transport and communications today diminish that protection. The major disadvantage of distance is that we are a long way from our markets, which explains our enthusiasm for free trade agreements to secure access for our exports.

Major conflicts

Notwithstanding our isolation, New Zealand has never been isolationist in its outlook or its policies. The downside of that is that we have been drawn into the major international conflicts of the 20th century. On 12 October we commemorated the 95th anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele. In the first four hours of the attack on 12 October 1917 846 young New Zealanders were killed and by the end there were 2700 New Zealanders killed or wounded.

The commemoration was held in Auckland War Memorial Museum's Hall of Memories. The names of over 18,000 killed in the First World War are inscribed on the walls. For a country of then barely one million people, this is a huge casualty rate. We sent 100,000 soldiers to fight in a war that served no good purpose. Far from being a war to end all wars, it succeeded only in planting the seeds of a second world war just 21 years later. The speeches given at the Passchendaele commemoration, by two retired colonels, paid tribute to the courage and self-sacrifice of those who gave their lives but did not glorify war. They talked of its horror. While monuments are often dedicated to 'The Glorious Dead', there was no glory in the manner of their deaths.

From those experiences, it is natural that we should today be strongly committed to a stable, secure and peaceful world. In 1945 Peter Fraser, our wartime Labour prime minister, took that commitment to San Francisco, where victor nations met to devise a post-war architecture to avoid a repeat of the world wars that had twice ravaged the world. There is irony in Peter Fraser being jailed for opposing conscription in the First World War and conscripting men to fight in the Second. But the circumstances were quite different and post-1945 we set out to avoid the mistakes made in 1919. We can be proud of the role Fraser and New Zealand played as a founding member of the United Nations and in devising its Charter.

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