As New Zealand embarks on its largest defence build-up in decades, two questions loom: how closely should it integrate with Australia’s military and how much should it spend?

While New Zealand has committed to lifting defence spending from just over 1% of GDP to 2% over the next decade, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently accused the country of “freeloading” as a partner, arguing at this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue that even 2% was “not enough”.

Instead, he said, 3.5% had become the new global standard. Yet political discussion in New Zealand has focused less on whether 2% is the right target than on whether the country can afford to reach it.

At the same time, New Zealand is aligning ever more closely with Australia under a strategy to build an increasingly integrated, interchangeable “Anzac force” by 2035.

Asked on TVNZ’s Q A programme how New Zealand could refuse to join an Australian war if its forces were built this way, Defence Minister Chris Penk said they could simply be recalled home, under what he described as “optionality”.

These two debates have largely been treated as separate questions. But they are in fact closely connected – and each has implications for New Zealand’s long-held freedom to act independently.

What the numbers don’t tell........

© The Conversation