E nga Mana, e nga Reo, Rau Rangatira ma kua huihui mai nei i tenei Whare Nui o te Ao. Nga mihi maioha ki a koutou katoa, mai i toku Whenua o Aotearoa. Tuia ki runga, Tuia ki raro, ka Rongo to po ka rongo te ao. No reira, tend koutou katoa.
I greet you in te reo Maori, the language of the tangata whenua, or first people, of Aotearoa, New Zealand. I acknowledge the leaders who are here, gathered in person after a long and difficult period. As is tradition in my country, I also acknowledge those who have passed. Loss brings with it a chance for reflection. As leaders, between us, we each represent countries and communities who have lost much in the past few years through famine, severe weather, natural disasters and a pandemic.
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic was devastating. It took millions of lives. It continues to affect our economies and, with that, the well-being of our people. It set us back in our fight against the crisis of climate change and progress on the Sustainable Development Goals while we looked to the health crisis that was right in front of us.
While we enter a period now in which the crisis is subsiding, the lessons cannot. COVID-19 schooled us. It forced us to acknowledge how interconnected and therefore how reliant we are on one another. We move between one another’s countries with increasing ease. We trade our goods and services. When one link in our supply chain is affected, we all are.
The lessons of COVID-19 are, in many ways, the same as the lessons of climate change. When crisis is upon us, we cannot and will not solve these issues on our own. The next pandemic will not be prevented by one country’s efforts, but by all of ours. Climate action will only ever be as successful as the least committed country, as they pull down the ambition of the collective.
However, I am not suggesting that we rely on the goodwill of others to make progress. We need a dual strategy — one in which we push for collective effort but also use our multilateral tools to make progress. That is why, on pandemic preparedness, we support efforts to develop a new global health legal instrument, strengthened international health regulations and a strong and empowered World Health Organization.
It is why we are such advocates of the World Trade Organization and its reform to ensure supply chains remain open and critical goods and services are not subjected to protectionism in times of need. It is why we have worked so hard within the Paris Agreement to see the action we need on climate change, while also doing our bit at home, including by putting a 1.5°C warming limit into law; increasing our nationally determined contribution to 50 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030; and quadrupling our climate finance commitment.
Whether on climate, trade, health crises or seeking peaceful solutions to war and conflict, New Zealand has always been a believer in multilateral tools. We were among the founding members of the United Nations, as Governments of the day recognized that the perils of war would be avoided only through a greater sense of shared responsibility. The basis on which this institution was formed remains as relevant today as it was then. But without reform, we risk irrelevancy.
There is perhaps no greater example of that than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Let us all be clear: Russia’s war is illegal and immoral. It is a direct attack on the Charter of the United Nations and the international rules-based system and everything that this community should stand for. Putin’s suggestion that Russia could, at any point, deploy further weapons that it has at its disposal reveals the false narrative upon which they have based their invasion. What country that claims to be a liberator threatens to annihilate the very civilians it claims to liberate? The war is based on a lie.
But I recognize that, for the people of Ukraine who have lost loved ones, their sense of peace and security and their livelihoods, these are all just words. They need us, as a global community, to ask one simple question: “What if it were us?” Our ability to answer that question with any confidence in the fact that we have the tools as a global community to act swiftly and collectively has been severely undermined. In March, when we most needed the Security Council to act in the defence of international peace and security, it could not. It did not fulfil its mandate because of one permanent member who was willing to abuse its privileged position. That was wrong.
We will not give up on the ability of our multilateral institutions to stand up against that illegal war or to take on the many challenges we face. Those institutions are the ballast we need, but it is a ballast that requires modernization fit for the tumultuous waters we all face. That is why New Zealand was pleased to champion the veto initiative. Not only does it provide an opportunity to scrutinize the actions of the permanent member who cast a veto, but the veto initiative also gives the whole United Nations membership a voice where the Security Council has been unable to act.
But we continue to call for more than that. For the United Nations to maintain its relevancy and to ensure that it truly is the voice of the breadth of countries it represents, the veto must be abolished, and permanent members must exercise their responsibility for the benefit of international peace and security, rather than the pursuit of national interests.
There are other battles that we continue to wage as a nation, including our call for a global response to the use of nuclear weapons. Our history of championing not just the non-proliferation but the prohibition of nuclear weapons is grounded in what we have witnessed, as well as what we have experienced. We are a nation that is both of the Pacific and within it. It was in our region that those weapons of war were tested. Those tests have left a mark on the people, lands and waters of our home. The only way to guarantee our people that they will be safe from the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons is for them not to exist.
That is why New Zealand calls on all States that share that conviction to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Some will call such a position naive. Some believe that we are safer as a result of nuclear weapons. In New Zealand, we have never accepted the wisdom of mutually assured destruction. It takes one country to believe that their cause is nobler, their might stronger or their people more willing to be sacrificed. None of us can stand at this rostrum and turn a blind eye to the fact that there are already leaders among us who believe that.
Nuclear weapons do not make us safer. There will be those who agree, but believe it is simply too hard to rid ourselves of nuclear weapons at this juncture.
There is no question that nuclear disarmament is an enormous challenge, but if given the choice — and we are being given a choice — surely we would choose the challenge of disarmament over the consequences of a failed strategy of weapons-based deterrence. This is why we will continue to advocate for meaningful progress
on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Such progress and consensus was recently blocked by Russia and represented a backwards step in the efforts of nearly every country in the world to make some even limited progress on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.
None of that will stop New Zealand’s advocacy. We will remain a strong and passionate advocate for efforts to address the weapons of old, but we will also be an advocate in addressing the weapons that are new. After all, the face of war has changed and, with it, the weapons used. The tools used to challenge the statehood of others are hidden and more complex. Traditional combat, espionage and the threat of nuclear weapons are now accompanied by cyberattacks, prolific disinformation and the manipulation of entire communities and societies.
As leaders, we have never treated the weapons of old in the same way as those that have emerged. That is understandable. After all, a bullet takes a life, and a bomb takes out a whole village, while a lie online or from a podium does not. But what if that lie, told repeatedly and across many platforms, prompts, inspires or motivates others to take up arms, threaten the security of others or turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them? What then? This is no longer a hypothetical. The weapons of war have changed, they are upon us and they require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old.
We recognized the threats that the old weapons created. We came together as communities to minimize those threats. We created international rules, norms and expectations. We never saw that as a threat to our individual liberties — rather, it was a preservation of them. The same must apply now as we take on those new challenges.
In New Zealand, we deeply value our right to protest. Some of our major social progress has been brought about by hikoi or people power, including becoming the first country in the world to recognize women’s right to vote and movement on major indigenous and human rights issues, to name but a few.
Upholding those values in a modern environment translates into protecting a free, secure and open Internet in order to realize all of the opportunities that it presents in the way we communicate, organize and gather. But that does not mean the absence of transparency, expectations or even rules, if we correctly identify what it is we are trying to prevent. Surely we can start with violent extremism and terrorist content online.
On 15 March 2019, New Zealand experienced a horrific terrorist attack on its Muslim community. More than 50 people were killed as they prayed. The attack was live-streamed on a popular social media platform in an effort to gain notoriety and to spread hate. At that time, the ability to thwart those goals was limited, and the chances of Government alone being able to resolve that gap was equally challenging. That is why, alongside President Emmanuel Macron of France, we created the Christchurch Call to Action. The Call to Action community has worked together to address terrorism and violent extremist content online.
As that important work progresses, we have demonstrated the impact we can have by working together collaboratively. We have improved crisis reactions, stymieing the ability to live-stream attacks and have crisis protocols that kick in to prevent proliferation. We are also focused on prevention and understanding those interactions between online environments and the real world that can lead to radicalization. This week we launched an initiative alongside companies and non-profits to help improve research and understanding of how a person’s online experiences are curated by automated processes. That will also be important in understanding more about misinformation and disinformation online — a challenge that we, as leaders, must address.
Sadly, I think it is easy to dismiss this problem as one in the margins. I can certainly understand the desire to leave it to someone else. As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even the most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly.
But while I cannot tell you today what the answer is to that challenge, I can say with complete certainty that we cannot ignore it. To do so poses an equal threat to the norms we all value. After all, how do we successfully end a war if people are led to believe that the reason for its existence is not only legal, but noble? How do we tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists? How do we ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?
The weapons may be different, but the goals of those who perpetuate them are often the same: to cause chaos and reduce the ability of others to defend themselves; to disband communities; and to collapse the collective strength of countries that work together.
But we have an opportunity here to ensure that those particular weapons of war do not become an established part of warfare. Therefore, we once again come back to the primary tool we have: diplomacy, dialogue and working together on solutions that do not undermine human rights, but that enhance them. For those who have not sought out the Christchurch Call to Action, I ask that they consider it. As with so many of the challenges we face, we will only be as strong as those who do the least.
In these times, I am acutely aware of how easy it is to feel disheartened. We are facing many battles on many fronts. But there is cause for optimism, because for every new weapon we face, there is a new tool to overcome it. Every attempt to push the world into chaos is a collective conviction to bring us back to order. We have the means; we just need the collective will.