Bridging the ditch : reassessing the Australia-New Zealand alliance for a more contested Indo-Pacific

Abstract

The view from Canberra and Wellington is of a fraught Indo-Pacific. National strategic outlooks illustrate converging pressures: great power competition, climate-driven instability, rising coercion, and an eroding rules-based order. This report examines how these overlapping challenges are reshaping regional stability and straining the multilateral frameworks that underpin it. Australia and New Zealand are recalibrating their strategic postures. Although broadly aligned, evolving threats require a critical reassessment of their bilateral cooperation.

Focusing on defence interoperability and policy alignment, this report explores the Australia–New Zealand alliance as a potential site of strategic resilience. It does so by drawing on interviews with defence and foreign affairs officials, policymakers, and regional experts to identify alliance opportunities and challenges, and practical avenues for increased cooperation. The rich insight from this data reveals important nuance in the relationship: strategic divergence, the risks of over-integration, and an underemphasised Pacific perspective. However, it also reinforces deep alignment in security outlooks and priorities, highlighting key areas where greater integration could lead to significant security advantages to both nations. This is woven together into practitioner-oriented policy and strategy recommendations, anchored in the contemporary advice of some of the region’s leading experts. The findings suggest that deeper integration is not only desirable but increasingly necessary—if calibrated to leverage complementarity while protecting sovereign decision-making across the broad stakeholders of Indo-Pacific security.