New Zealand ‘must never be seen as a proxy’, former PM Helen Clark warns

Helen Clark spent nine years running New Zealand and eight more running the United Nations’ development arm. Now, the former prime minister has a warning for the country she once led: do not let the scramble for Pacific security deals crowd out its much-vaunted independent foreign policy tradition. Speaking to This Week in Asia in Singapore on Tuesday, Clark argued that Wellington’s recent flurry of defence diplomacy – including a defence cooperation pact with Papua New Guinea, a joint security.

Original reporting by South China Morning Post · Jean Iau. GridIndex is an aggregation and intelligence layer — full credit to the original publisher.