Susannah Patton: Lowy Institute's SouthEast Asia Program Director on New Zealand's influence on decline

New Zealand’s influence as a nation is on the decline, according to the Lowy Institute’s annual Asia Power Index. 

NZ is one of only three countries to go backwards, alongside Russia and Myanmar. 

A traceable drop in diplomacy since 2018 is partly to blame. 

Lowy Institute’s SouthEast Asia Program Director Susannah Patton tells Mike Hosking the index looks at a range of things including economy, economic relationships and diplomacy. 

Patton says China’s power is described as plateauing due to long-term challenges. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Not good news. I'm afraid for New Zealand. Inc our
influences and nations on the decline comes from the Lowe Institute.
They're out of Australia. Of course, they release their annual
Asia Power Index. We're one of only three countries to
go backwards. The other two are Russia and Me and
mass who are an excellent company. A traceable drop in
diplomacy since twenty eighteen. I wonder who that would have
been traceable drop in diplomacy twenty eighteen. Who was running

(00:21):
the place. Lowe Institute Southeast Asia Program director of Susanna
Patents with US Susanna, good morning, Good morning. So China
beats out the Americans and the Asia Pacific militarily for
the first time. How are these things actually measured?

Speaker 2 (00:36):
So we have more than one hundred and thirty indicators
that go into our index. So in terms of military capability,
for example, we're looking at both the size of the
armed forces, the equipment inventories, and then also measures that
we take from an expert survey where we ask people, Okay,
so a country has this many tanks, but how well

(00:56):
prepared are they actually to go to war? So that's
one measure, and then we also look at a whole
range of other things including the size of the economy,
economic relationships, and diplomacy.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Okay, when we look at the top five countries, the States, China, India, Japan,
and Australia. Is Australia helped by August.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Not yet actually, because August hasn't really delivered much yet,
so that's yet to show through in our data. Definitely,
participation in the alliance network and defense networks is a
phenomenon that we've seen over the last five years that
the US has been doing a lot more, especially with Japan,

(01:35):
actually even more so than with Australia. So we see
that in the data that we collect about for example,
combined military exercises and.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Is Japan seen as increasingly proactive in the region.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yes, So Japan is really interesting because overall, actually we
would say that Japan is in relative decline because it
has an aging society. But we do see that Japan
is playing a much more active role when it comes
to defense and security relationships, especially with countries in Southeast Asia.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Take out the military aspect of China, are they waning
or increasing?

Speaker 2 (02:10):
We describe China's power as plateauing, and that's what we've
seen over the last five years. But the US still
remains ahead of China. And I think many people would
have expected that year on year China would be making steady,
steady gains to overtake the US, but actually that hasn't happened,
and the US remains about ten percent more powerful than China.

(02:31):
And that's due to a few different factors, including the
fact that the US economy is pretty strong, whereas China
faces a lot of long term challenges there.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Greater insights isn't appreciated very much. Suzanne petn Out of
the Low Institute up early for US in Australia this morning.
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