Did New Zealand need AUKUS to become a target?
Professor Gehan Gunasekara warns that joining AUKUS Pillar II could turn Rocket Lab's Mahia site into a wartime target. That exposure already exists, with or without Pillar II, and that his China comparison tells only half the story.
Gehan Gunasekara's New Zealand Herald column warns that joining Pillar II of AUKUS would draw New Zealand into what he calls “the technologies of modern warfare,” and could turn Rocket Lab's Mahia launch complex into a wartime target. It's a serious argument, made by a serious academic. It is also about three weeks behind where the record already sits.
In my feature article Is Rocket Lab a vehicle for US foreign policy in New Zealand?, I traced what Mahia already carries, Pillar II or no Pillar II. Locals were promised in 2021 that the site would carry “no military payloads.” Green MP Teanau Tuiono counted at least 13 US military or intelligence payloads launched from Mahia by that year. The National Reconnaissance Office has since flown at least four classified missions from the same paddock.
The money tells the same story more bluntly. Rocket Lab has picked up more than $1.3 billion in US defence contracts in under a year: an $816 million missile-tracking satellite deal with the Space Development Agency, a $190 million hypersonic test programme, and a $266 million Space Force suborbital contract. In January, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth toured the company's Long Beach plant as part of what he called an “Arsenal of Freedom” tour. None of that required New Zealand to sign anything.
Gunasekara is right that Santoro's description of Mahia as a “unique resilient platform” offering “critical redundancy to Western orbital infrastructure during a crisis” should worry New Zealanders. He is wrong to treat that redundancy as a future risk contingent on a Pillar II decision Cabinet has not made. It is a present fact, waved through under the Outer Space and High-altitude Activities Act, whose ministerial test has yet to turn back a single US military or intelligence launch.
There is also a second site he does not mention. In June, an unmarked radar installation at Warkworth was confirmed as belonging to LeoLabs, a California space-tracking company that markets a mobile radar system to military customers hunting manoeuvring spacecraft and hypersonic threats. New Zealand's exposure is no longer confined to a peninsula chosen for its emptiness. It now sits forty minutes from Auckland's biggest shopping mall.
New Zealand's exposure is no longer confined to a peninsula chosen for its emptiness.
Where Gunasekara's column is more interesting is what it leaves out on the China side. He describes the relationship as a source of “genuinely independent foreign policy,” pointing to Chinese restraint over tariffs and a court ruling favouring New Zealand apple growers. At the beginning of the month, my article Was New Zealand capitalism's soft underbelly? sets out a less comfortable picture. China takes 31 percent of our dairy exports and 61 percent of our timber, Fonterra's milk price is effectively set in Beijing, and the country's most successful industrial champion, BYD, ran on a $1.8 billion government subsidy in 2025 alone, worth 38 percent of its reported profit.
That piece also traces the political dimension Gunasekara skips: Anne-Marie Brady's documented Chinese Communist Party influence operations targeting both major parties, the undisclosed military intelligence background of former National MP Yang Jian, and a Cabinet minister who kept her seat after dining with a Chinese-linked company on an official trade delegation. Independence from Washington is not the same thing as independence, full stop.
New Zealand does not need to join Pillar II to discover it has already been drawn in. It needs to read the two ledgers, American and Chinese, on the same page.
