Kilda. I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. A search for answers is underway after the HM and Z S Manawanui ran aground and sank near Samoa. The one hundred million dollar ship left Auckland's devonport just over a week ago and was conducting a reef survey off the coast of Samoa, but ran aground at six forty six pm on Saturday. The ship started to take on water shortly after, and fire broke out as well, prompting an
evacuation of all personnel on board. In the end, seventy five crew and passengers were rescued by Samora's Fire and Emergency Services Authority. A Court of inquiry is underway to find out exactly what happened, while cruis are on their way back, to work out how it can be salvaged
and if there's an environmental concern from leaking fuel. Today on the Front Page, Dr John Battersby, a teaching fellow in the Center for Defense and Security at Massi University, joins us to discuss the historic nature of this incident and its potential impact on geopolitical relationships. John, what were your first thoughts when you heard the news.
Well, being a Wellington resident, we were woken up at five oh eight with a rather nasty earthquake, so it
was fearing. Shortly after that that we spotted the news that the ship had gone down, and it's a vessel that does that important survey of the ocean floor work and one of the reasons of the ocean floor changes there was an earthquake, so it sort of came as a little bit of a shock and definitely a sense of this is an important piece of capability that we could be losing here, So that was my first impression of it.
Are obviously saying it's too early to speculate whether a mechanical failure or human error are to blame, and we'll go along with that, but can you tell me what could have happened here? I suppose or we really just don't know until that inquiry's over.
Well, we won't know until inquiries over, and there's a key piece of evidence on the bottom of the ocean, so they're going to have to get a look at that, and so there's going to be some time involved before we know exactly what's happened. The only other group of people that really know what's happened were on it, and they won't be talking to anybody other than the Inquiry. I wouldn't have thought so, really, it's going to come down to was this with the vessel or the people
on it? And it's going to be the Inquiry's job to work out which is what The.
Dramatic scenes unfolded this morning as h Men's it is Manuwannui became a burning haze of smoke before the vessel rolled and slipped beneath the ocean.
Oh love, it's gone down, it's gone. And then finally there was some big flame. For a couple of minutes, the flames were going up, and then the Bold sank.
This is a ship that unfortunately is pretty much gone. This could have been a truly terrible day, but actually it's a bad day.
Well.
The decision to evacuate the seventy five crew and passengers have been credited as likely to have prevented the loss of lives, which is just extraordinary. How rare is it to have an evacuation like this on a military vessel.
Well, it's been inly rear to heaven evacuation like this in New Zealand because we haven't lost ship since World War Two, so it would be something that they would practice. And it sounds as if the conditions were not ideal for this type of thing, So it's really it's been really good credit to them to get I would put that down to the training that they would have regularly
done for this sort of thing. So as rare as doing it operationally would be, it would something that they would have practiced, I would have expected, and that's probably part of the reason why everybody's got off.
We haven't lost a ship since World War II, you said, but do we lose many other vessels?
There are two sinkings in New Zealand orders that come to mind, the Wahini, which was nineteen sixty nine, and then I remember the Mikhail Lermaitov going down at some point during the nineteen eighties. So it's not a common thing anymore for large vessels to go down. We once it was far more common. So no, look, it's real.
It's very rare for a naval vessel to go down, and it's not happened to us since World War Two, but it does happen there has been a study that's looked at the number lost between World War Two and the late nineteen eighties, and I think we're over twelve hundred incidents at sea, and a large purport of those worse sinkings accidental sinkings of naval vessels, so bigger navies than us, with bigger vessels, and a more significant constant that has happened too, So we're not entirely alone in
naval history for losing a vessel in peacetime.
I kind of even began to imagine how much these kind of vessels cost. This one one hundred million dollars. But does that seem quite cheap to you?
I don't think anything's anything. Nothing's cheap in the in the fiscal times that we're in. It's a smaller vessel, I think, and it's a vessel there is for a set of specific, not especially military capabilities that it has. So look, I think it's a decent sum of money, but it doesn't seem to be an astronomical sum in terms of let's say we compare it to the new Into Irelander theories, which were projected to be three hundred million each, and the Air Force poseidons four of them.
We paid out two point three billion, So it's not like an astronomical sum that we wouldn't be able to find. I wouldn't have expect if we needed to replace that vessel. But still it's one hundred million dollars we could have spent somewhere else.
This not happened, And I suppose the big question is who pays for it? Now, do you reckon it's ensured?
I don't think you can ensure naval vessels. I don't know the answer to that question, so no, I think it'll come down to the government will have to if it chooses to replace it. The government, we'll need to find the money to do that.
How many naval vessels do we actually have in service?
I understand that we have nine ships eight now that would qualify as ships in service of the New Zealand Navy. So as a percentage of our navy, it represents a significant chunk of it.
Have we always kind of had about that nine ish or so? That seems quite small to me, but we are a small country, aren't we.
We are, and the levy has steadily declined over the years since War two. I can remember when we had six six frigates. We went down to four, then we went down to two. So it's we have a small navy. We are a small country. Our defense capability at sea has been declining now for fifty or sixty years.
Purchased in twenty eighteen from Norway, it was used in the oil and gas industry there. It cost US one hundred and three million dollars to buy and convert into a Navy ship, which was ready for service in twenty nineteen. The guy who signed the cabinet paper to get that done was Ron Mark Garted.
I'm pretty sad and oh yes, you know this one who loses ship that brought such an amazing capability to the Royal New Zealand Navy, into New Zealand as a whole, which quietly stunned a lot of our five Eyes and other partners because of its capability and the innovation and thinking that was behind its purchase. Yeah, lose that ship. We knew we should be a stopgap for about fifteen years.
I can't imagine this is a great look for our defense force. Is it to have a one hundred million dollar ship sink only a few years after service?
No, we've got to I think we've got to take that one on the chin that, yeah, we've taken a hit here. We've we've lost a vessel in peacetime. It's two weeks out from Choggham and some major Commonwealth heads of government meeting that's going to be right where our vessel was. We've got all three services and the police I presume also a running support for that. So it's definitely not a good look, and it's it's not a
good time for this for this to happen. But then there's I mentioned before, it's not like these things don't happen. It's inherently a risky thing to heat out on the open sea, and other navies have lost vessels in peace time with far greater consequences than what we've experienced here. So it's look, it's not an unknown thing to have a cured and.
We're trying to show our strength in the Pacific at the moment, aren't we a Commonwealth heads of government? And some I assume we're seeing that you mentioned. Is it fair to say that this is a little bit embarrassing, especially right before this event.
Of course, having said that, we've got to we've got to balance that up everybody survived, nobody's died, and if we have a little bit of a dent in our pride, well that's that's probably an okay loss to take. But yes, our strength in the Pacific, I'm not sure that's the
right term. I think it's our presence and influence in the Pacific as a player who is interested in the ongoing circumstances in the Pacific, the welfare of the Pacific island countries that are there, and the general geo strategic sort of setup. We're interested in maintaining our presence and our eyes on that. So there's all of that sort of stuff that that was part of, and that all of that has taken a little bit of a hit right now.
How easy is it to replace a boat like this? I can't imagine that there's an eBay for these kind of vessels.
Yeah, again, I'm not an expert in procurement. I can't imagine it's it's easy. If you just look.
At look online, there's bound to be one on trade. Me doesn't It would be a long process.
I asked the people who are trying to replace the Wellington depict in theories how it is to get a replacement yeah, I can't imagine it's it's that aage I would say, be a long, expensive.
Process inspecting New Zealand's aging defense fleet forty years old at least before announcing a funding boost to get the defense force on a fresher footing.
We have secured extra funding for defense of five hundred and seventy one million dollars.
Four hundred and eight million dollars is going towards equipment and infrastructure, subject or final green light for Cabinet. It will include replacing the unimogs and pinz Alga trucks. The NZI deaf's workhorses.
Oh, I can't even open it.
John. We've heard in the past about the underfunding of our defense force and it's infrastructure. After this incident, should we look at further investments.
I'm not sure. I'm not a big fan of experiencing a single incident and then making a whole lot of quite general reactions to that. I think what New Zealand needs to focus on is our defense mending, which I think roughly half per capita what Australia is, and whether that is appropriate given the changes they're going on in the Pacific. We like to think we've got responsibilities in the Pacific. We like to think that we can help those Pacific Onlming countries in the number of ways. We've
got geostrategic competition starting to show itself. Is the Chinese show that they're interested there? The Americans want to come back. So we've got a whole lot of geostrategic, geopolitical kind of decisions that we need to make. And the question we've got to ask ourselves is not whether this particular incident means we've got to refocus on how much defense
money we're spending. It's whether the objectives of New Zealand are met by what we are and if they are not, how much more do we need to get to those objectives. I think that's the question we've got to ask.
There are already reports of a strong smell of oil in some With those geopolitical issues in mind, how should New Zealand handle this potential environmental disaster, I guess, and the impacts in our relationship?
Yeah, so I think on that how you can't minimize impact to the environment.
Right, It's.
As I said, you go out to see you take the risk well of being out there. Pretty much every vessel that's that's out on the seat at the moments, full of full of fuel oil, because that's how we get around. We're an not isle nation and so are they, so it's not like we can exist without these vessels coming and going from our thoughts. So that sort of risk is the It's some There is always going to be I think a period of time after a vessel goes down where there is going to be an environmental impact.
But I tend to think of the English Channel in World War Two, where you know, dozens of ships potentially could have been going down on any given day, and the environmental damage that that must have done is something that nobody ever really asks about. So I think while there will be a short term amount of environmental damage, not to minimize it all it could be. It could be quite damaging for the economy there for a little while,
but things will recover. It's not a huge ship, it's not nuclear powered, so there are some I think there'll be a period of time where it's it's a concern and it may have an impact, but things will recover.
Thanks for joining us, John, That said, for this episode of the Front Page, you can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Siles with sound engineer Patty Fox.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
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