Parliaments in the UK, Australia, Canada and Brazil are waking up to the role of the social media giant in their democracies and is demanding Mark Zuckerberg answer questions. Toby Manhire attempts to learn where New Zealand sits on the issue – and is deeply unimpressed with what he finds.

An annus horribilis for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook comes to a head tomorrow at Westminster, as a special “international grand committee on disinformation and fake news” gathers. Eight parliaments have summoned the Facebook boss, demanding he appear before them. In a letter addressed to Zuckerberg at Facebook’s tech-bro-swagger address, 1 Hacker Way, California, the chairs of parliamentary committees from the UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, Argentina, Latvia, Singapore and Brazil demand the most powerful person in the world’s media afford them the same respect he did the European parliament and the US congress – answer some questions. After he indicated he couldn’t make it to London, they suggested a video-link would do the trick. It’s unlikely he’ll be able to manage even that. Maybe he’s forgotten his Skype password.

These politicians insist that the Facebook CEO and chairman – who reportedly has told his employees they are at “war” – must front up and be held accountable after a cavalcade of scandals around the social media monster’s impact on elections, the media and democracy in general. The temperature went up several notches yesterday with news of an extraordinary seizure of internal Facebook documents. The documents are thought to provide clues to who knew what about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exploded in March, confirming the UK-based consulting firm had illicitly hoovered up and used for political purposes the personal Facebook data of millions of Facebook profiles without users’ consent.

In the American blur of Thanksgiving eve last week, Facebook confirmed another bombshell story from a week earlier in the New York Times. In the wake of 2017 revelations around the use of Facebook by Russian interests to influence the presidential election in favour of Donald Trump, executives had engaged the PR outfit Definers Public Affairs to propagate negative stories about Facebook’s critics – among them the philanthropist George Soros, a favourite target of anti-semitic slurs from the far right. The Times report saw Facebook stock drop to its lowest level in almost two years.

And those are just the most conspicuous scandals. Facebook has faced constant criticism over dodgy data, massive security breaches, its malign impact on the media and disdain for journalists. Should any of that seems abstract, consider its role in the Rohingya genocide. Please read about that and see if you can stay calm.

On one level, it is inevitable that Facebook should be incessantly under pressure and in the news – it is after all an unprecedented kind of global power, connecting 2.2 billion people a month. But most of all it underscores something that will soon be regarded, surely, as unimaginable: the quite extraordinary and ongoing evasion of regulation. Mark Zuckerberg likes to preach Facebook’s commitment to “building the long term social infrastructure to bring humanity together”, but God forbid any public scrutiny while he’s doing it.

That a company so huge, so influential, which seeps into every chink of society and politics, and which has in its possession the greatest private trove of information about humans’ lives – even those which don’t use Facebook – in, well, the history of the world, should be so utterly and oftentimes contemptuously impervious to serious oversight by our elected representatives is the greatest joke the 21st century has played on us.

So no wonder that the US and the EU, the UK and Australia and Canada, Ireland, Singapore, Brazil and others are beginning to show a willingness to push back. Where’s New Zealand on that list? It seems a like-minded bunch, right? Where are we?

The best-suited select committee here to add its name to the signatories is the Justice Committee. Had there been talks with the UK committee spear-heading the whole thing? And what was the general view about the role of Facebook on our democracy, that sort of thing? I met with its chair last week to pose those questions and more.

“I have not had any contact with or correspondence from international counterparts on this question,” said Raymond Huo, chair of the Justice Committee.

“The Justice Committee is currently undertaking an inquiry into the 2017 general election and 2016 local elections,” he said.

“By convention, a parliamentary committee undertakes such an inquiry after every general election. The terms of reference for the inquiry include ‘the increased importance and use of social media in campaigning, advertising, and expression of political opinions’. The work of the committee on the inquiry is ongoing.”

(He didn’t mention that the inquiry is being livestreamed. On Facebook.)

But that was pretty much it. “I am mindful that as chairperson, I speak for the Justice Committee as a whole, and do so only when the committee empowers me to do so,” he said. “I therefore have no comment as chairperson on your other questions at this time.”

What about the attorney-general. He is after all tasked with maintaining the rule of law. And David Parker isn’t the kind of politician to shrink from an important democratic issue.

“No comment,” he said.

OK. What about the justice minister, Andrew Little?

He hasn’t replied to a request for comment.

Maybe he will. (Update: he has.) Maybe there’s someone in our parliament who gives a shit about all of this. I look forward to hearing from them. Until then, as the government continues to pour untold millions of public dollars into a bulldozing offshore media behemoth that has a terrible reputation as a global citizen and shows enormous enthusiasm for not paying tax in places like New Zealand, the only question is whether the puny shrug on this urgently important question is because we’re supine or naive.

Washington and Beijing won’t be fooled by the bridge and broker rhetoric. They know that should push come to shove New Zealand will have to make a choice writes security consultant Paul Buchanan

The Labour-led government in New Zealand has settled on a new mantra when it comes to addressing the US-China rivalry. It claims that New Zealand is ideally situated to become a bridge between the two great powers and an honest broker when it comes to their interaction with the Southwest Pacific. This follows the long-held multi-party consensus that New Zealand’s foreign policy is independent and autonomous, and based on respect for international norms and multinational institutions.

The problem is that the new foreign policy line is an illusion. It ignores historical precedent, the transitional nature of the current international context, the character and strategic objectives of the US and the PRC and the fact that New Zealand is neither independent or autonomous in its foreign affairs.

The historical precedent is that in times of conflict between great powers, small states find it hard to remain neutral and certainly do not serve as bridges between them. The dilemma is exemplified by the island of Melos during the Peloponnesian Wars, when Melos expressed neutrality between warring Athens and Sparta. Although Sparta accepted its position Athens did not and Melos was subjugated by the Athenians.

In stable world times small states may exercise disproportionate influence in global affairs because the geopolitical status quo is set and systemic changes are incremental and occur within the normative framework and around the margins of the system as given. When international systems are unstable and in transition, small states are relegated to the sidelines while great powers hash out the contours of the emerging world order—often via conflict. Such is the case now, which has seen the unipolar system dominated by the US that followed the bi-polar Cold War now being replaced by an emerging multi-polar system aggregating new and resurgent powers, some of which are hostile to the West.

In this transitional moment the US is in relative decline and has turned inward under a Trump administration that is polarising at home and abroad. It is still a formidable economic and military power but it is showing signs of internal weakness and external exhaustion that have made it more reactive and defensive in its approach to global affairs. China is a rising great power with global ambition and long-term strategic plans, particularly when it comes to power projection in the Western Pacific Rim. It sees itself as the new regional power in Asia, replacing the US, and has extended its influence world-wide.That includes involvement in the domestic politics and economic matters of Pacific Island states, including Australia and New Zealand.

China’s rise and the US decline are most likely to first meet in the Western Pacific. When they do, the consequences will be far reaching. Already the US has started a trade war with the Chinese while reinforcing its armed presence in the region at a time when China cannot (as of yet) militarily challenge it. China has responded by deepening its dollar and debt diplomacy in Polynesia and Melanesia as part of the Belt and Road initiative, now paralleled by an increased naval and air presence extending from the South and East China Seas into the blue water shipping lanes of the Pacific.

There lies the rub. New Zealand is neither independent or autonomous when it confronts this emerging strategic landscape. Instead, it has dichotomised its foreign policy. On the security front, it is militarily tied to the US via the Wellington and Washington Declarations of 2010 and 2012. It is a founding member and integral component of the Anglophone 5 Eyes signal intelligence gathering network led by the US. It is deeply embedded in broader Western security networks, whose primary focus of concern, beyond terrorism, is the hostile activities of China and Russia against liberal democracies and their interests.

On trade, New Zealand has an addict-like dependency on agricultural commodity and primary good exports, particularly milk solids. Its largest trading partner and importer of those goods is China. Unlike Australia, which can leverage its export of strategic minerals that China needs for its continued economic growth and industrial ambitions under the China 2025 program, New Zealand’s exports are elastic, substitutable by those of competitors and inconsequential to China’s broader strategic planning. This makes New Zealand extremely vulnerable to Chinese economic retaliation for any perceived slight, something that the Chinese have been clear to point out when it comes to subjects such as the South China island-building dispute or western concerns about the true nature of Chinese developmental aid to Pacific Island Forum countries.

As a general rule issue linkage is the best approach to trade and security: trading partners make for good security partners because their interests are complementary (security protects trade and trade brings with it the material prosperity upon which security is built). Absent that, separating and running trade and security relations in parallel is practicable because the former do not interfere with the latter and vice versa. But when trade and security relations are counterpoised, that is, when a country trades preferentially with one antagonist while maintaining security ties with another, then the makings of a foreign policy conundrum are made. This is exactly the situation New Zealand finds itself in, or what can be called a self-made “Melian dilemma”.

Under such circumstances it is delusional to think that New Zealand can serve as a bridge between the US and China, or as an honest broker when it comes to great power projection in the Southwest Pacific. Instead, it is diplomatically caught between a rock and a hard place even though in practice it leans more West than East.

The latter is an important point. Although a Pacific island nation, New Zealand is, by virtue of its colonial and post-colonial history, a citizen of the west. The blending of Māori and Pasifika culture gave special flavour to the Kiwi cultural mix but it never strayed from its western orientation during its modern history. That, however, began to change with the separation of trade from security relations as of the 1980s (where New Zealand began to seek out non-Western trade partners after its loss of preferred trade status with UK markets), followed by increasingly large waves of non-European immigration during the next three decades. Kiwi culture has begun to change significantly in recent years and so with it its international orientation. Western perspectives now compete with Asian and Middle Eastern orientations in the cultural milieu, something that has crept into foreign policy debates and planning. The question is whether the new cultural mix will eventuate in a turn away from Western values and towards those of Eurasia.

The government’s spin may just be short term diplomatic nicety posing as a cover for its dichotomous foreign policy strategy. Given its soft-peddling of the extent of Chinese influence operations in the country, it appears reluctant to confront the PRC on any contentious issue because it wants to keep trade and diplomatic lines open. Likewise, its silence on Trump’s regressions on climate change, Trans-Pacific trade and support for international institutions may signal that the New Zealand government is waiting for his departure before publicly engaging the US on matters of difference. Both approaches may be prudent but are certainly not examples of bridging or brokering.

While New Zealand audiences may like it, China and the US are not fooled by the bridge and broker rhetoric. They know that should push come to shove New Zealand will have to make a choice. One involves losing trade revenues, the other involves losing security guarantees. One involves backing a traditional ally, the other breaking with tradition in order to align with a rising power. Neither choice will be pleasant and it behooves foreign policy planners to be doing cost/benefits analysis on each because the moment of decision may be closer than expected.

This post originally appeared at Kiwipolitico.