By Deborah Williams,
Published by World Beyond War, 8 October 2025
Here is breaking news from my city Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. The aerospace industry here started with a simple New Zealand-owned rocket site industry in the North Island named RocketLab operating on Māori land on the Mahia Peninsula. Later they were sending USA military payloads into space and are now U.S.-owned. RocketLab is launching BlackSky satellites which are used to gather intelligence on Palestine civilians, allowing Israel to bomb them with precision.
There is now another company here in the South Island (known as Te Waipounamu – hence our WBW chapter name) named Dawn Aerospace operating on Māori-owned land at the Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre, an hour from our city. As yet, we don’t know much about this operation.
The National Aerospace Convention is taking place in the city right now. Yesterday my husband and I went at 11 a.m. for an hour to stand with the WBW banner and our Quaker sign. The other protesters left not long after we arrived. Today the main speakers were due to arrive so Peace Action Ōtautahi (Māori name for our city) demonstrated from an early hour to try and shut down the convention. By the time I arrived at about 12.30 pm there were no other demonstrators.
Murray Horton, long-time Anti-Bases Campaigner provided these links:
‘Thrown backwards into a garden’: Activists allege rough treatment as police make dozens of arrests
Arrests as protesters target Christchurch aerospace summit
Here’s another:
Dozens of protesters arrested at Aerospace Summit in Christchurch
Response to the Minister of War and Space, Judith Collins, on the Aerospace Summit
By Val for Peace Action Wellington
Today’s blockade outside the Aerospace Summit in Ōtautahi/Christchurch was a massive show of desire for peace, justice and an end to New Zealand’s complicity in the US empire’s endless warmaking.
The brave people who locked on, linked arms and bore the brunt of police violence did so because they care deeply about a world free of genocidal violence driven by capitalist greed and colonialist exploitation.
At the time of writing, there were known to be 39 arrests. These awesome people will be facing the wrath of the state in court proceedings, so please help out the legal fund if you can.
Unsurprisingly, the government’s loudest cheerleader for weapons and war, Judith Collins described protesters as “living in another world” and went on to claim that:
“I actually do say to some people, they’re living in the past, they’re living 30, 40 years ago, they need to get with it and get with the programme.”
“We’re also very aware that the space industry in New Zealand is primarily civilian – not all, but primarily,” she went on to say.
And, “New Zealand was lucky to have companies like Rocket Lab and the billions of dollars the wider industry brought to the country’s economy.”
Get with the programme!
Minister Collins wants all of us who dare to care about genocide and other war crimes to just put those to one side and “get with the programme”. The programme is for NZ companies to make some money in the global arms trade.
Needless to say, life 30 or 40 years ago would indeed have been different than it is now – but the world was not a less dangerous or conflict-ridden place. In 1985 the world was embroiled in a nuclear arms race between the US and USSR that included testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific.
In 1995, war raged in Yugoslavia – often described as one of Europe’s deadliest armed conflicts since World War II, the successive wars were marked by many war crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, massacres, and mass wartime rape. Also underway was the Afghan civil war that ultimately brought the Taliban to power, and subsequently gave safe haven to Osama Bin Laden – and embroiled NZ in 20 years of US-led war.
The arms industry has been trying to sell the world on the necessity of war for generations. With each new generation, it needs a new enemy for us to hate and fight.
The Minister is just the latest lackey for the US government and arms industry propaganda: get weapons now or you will be sorry!
“Primarily civilian”
The Minister says that we should all be OK with the aerospace industry because it only does a little bit of war profiteering. There is just a little bit of Palestinian blood on their hands.
The industry does not seem to know or care if it is making money from genocide and murder. One Aerospace attendee noted that, “”The drone doesn’t know if it’s being flown for military or civilian purposes…”.
History speaks for itself: the entire local industry was established because of Rocket Lab. And what company – what funder – sits behind Rocket Lab? Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms manufacturer.
The satellites that Rocket Lab launches that spy on the people of Gaza, well those are commercial satellites owned by a company called Black Sky, not strictly military satellites. Poor thing: it doesn’t know if it’s being flown to help a genocide or a bombing raid.
Another Aerospace Summit attendee was Samuel Vye, head of Syos, a dronemaker with over $60 million in UK contracts. Syos sponsored a drone conference in Israel last year with two other major drone manufacturers.
Peace Action Ōtautahi has documented attendance the Summit from members of the US’s Department of War to European weapons dealers directly supplying the Israeli Occupation Forces.
So not so civilian, really.
We’re just so LUCKY!
Rocket Lab and all their buddies are bringing in so much cash, the Minister says, so we should be grateful. We should feel LUCKY!
Despite ‘defence’ being the world’s most profitable industry, the NZ taxpayer gave Rocket Lab $25 million on 2017 for some ‘start up’ help, then it gave Rocket Lab another $2.85 million in Covid wage subsidies (in a year that they recorded $1.1million in profit), and then it gave $8.3 million from the provincial growth fund to pave the road out to their launch pad in Māhia. This was all before the Minister announced some $600 million for the sector in spending, and another $100-$300 ‘technology accelerator’. Aren’t we lucky!
It looks very much like the we’re paying for the LUCK of being a target in any war between the US and China; paying for the LUCK of contributing to a genocide; and paying for the LUCK of having a domestic arms industry instead of a functioning society where people have jobs, homes and prospects for the future.
The reality is that the millions spent subsidising the arms industry is money that should be spent subsidising our health, education and welfare systems for the people who live here. It should be spent subsidising the ecological restoration that we urgently need and which improves the life of every person on earth.
Reality check for the Minister
The Minister is the one who is living in another world: the zionist, murderous, imperial halls of the US military industrial complex she’s been swanning around lately. She is living in the fantasy that siding with the US and its weapons industry provides benefits or guarantees for the people of this land.
Despite decades of trying, Aotearoa NZ has never had and never will have a free trade agreement (FTA) with the US. China is our largest trading partner and signed an FTA nearly 20 years ago. Instead trade with the US has gone backwards with the imposition of 15% tariffs this year.
The US also isn’t some reliable guarantor of security. The long dead US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said, “the US doesn’t have friends, it has interests.” Come crunch time, the US will only be there for NZ if it is useful for them. We are just a plaything, a cute little toy, in their playground of empire. They will happily bomb us or kill us if we truly stand in the way of their interests. They have proved this time and time again all over the world.
If there is one thing that is true of today it is that there are no certainties or absolutes on which to pin our future, least of all, Trump’s America.
Peace Action Ōtautahi concluded their blockade by saying: “This partnership of sadistic military executives, profit-hungry tech bros, and the New Zealand government is absolutely appalling. Our country is not only volunteering itself as a violent tool of imperialism, but strengthening the means by which it can silence protest and target civilians within Aotearoa.”
We couldn’t agree more.
See: Original Article
