As many people will know by now, the government has invited a warship here and is hosting a arms expo in mid-November linking it to celebrations of the Navy’s 75th birthday. Discussion about this has tended to centre around whether the ship is nuclear-armed in line with NZ’s anti-nuclear stance of some thirty years, but the bigger question is, why are we even inviting these warmongers here peddling death when the world is in much more need of promoting peace instead of war?

New Zealand has no enemies, it is common knowledge and has been acknowledged from high up in the armed forces recently that New Zealand’s defence forces are most notable for having no discernible threat. This exercise is being done solely to stay onside with the ‘big boys club’ that our morally-challenged PM is committed to being part of. He has no problem coming up with $20 billion for ‘defence’ against a non-existent enemy, but can’t find a tenth of that amount to feed the kids in schools or even show a murmur of interest in tackling child poverty or the housing crisis.

By aligning himself with the countries causing havoc in the Middle East, Key is actually edging NZ nearer to becoming a target for terrorists. For those who want to talk about Isis, broadly speaking Isis was created by America by its invasion of Iraq, and the best response would be to withdraw from any more bombing instead of escalating it. You can’t bring peace by bombing people.

This arms expo, with arms dealers coming from all over the world peddling these obscene weapons of mass-destruction, amounts to a celebration of war and should not be hosted by a peace-loving nation like New Zealand. The arms industry is driven by money and it is in the interests of these arms dealers to promote endless war, the doctrine that first became overt during the administration of George W Bush. There are a number of protests planned for that week (Nov 14 – 19), mostly family-friendly events, and the more people support the alternative vision of peace instead of war the better.

Ultimately it would be great to shut down the arms industry altogether. This might seem quite Utopian while so much of America’s economy depends on it, but it would be much better to channel the economy into something more productive. It starts with imagining a world without arms dealers – then it seems more possible.