If nobody is planning to invade New Zealand, why would we need a defence force? So runs the logic of those questioning the decision to increase defence spending.
 
The awkward part: the first half is true. Nobody is planning to invade us.
 
Repelling invasion has never been the job. The NZDF does other work that defends our national interests.
 
New Zealand looks after a patch of ocean fifteen times the size of our land, an area of great interest to many others. We are a trading nation. Almost everything we sell and buy travels by ship; tourism needs open skies; and our internet runs through seabed cables that others pay to protect.
 
We also sit in Five Eyes, the intelligence club with America, Britain, Canada and Australia. That seat is not free, although our Australian mates have long called us a defence free rider.
 
Then the neighbourhood changed. In 2022, China signed a security agreement with the Solomon Islands, a few hours’ flight away. Last year, Chinese warships’ live-fire exercises in the Tasman forced airlines to reroute. Last month, China fired a nuclear-capable missile into our nuclear-free region.
 
Then there is our own Navy. In October 2024, HMNZS Manawanui ran onto the Samoan reef it was surveying, caught fire and sank. The Court of Inquiry found that no one aboard qualified for the survey and listed twelve failings. One was hollowness: a ship and crew, but too few trained people to make either work.
 
Germany managed the same trick on a grander scale. During a 2014 NATO exercise, soldiers stuck black-painted broomsticks on their vehicles. They had run out of machine guns. Germany has since spent hundreds of billions and changed its constitution. Twelve years on, it is still buying back what military capability it threw away.
 
Our Army, including Special Operations, sits at a declared 45% of the required level. We know it; so do those who are interested in us.   
 
The invoice has arrived: twelve billion dollars over four years, taking defence spending to around two dollars in every hundred New Zealanders earn annually. The plan runs fifteen years, spanning three or four governments.
 
Cutting the spend would save little: a hollow force costs almost as much as a real one.  
 
The long and winding road towards strategic relevance starts now, if only we are willing to invest in our national interest.

Bürgen is leaving New Zealand. After decades on our supermarket shelves, the grainy loaves with the German name will soon be gone.

Except the name was never German. Master baker Doug Leighton invented Bürgen in the 1980s. Its owner, George Weston Foods, is as Australian as Vegemite.

The recipe leaned on Europe, and the umlaut (ü) did the rest.

With two tiny dots above a vowel, a factory loaf somehow becomes European. The umlaut promises density, seriousness and authenticity. As a native German speaker, I am impressed.

The trick is rather old: in 1959, Reuben and Rose Mattus, Polish-Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, needed a name for their premium ice cream. They settled on Häagen-Dazs to make it sound of old-world sophistication.

Except, Häagen-Dazs means nothing in any language. Danish has æ, ø and å but no ä, and no Danish word contains “zs”. Early cartons showed a map of Denmark anyway.

New Zealand later added Haägen, a locally brewed “German-style” lager that moved the ice cream’s dots one vowel along, as if that made a difference.

Nobody understood the umlaut premium better than Ahmet Yaltirakli, an Istanbul-born, Cologne-raised entrepreneur who started a bakery chain in Sydney.

Yaltirakli was not even a baker; his dough arrived deep frozen from Germany. But he had the genius to call his shops Lüneburger, after a town he had never visited. You cannot get more German than the dots on the ü, he reasoned. Eleven successful bakeries across New South Wales prove him right.

Heavy metal made the same discovery. Motörhead, Mötley Crüe and Blue Öyster Cult adopted the umlaut to look dangerous. However, I still do not understand what should be dangerous about a vowel modifier.

The fans never attempt the pronunciation, because the dots are body paint rather than language. Except for their German fans who got confused.

The genuine German special characters get no such respect. In England, my old English teacher, Frau Voß, pronounced “Foss”, became Mrs Vob, with her ß mistaken for a b. And every German abroad knows ALT+0228 by heart, the five keystrokes between us and a properly spelled ä.

So farewell, Bürgen. New Zealand mourns you as a German loss, which is generous, because no German ever mistook your loaves for German bread.

A proper Roggenbrot, a dense rye, holds its shape against two fingers. Bürgen’s surrendered half its volume the way Worcestershire loses half its letters in the mouth. German bread, like German words, resists compression.

The umlaut was real. Nothing else ever was.