Defence
External - Short Term
Upon becoming Government, the McGillicuddy Serious Party will immediately sack all Ministry of Defence personnel except one. The most lowly-paid new recruit will be promoted to Minister of Defence, (but only on their present salary) and given a tiny fortified bunker, a generator, a small amount of diesel, and an answerphone.
We will then contract-out the defence of Aotearoa to our enemies (ie.
whichever foreign power poses the greatest threat of invasion eg. Indonesia,
USA, Australia, etc). That country (or consortium of countries) will have
the highly complex and self destructive task of fighting themselves
on our behalf.
This has the extra benefit of putting them in a very tricky legal position, and just a few good New Zealand Lawyers should be able to tie them up in Court for years, buying us valuable preparation time.
Should, however, the Judges rule against New Zealand, and if subsequently the nonprotecting force wins a victory and invades us before the Great Leap Backwards is complete, don’t dispair, we still have a few inexpensive and highly effective strategies up our sleeve.
The McGillicuddy Serious Government will shift the International Date Line. Already it meanders all over the place, taking in some land masses and excluding others. It will therefore be a simple matter to move it from the East Coast over to the West Coast of New Zealand, putting us a whole day behind. The resulting confusion in the invading army will give us all an extra 24 hours in which to head for the hills and hide. All of us, except, that is, the new Minister of Defence, whose role it will be to start up the generator that powers the Defence Ministry answer phone which has the recorded message “DON’T SHOOT, WE SURRENDER” (in whatever language is necessary).
External - Long Term
Central to the long term defence of our Medieval nation will be the External Ignorance Bureau, a section of the DEPARTMENT OF IGNORANCE. Their task will be to travel around the world, secretly tampering with maps, both existing and in preparation, introducing little hiccups in the programs of satellites, and removing all mention of New Zealand and Aotearoa from all non-fiction publications. By the time the Great Leap Backwards is complete, New Zealand will have mysteriously disappeared completely from the worlds collective memory. Consequently, no one will even visit us, let alone mount a fully fledged invasion. If, how-