The government has accepted a ten point plan to better protect New Zealand’s undersea internet and power cables, with Assistant Transport Minister James Meager confirming eight of the initiatives are already done or underway and two more are still waiting on industry and overseas partners. The plan was put together after a request from Meager for a list of no cost, low effort options to lift the country’s defences, against a backdrop of cable sabotage incidents in Europe and Asia and growing concern that quietly cut fibre or power lines could cause widespread economic damage.
The nine page report, released this week, concluded that New Zealand was generally well set up compared to international best practice but still had vulnerabilities worth closing. Officials told the minister that the most likely threats to the cables that ring our coast were not foreign navies but more familiar problems, namely commercial fishing gear, ship anchors and earthquakes. Most of the formal threat assessment was blanked out before publication, on national security grounds, and the document only confirms that a fuller version is being produced twice a year for ministers and security agencies.
The numbers underline why the topic matters. New Zealand has five international submarine cables that carry almost all of the country’s internet traffic, on top of the two HVDC power cables that run across Cook Strait and supply up to 30 per cent of the North Island’s peak electricity demand. The Ministry of Transport advice notes that losing a single international data cable would be barely noticed by users, because the others can carry the load and the industry has informal agreements to share spare capacity. Losing two or three at the same time, or losing a Cook Strait link in winter, would be a very different story.
The headline initiative still to be delivered is a system that would give cable owners and Maritime New Zealand a live feed of vessels operating near cables, drawing on the Automatic Identification System carriage that most large ships are already required to broadcast. The system, which the report calls AIS Transmit, was the only one of the ten that had not yet been started as of the March stocktake. A second initiative not yet running is described in the report as dependent on commercial partners, with little further detail. The remaining eight, including a National Surveillance Warning Capability that was piloted in late 2025, a refreshed inventory of cable protection zones and a marine repair vessel kept on standby in Fiji to service Pacific cables, are either complete or in active delivery.
Meager has also confirmed that the first national exercise simulating a deliberate or accidental cable break was held on 10 March, bringing together cable operators, Maritime New Zealand, the Government Communications Security Bureau and the National Emergency Management Agency. Officials are tight lipped about the scenario but have indicated that more exercises will follow, and that lessons from the simulation feed directly into the biannual threat assessment cycle. The report makes clear that even with the new measures, response and repair will remain heavily dependent on private cable consortia and on a small global pool of specialist repair ships, only one of which is regularly available in our part of the Pacific.
The political context for the announcement is sharper than it might look. Submarine cables sit in an awkward gap between transport policy, telecommunications, energy security and defence, and have historically been left largely to the operators themselves. The shift towards naming a minister responsible for critical underwater infrastructure, commissioning a regular threat picture and running scenario exercises is a quiet but real expansion of the state’s role in protecting digital and electricity infrastructure. It also lines up with moves by Australia, the United Kingdom and several European governments to treat undersea cables as national security assets rather than purely commercial ones.
Cable protection zones, where anchoring and bottom contact fishing are restricted, already exist around the busiest landing points but do not cover every cable around the coast. Industry groups have been pushing for the zones to be tightened and for penalties for breaches to be lifted, arguing that the current fines are no real deterrent for a foreign trawler skipper acting on a quiet stretch of coast. The report stops short of recommending tougher penalties but flags the issue as something that may be revisited if the threat environment continues to deteriorate.
Opposition parties have so far given the plan a guarded welcome, saying the work is overdue but warning that calling them no cost, low effort options is a polite way of saying the government has not yet been willing to invest in the deeper structural changes that some agencies have been quietly pushing for, including dedicated naval surveillance capacity and stricter rules on foreign owned cable infrastructure. Whether those bigger questions are tackled before the 2026 election will depend on how loudly events overseas force them onto the agenda.
For now the message from Meager and the Ministry of Transport is one of cautious confidence. New Zealand is unlikely to be a primary target for cable sabotage in the way that the Baltic and the Taiwan Strait have been, but the cables that knit the country to the rest of the world and keep the lights on across Cook Strait are no longer being treated as just somebody else’s problem.
Have your say on whether the ten point plan goes far enough, and which parties you trust to take undersea cable security seriously, in the comments below. You can also test where you currently sit on the political spectrum using the Newswire voting tool ahead of this year’s general election.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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