Biden’s visit, which comes as President Barack Obama enters the final months of his administration, ends on Wednesday when he travels to New Zealand.
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Biden said that when he laid a wreath tomorrow in Auckland at the Cenotaph with Prime Minister John Key he would be honouring Matthew and all those other courageous men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to defend their nations.
The US needs to make a decision on whether to send a ship soon, and Mr Biden’s flying visit to New Zealand would be ideal timing to make it.
Biden was speaking at a reception in Auckland tonight hosted by Foreign Minister Murray McCully.
“In the a year ago and during 2016, our shared beliefs and principles have made our two nations close and constructive partners”, Mr McCully said.
“The United States is here in the Pacific to stay”, Biden told reporters. Our governments and peoples share a deep and abiding interest in maintaining peace, prosperity and stability in the region. “It is our great pleasure to welcome you here tonight”.
“It’s a delight to be in New Zealand; the President [Barack Obama] usually doesn’t let me come to nice places”, he said.
Biden made the comments in a speech punctuating his four-day trip Down Under, during which he met with the nation’s leaders and troops in a bid to reassert America’s standing as a so-called Pacific power in the region.
In an emphatic description of the country’s “unparalleled” military commitment, which will be seen as a warning to China, he said they spend more on defence than the next eight nations combined.
Biden is visiting Australia as part of a tour of the Pacific.
Biden then discussed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement with Turnbull which is struggling to gain support in the US Congress.
“Whether or not we reach that potential, whether or not we continue to prosper and live in peace, in our view depends on our ability to maintain a free and fair and open and liberal worldwide system on the seas, in the skies, and with free and open commerce”.
“Because of the commitment of our citizens to our most fundamental value, because of you we move inexorably forward”, he said.
“You nor we never bend”. That is who we are. We mean what we say. “We say it in slightly different ways but it is the same”.
While its warships are no longer believed to be carrying nuclear weapons, the U.S. navy has resisted returning to New Zealand because it long considered our nuclear free policy a test of its own policy to neither confirm or deny its ships are neither nuclear armed or nuclear powered.
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Mr Biden will hold formal talks with Prime Minister John Key tomorrow.
