The world is “bloody messy” but must take a step back from polarisation and black-and-white approaches to conflict, Jacinda Ardernhas said in a wide-ranging speech in which she addressed the war in Ukraine and rising tensions with China.

In a speech to foreign policy thinktank the Lowy Institute in Sydney, the New Zealand prime minister decried Russia’s “morally bankrupt” war in Ukraine – but also argued against the hardening of alliances, saying that the war should not be presented as a conflict of “democracy v autocracy” or be seen as an inevitable direction for other tensions between competing nations.

“In taking every possible action to respond to Russia’s aggression and to hold it to account, we must remember that fundamentally this is Russia’s war,” she said.West must stand firm as China challenges ‘rules and norms’, Ardern tells Nato

“And while there are those who have shown overt and direct support … who must also see consequences for their role, let us not otherwise characterise this as a war of the west vs Russia. Or democracy v autocracy. It is not.

“Nor should we naturally assume it is a demonstration of the inevitable trajectory in other areas of geostrategic contest.”

While Ardern cited Belarus as an example of a country that had shown Russia support, her comments also gestured at China’s failure to condemn Russian aggression, and the prime minister dedicated much of her speech to the question of China’s role in the Indo-Pacific, again arguing against hardening alliances, and calling for dialogue and cooperation.

“In the wake of the tensions we see rising, including in our Indo-Pacific region, diplomacy must become the strongest tool and de-escalation the loudest call. That won’t succeed, however, if those parties we endeavour to seek to engage with are increasingly isolated and the region we inhabit becomes increasingly divided and polarised,” Ardern said.

Over the past year, New Zealand has come under pressure to clarify its position on China’s increasingly muscular presencein the Pacific, particularly after Beijing signed a secretive bilateral security pact with Solomon Islands, and sought a regional agreement with other Pacific nations.

New Zealand has made some incremental shifts toward its harder-line western partners, including joining the US-driven Blue Pacific pact, and joining UK military exercises in the South China Sea. But New Zealand – which is heavily reliant on China for trade – is still trying to walk a middle road, with Ardern saying it would seek to cooperate with Beijing on shared interests, and emphasising Pacific nations’ right to make autonomous decisions on their partners and allies.

“Even as China becomes more assertive in the pursuit of its interests, there are still shared interests in which we can and should seek to cooperate,” she said.

“The honest reality is that the world is bloody messy. And yet, amongst all the complexity, we still often see issues portrayed in a black and white way,” she said. “We must not allow the risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy to become an inevitable outcome for our region.”

She also called for countries not to become myopically focused on military security, and miss the major threat that climate change and economic fragility posed to the Pacific.

“While we all have a concern – and rightly so – about any moves towards militarisation of our region, that must surely be matched by concern for those who experienced the violence of climate change,” she said.

“What happens in the Indo-Pacific Region impacts our entire neighbourhood. It follows that we must strengthen the resilience of the Indo-Pacific through relationships, and importantly, economic architecture.”

As she charted New Zealand’s approach to trying to pursue “independent foreign policy” as a small player in an intensely pressured environment, Ardern re-articulated the country’s commitment to multilateral institutions – but also reflected on their recent failures. There was “no better example of that than the failure of the UN to appropriately respond to the war in Ukraine because of the position taken by Russia in the security council”, she said, describing it as “a morally bankrupt position on their part, in the wake of a morally bankrupt and illegal war”.

Ardern is visiting Australia on the tail end of a trip to Europe, where she spoke at the Nato summit, finalised a free trade agreement with the EU and held a series of bilateral talks with leaders including Boris Johnson. In Australia, she will hold further talks with her counterpart Anthony Albanese that are expected to include conversations about China, the challenge of climate change in the Pacific, trade between the two countries and the rights of New Zealand citizens residing in Australia.

In Sri Lanka right now, before you’ve woken up, you’re losing. 

Power cuts that run late into the sweltering nights steal hours of sleep as the fans cease; whole families waking up sapped from the months-long trial of shuffling their lives around daily blackouts after the country went bankrupt and essentially ran out of fuel. 

There are long days to be lived; work days, errands to be run, daily essentials to be bought at twice the price they had been last month. 

All this, you’re starting a little more broken than you were last week. 

Once you’ve had breakfast – eating less than you used to, or perhaps nothing at all – the battle to find transport beckons. 

In the cities, fuel queues curl around entire suburbs like gargantuan metal pythons, growing longer and fatter by the day, choking roads and crushing livelihoods. 

Tuk-tuk drivers with their eight-litre tanks are forced to spend days lining up before they can run hires again, for 48 hours perhaps, before they are forced to rejoin the queue, bringing pillows, changes of clothes and water to see them through the ordeal.

For a while, middle- and upper-class folk had brought meal packets and soft drinks for those queuing in their neighbourhoods. 

Lately, the cost of food, of cooking gas, of clothes, transport, and even what electricity the state will allow you to have, has sky-rocketed so egregiously as the rupee’s value plummeted, that even largesse from the moneyed has been in short supply. 

In working-class neighbourhoods, families have begun to band together around wood fire stoves, to prepare the simplest of meals – rice, and coconut sambol. 

Even dhal, a staple of the diet all over South Asia, has become a luxury. Meat? At three times the price it used to be? Forget it. 

Fresh fish was once abundant and affordable. Now, boats can’t go out to sea, because there is no diesel. The fishermen that can go out sell their catch at vastly inflated rates to hotels and restaurants out of reach to most. 

Sri Lanka: The basics

• Sri Lanka is an island nation off southern India: It won independence from British rule in 1948. Three ethnic groups – Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim – make up 99% of the country’s 22 million population.
• One family of brothers has dominated for years: Mahindra Rajapaksa became a hero among the majority Sinhalese in 2009 when his government defeated Tamil separatist rebels after years of bitter and bloody civil war. His brother Gotabaya, who was defence secretary at the time, is now president.
• Now an economic crisis has led to fury on the streets: Soaring inflation has meant some foods, medication and fuel are in short supply, there are rolling blackouts and ordinary people have taken to the streets in anger with many blaming the Rajapaksa family and their government for the situation.

A majority of Sri Lankan children have now been forced to subsist on a diet with almost no protein. This is a crisis that has hit on every level from the macroeconomic to the molecular. 

Are children’s brains, their organs, their muscles, their bones, getting what is required? Milk powder, most of which is imported, has barely been seen on market shelves for months. 

The UN is now warning of malnutrition and a humanitarian crisis. For many here, the crisis has been roiling for months. 

Those who can find rides generally commute on buses and train carriages bursting with evermore passengers. 

Young men cling for their lives on the footboards, while the mashed throng inside gasps for air. 

For decades Sri Lanka has failed to invest appropriately in its public transport, while the island’s wealthier residents continued to complain about the indiscipline of bus and trishaw drivers.

There is a growing view that it’s this perceived disdain for regular people from both the political and financial elites that has brought the nation to its knees. And yet it’s the lower-middle and working classes that must bear the worst of the economic collapse. 

• ‘Living in my car for two days to buy fuel’
• Sri Lanka: ‘I can’t afford milk for my babies’
• What’s behind Sri Lanka’s petrol shortage?
• How war heroes became villains

Private hospitals continue to function, albeit less well than they used to. In North Central Anuradhapura, a 16-year old who had suffered a snakebite died as his father rushed desperately from pharmacy to pharmacy to look for the anti-venom the public hospital had run out of. 

The healthcare sector can no longer afford many lifesaving medicines. In May, a jaundiced two-day-old died after her parents could not find a trishaw to take her to hospital. 

As economists have pointed out, it is the sweeping tax cuts of 2019 – lobbied for and cheered on by many corporate and professional groups – that contributed to emptying Sri Lanka’s coffers, and helped bring the nation to this brink. 

On the black market, fuel can still be bought at vastly inflated prices, some of it to run the larger private vehicles, and home electricity generators. 

Lower down the economic ladder, people attempt to buy bicycles to make trips into work, and find the exchange rate has put even that form of transport out of reach.

It had been the worst of the power cuts that set off Colombo’s major protests, late in March. Back then, the 13-hour daily outages had left a nation exhausted in the hottest weeks of the year. 

That fatigue had sparked widespread fury, and a crowd of thousands descended on the eastern Colombo suburb of Mirihana, where the president resides. 

Of all the demonstrations in the country over the past year, this was perhaps the most visceral. A man in a motorcycle helmet made a speech railing at the political forces, clergy and media that had delivered the nation into the hands of what was now widely perceived as simultaneously the most self-serving and inept government here in generations. 

Later, that man, Sudara Nadeesh, was beaten brutally by the police and arrested, along with several dozen others who suffered the same violent fate. 

Sri Lanka had been strung up in a 26-year civil war, but even through that unspeakably violent stretch, the island has never had a president so close to the military’s top brass as former defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. 

The south has found out in the past few months, what northerners have known for decades: dissent is routinely met with state violence. 

In recent months largely peaceful protesters have had live rounds shot into their midst, tear gas has been indiscriminately fired at crowds in which small children were present. In queues for essentials, the mildest shows of displeasure have been met with brutal beatings. 

Police say some officers suffered injuries when stones were thrown, but as protesters have lost lives, or ended up in hospital, the police response has been viewed as being wildly disproportionate. 

On social media, politicians offer sympathy, posting photos of the public’s hardship while asking for change. This has mostly only inspired more outrage. Was it not the politicians who led us here?

And yet, while nationwide protests have called for the removal of the president and his cohort, they remain obstinately in place, their perceived disdain for the public’s will evident in the backroom deals that many feel continue to poison the island’s politics. 

The same leaders accused of crashing Sri Lanka into this ravine insist that only they can lift the island out again, and the policies they devise are met with sharp criticism. 

There is now a concerted push, for example, to send more Sri Lankans overseas to work as housemaids, drivers and mechanics in the Middle East, with those emigrants expected to send their earnings home. 

This may only deepen the hardship of many of its most vulnerable citizens, as poor Sri Lankans with no hope of finding local employment are forced to leave their families for nations in which they have few protections and little agency. One anthropologist online described this vision for Sri Lanka in stark terms: “the vampire state”. 

By evening in Sri Lanka’s crisis, you’re drained beyond imagination. Beyond the almost impossible commute because of the lack of petrol and diesel, the everyday functioning of a workplace has itself become a relentless onslaught of crises, with supply chains having broken down, most potential customers having long since refused to spend on anything but essentials, and staff failing to show up. 

Then late-night power cuts come again, and you survive on lighter evening meals with each passing week, unable to buy enough food for your home, unable to cook what little you’ve bought, unable to give your parents their medication, or your children the education they deserve. 

Schools are presently shut, as there is no fuel to take them. Classes are online for the third year running. 

The government continually fails to deliver what little it’s promised, relatives and neighbours call to ask for money you don’t have to spare, the police and military bear down on what little hope remains, and through all this you’re still grateful, because many around you have it so much worse. 

Last week, a mother threw herself and her two children into a river.

Every day, a fresh heartbreak.

Andrew Fidel Fernando is an award-winning author and journalist, based in Sri Lanka.

It is reported that it has been decided to increase the railway fares from next Tuesday. Railway department sources say that the related legal procedure is currently being prepared and the work will be completed by Sunday.

The rail fares will be revised up to half of the current regular passenger bus fare and the minimum fare will be increased to Rs.20.

The railway department proposed on several occasions to increase the train fares as the fuel prices have gone up, but it was not approved.

By now the bus fares have increased to the level that the people cannot bear and therefore the number of passengers using the train has increased. They will face further hardship through hike in railway fares.