With just a stretch of sea dividing them and many, many thousands of New Zealanders and Australians living in each other’s countries, you’d think their leaders would get along, mostly. But animosities have been frequent. New Zealand’s truculent Robert Muldoon mightily annoyed his patrician, towering Australian counterpart of the early 1980s, Malcolm Fraser, though both were political conservatives.
Weary of Muldoon’s jibes about Australians – crowned with his infamous observation that every Kiwi crossing the Tasman raised the IQ of both countries – Fraser finally erupted in 1982. Both were in Rotorua for the annual conference of Pacific leaders when Fraser, learning that Muldoon was asleep in the hotel room directly below him, began leaping up and down on the floor. It was 1.30am.
In the mid-90s, when Australia’s razor-edged Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, was in Queenstown for a weekend summit with his New Zealand opposite, Jim Bolger, Keating’s staff let it be known to the travelling Australian press – this correspondent included – that Keating was finding Bolger “tedious”. Minutes later, when Bolger greeted me – I’d known and liked him since my earlier incarnation in the New Zealand press gallery – Keating eyed me darkly, saying, “I didn’t know you were a Kiwi.”
Similarly, John Howard, when returning from New Zealand after talks with Helen Clark in the late 1990s, wandered down the aisle of his aircraft to give journalists his unflattering assessment of Clark – at least as it pertained to what she thought Kiwis in Australia should be entitled to.
More recently, Scott Morrison, the self-confessed bulldozer prone to mansplaining, exasperated Jacinda Ardern, who publicly disagreed with him at their joint Sydney harbourside press conference in 2020 over Australia’s forced return to New Zealand of criminals who had few or no remaining connections here.
Which raises the question of how the corporately preened Christopher Luxon will buddy up with the leftie political street brawler Anthony Albanese, especially without the soothing presence in Canberra of Dame Annette King, New Zealand’s retiring High Commissioner and the most successful Kiwi diplomat across the Tasman in decades.
An immediate pressure point may well be defence spending. With Australia’s military budget under pressure over the forthcoming A$368 billion cost of its decision to acquire eight nuclear-powered submarines, its army, air force and surface naval fleet are facing cuts, making Australia’s defence chiefs even less willing to continue suffering the skimpy defence spending of New Zealand, which almost wholly relies on Australia as a security partner. Luxon’s “aspiration” to lift the country’s defence spending from 1.2% of GDP towards Australia’s 2%, but without any firm commitments or timelines, may not cut it in Canberra.
While King’s standout achievement during her term there was Albanese’s decision to fast-track a pathway to citizenship for New Zealanders in Australia, there is now a growing concern – fostered by Albanese’s opponents – over Australia’s surging immigration levels. More than half a million new migrants have arrived in the past 12 months – a figure well above forecasts – putting heavy pressure on rents and housing prices and bringing the predictable immigrant fear campaign from opposition leader Peter Dutton.
It was Dutton, while home affairs minister in 2021, who described deporting New Zealanders as “taking out the trash”. Albanese’s relaxation of citizenship rules for Kiwis presents a juicy target for Dutton, who, by November’s end, had lifted his conservative coalition above Labor in opinion polls for the first time.
Unless Albanese can arrest Labor’s fall, Luxon could find himself dealing with a new Australian prime minister – a man with a record of trashing those from Aotearoa.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for the Times, London.
