NZ’s armchair criticism
Manus Island has the potential to strain Australian and NZ relations. and offer views from each side of the ditch.
This time of year in Canberra is called the Killing Season. The period just before Christmas and early in the New Year has been the time when a surprising number of Australian political leaders have been dumped from office. Often in bloody coups.
Paul Keating stabbed Bob Hawke in the front to take the prime ministership on December 20, 1991. Kevin Rudd successfully moved on Labor leader Kim Beazley on December 4, 2006. Tony Abbott defeated Malcolm Turnbull for the Liberal leadership on December 1, 2009. Turnbull unsuccessfully moved against Abbott on February 9, 2015 but won a leadership vote in September 2015.
This season of joy is anything but for Malcolm Turnbull. Australians are fed up with a constitutional shemozzle which has seen numbers of MPs and senators forced from office for the crime of being dual citizens. Abbott and his conservative cronies have never accepted Turnbull’s legitimacy and keep up a running commentary on his failings in the media.
The Australian Labor Party consistently leads opinion polls and the leader, Bill Shorten, is clawing his way to more respectable poll numbers.
Into this toxic political mix comes a novice New Zealand prime minister with sharp criticisms of Australia’s hardline but bi-partisan immigration policy and the tragedy unfolding on Manus Island.
Canberra is underwhelmed by the timing and tone of the Kiwi commentary. There are dark mutterings of Jacinda Ardern’s naivety and self-serving ‘‘dog whistling’’ – sending a coded political message to the NZ electorate that Kiwis occupy higher moral ground than do those coarse Aussies.
Clearly, this plays well in the NZ media still offering a warm honeymoon to the new Labour Government. Aussie bashing appears to be a regular theme in print and especially in broadcast commentary. But bombast makes a poor substitute for old-fashioned reporting of the facts.
Take the widespread view that New Zealanders have a more humane and decent record in dealing with refugees.
Last year, NZ raised its refugee intake from about 750 a year to about a thousand. It was the first time in 30 years that the refugee intake had been increased. By comparison, last year Australia’s intake was more than 20,000 and this figure will rise by about a thousand in each of the next two years.
Then there is the view, often retailed in NZ, that Australia operates a brutal maritime blockade to stop desperate people from landing on its shores.
Between 2008 and 2013, more than 50,000 people travelled to Australia on more than 800 unauthorised boat trips. More than 1200 died at sea trying to make the journey.
NZ has yet to have a single unauthorised boat land on our shores.
This has not gone unnoticed in Canberra. Last week the Australian Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, took a thinly veiled swipe at NZ by saying that it benefits from Australia’s tough border protection policies without paying for them.
‘‘We have stopped vessels on their way across the Torres Strait planning to track down the east coast of Australia to New Zealand,’’ Dutton said. ‘‘We have put hundreds of millions of dollars into a defence effort to stop those vessels. We do that, frankly, without any financial assistance from New Zealand.’’
The other senior Australian minister with a close interest in the regional implications of Canberra’s border protection policies is the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop.
Bishop is a toughie who has never publicly backed away from her statement that she would find it ‘‘very difficult to build trust’’ with a New Zealand Labour Government.
None of this is to suggest that NZ’s political leaders should not have concerns about the effects of Australia’s hardline policies or should moderate their criticism.
But the view in Canberra is that the new Labour Government in Wellington should be doing more than offering armchair criticism.
Turnbull is remarkably well briefed on NZ’s view. His new chief of staff, Peter Woolcott, was until recently Australia’s high commissioner in Wellington. A former high commissioner to Wellington heads Australia’s Defence Department.
That a new Australian high commissioner has not been appointed to Wellington for several months may reflect a certain grumpiness in official circles in Canberra.
Some pundits in Australia are suggesting history may be about to repeat itself and Malcolm Turnbull could become the latest victim of Canberra’s Killing Season.
If their grim predictions are accurate and Turnbull is dumped as leader of the Liberals, the Canberra cognoscenti speculate than two ministers lead the pack to replace him. The most likely replacement is the deputy leader, Julie Bishop. After her comes the Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton.
Something for Ardern to think about. Very carefully.
❚ Dennis Grant is a former journalist who worked in the press galleries in Wellington and Canberra.