School’s in for new Ardern Government

One of Jacinda Ardern’s early jobs as the new prime minister will be to visit the Australian government, and it is unlikely to be all plain sailing. No-one has forgotten Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s assertion two months ago that she would find it ‘‘very hard to build trust’’ with a Labour-led New Zealand government.

Kiwi Labour MP Chris Hipkins had then just been involved in outing Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce as an unwitting New Zealand citizen, meaning that his eligibility for public office is now before the courts.

Ardern says she doesn’t ‘‘perceive there will be any issues’’ dealing with Bishop, but she will also cross the Tasman with a promise that she will retaliate if Australia moves to make New Zealanders pay full fees when attending Australian universities.

This assertive response contrasts with that of the previous National government, which generally played down successive Australian moves which affected the immigration, benefit and study rights of the 650,000 New Zealanders who call Australia home.

Ardern’s declaration that New Zealand would ‘‘lock them out’’ if Australia effectively doubled or tripled expatriate Kiwis’ study fees would have struck a chord with the New Zealanders in Australia who feel they are getting a raw deal from the government there.

Former Prime Minister Bill English, however, said it would be ‘‘pretty silly’’ to slap the Australians on a detail such as the study fees, when his government preferred to engage the Australians ‘‘constructively’’ to advance expatriates’ interests.

But English had been blindsided by the Australian announcement of the tuition fees plan in May. This heightened the sense that while politicians of all hues and on both sides of the Tasman continually stressed the importance of the Anzac relationship, Australia treated New Zealand as the junior partner, and sometimes with apparent disdain.

So, while Ardern says that the New Zealand-Australian relationship is too important to let politics get in the way, there is likely to be some hard talking when she meets Bishop and the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

When Bishop made her intemperate remarks over the Joyce affair, she probably thought Ardern would remain the leader of a relatively lightweight New Zealand opposition party – one which she believed to be acting as an extension of the Australian Labor Party. Now, she will have to deal with Ardern as a prime minister.

Ardern in turn will face the challenge of engaging positively on most matters while holding to her very public and repeated pledge to retaliate if Australia insists on changing the entitlements to tertiary fees.

As it happens, the raft of immigration measures that included the fees hit a block in the Australian Senate last week. Its future is uncertain.

But Ardern has an added incentive to stand firm on this matter, and that is Labour’s own policy to start providing free tertiary education in New Zealand – one year free from next year and three years by 2024. How this policy will be implemented has yet to be announced, but the obvious question arises: would this open up fee-free tertiary study to Australians?

The prospect of educating young Australians at the New Zealand taxpayers’ expense while New Zealanders are charged full fees in Australia is likely to be deeply unpopular.