Ardern getting push-back

OPINION: Make no mistake. Behind the smiles and the TransTasman handshakes, tensions are running high.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s increasingly insistent push for Australia to send 150 refugees from Manus Island and Nauru our way is facing an intensifying push-back.

She raised it during her flying visit to meet Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull earlier in November, and again at the Apec summit in Vietnam over the weekend.

But despite a ‘‘chat over a cup of tea’’, Ardern’s wish for an extended discussion during the East Asia Summit in Manila on Tuesday looks set to be dashed.

And as Turnbull ducks that option, both sides are using back channels to make their anger clear.

From Australia’s point of view, Turnbull has big problems at home trying to keep his own boat afloat.

As he fights for his political survival, with a vanishingly small majority, he will not want any suggestion he is deviating from his tough policy that those refugees should not set foot in Australia.

That would require some action to distinguish them from other Kiwis if they ended up in New Zealand and subsequently turned their sights westward.

Also, he has stuck firmly to the line that he wants first to deal with an offer from the United States to take 1250 from the two islands before – perhaps – turning to New Zealand for help.

Meanwhile, Australia has wheeled out all the usual tactics.

There was the one about it showing New Zealand was a soft touch.

Then in the last day came the strategically placed newspaper story – which has particularly irked Ardern and her team – that four boats with 164 people heading for New Zealand were stopped by Operation Sovereign Boarders and turned around.

This implied mix of messages is familiar. Kiwis are ‘‘free-loading’’, by relying on Australia to stop refugees, and New Zealand is vulnerable. And that, despite no successful landings here by people smugglers, not to mention the unlikelihood of them risking having impounded the valuable boat needed to successfully cross the rough Tasman Sea.

Former prime minister John Key was a master at playing up that vulnerability whenever he moved to toughen New Zealand’s stance. Ardern responded to the

story by saying ‘‘chatter’’ about asylum seekers and people smugglers setting sights on New Zealand was not new.

But if Turnbull really believes allowing some of the refugees to come to New Zealand now would encourage more refugees to head his way, then surely he should drop the deal entirely and refuse to send any to New Zealand.

It also stretches credulity that desperate refugees would see the US as some sort of booby prize if they were denied the right to enter New Zealand.

Ardern said she could not comment on suggestions the information about the 164 asylum seekers was a strategic leak by the Australian Government, in an effort to push back against New Zealand’s stance.

That maintained the necessary diplomatic niceties.

But add Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s extraordinary boycott of a leaders’ meeting, which almost scuppered the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade talks, and Ardern would be justified in flying home from her first international summit looking askance at two of our ‘‘best mates’’ and Five Eyes partners.