Australians our friends? Mate, you’re dreaming
Having Australia as our nearest neighbour is like living next to a large house filled with noisy, aggressive, rude teenagers who party all the time, and look down upon you because you are more mature and don’t behave like they do.
Our new foreign affairs minister, Nanaia Mahuta, recently called Australia ‘‘our only formal ally and an indispensable partner across the breadth of our international interests’’. Where has she been all her life?
Last week’s comments from Aussie minister Peter Dutton about ‘‘taking the trash out’’, referring to New Zealand-born criminals they are sending back to us, are just the latest deliberate insult. The television footage of the ‘‘trash’’ boarding planes was a month old but conveniently released because the Australian Federal Government needed a diversion and Kiwi bashing is a go-to.
Likewise with the row over New Zealand-born Suhayra Aden, the Isis fellow traveller, now detained in Turkey but likely to end up back here, because Australia revoked the Aussie part of her joint citizenship. Our always-nice Jacinda called this ‘‘an abdication of Australia’s responsibility’’, but ScoMo said he was responsible for the security of Australia and his people wanted it that way.
Translation: ‘‘What you want is irrelevant, New Zealand, just thought I’d remind you of that.’’ Her reported ‘‘fury’’ achieved nothing.
The trouble with being ‘‘friends’’ with Australia is that it is always on its terms. Compromise, cooperation, and concord are not words in the dictionary of any Australian politician, and it has long been that way.
When the Commonwealth of Australia was formed back in 1900-01, the various states asked us to join. We said no. Undeterred, the framers of the constitution put in a clause making us part of Australia anyway – if ever we wanted to be.
Military historian Peter Cook tells me that during the Land Wars in the 1860s advertisements were placed in newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne recruiting men to join the armed constabulary to fight Ma¯ ori, who were resisting colonists’ efforts to obtain their land.
The idea of Anzac is a powerful mythology about bonds of comradeship forged in the heat of battle and mutual sacrifice. We fought alongside each other in the Boer War and again at Gallipoli. In World War II we were together in North Africa (for a while, but not in Italy) and again in Malaya, Korea, and Vietnam.
But our views of our roles in the world are not identical. Australia aspires to be deputy sheriff in the South Pacific and behaves like a bully. It also snuggles far closer to the US than we do.
In sport who can forget February 1, 1981, at the MCG, where Greg Chappell ordered his brother Trevor to bowl the last ball of the game underarm to foil any chance of our winning the game. (The pair are still unrepentant.) ‘‘Nothing stinks like an Aussie underarm,’’ said the T-shirt that followed, and prime minister Robert Muldoon said it was appropriate the Australians were wearing yellow.
Cricketers Steve Smith, Dave Warner and the forgotten third man, Cameron Bancroft, are fine examples of manhood in Australia. We just call them cheats.
It happens in business too. You’d think that companies like Fletcher, Telecom, and Michael Hill would know a thing or two about running successful businesses. All of them have gone to Australia and lost hundreds of millions of dollars as Australian companies, federal and state governments and other bodies found ways to frustrate their operations and tilt the playing field against them.
In 1994, when Air New Zealand was all set to start domestic air services in Australia, the Keating government suddenly changed its mind. The
Australian Financial Review reported, ‘‘With no warning, [federal transport minister Laurie] Brereton notified his counterpart in Wellington, Maurice Williamson, of the decision in a one-page, five-paragraph fax sent one week before Air NZ was due to acquire domestic rights.’’ The AFR quoted an Aussie official that this was ‘‘a calculated insult’’.
It’s Australia, first, second, third, last and always. And all of this is cheered on by a news media, some of which are the most nationalistic, jingoistic, chauvinistic, and xenophobic in the English-speaking world. Honesty, fairness, and giving someone a fair go are just not in the Australian character. Australia is a nation of selfish, boastful, patronising, condescending rat bags.
And that’s without even mentioning their hidebound racism and ingrained ‘‘bloke culture’’ sexism. And to date they’ve sent us 2300 hardened criminals because they were born here. Our friends? You’re dreaming.
The trouble with being ‘‘friends’’ with Australia is that it is always on its terms.