Relief in New Zealand that Dutton didn’t get job

comment

New Zealand is not meant to get involved in the politics of another country, especially not our best friend’s.

But there was a collective sigh of relief across New Zealand that Scott Morrison beat Peter Dutton for the Liberal Party leadership in Australia and has become Prime Minister.

You could almost hear the relief in the voice of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as she was questioned about the result at her press conference yesterday afternoon.

She had just got off the phone from congratulating him and immediately talked about the warmth he felt towards New Zealand.

That is genuine and no surprise given his association with New Zealand. He lived in Wellington in the late 1990s running a controversial quango that Sports and Tourism Minister Murray McCully set up to sell New Zealand as a sports and tourism destination to the world.

He was caught in the middle of a political war between McCully and Labour’s sports spokesman at the time, Trevor Mallard, Morrison told the Herald: “I have no interest in New Zealand politics.”

Mallard attacked Morrison as being McCully’s “hard man” and said that in his experience rules and ethics were not as important to Australian politicians as they were to New Zealanders. Morrison has a good sense of humour and perspective and he and Mallard have since had a good laugh about it when they met each other again recently in Canberra.

Mallard visited in his capacity as Speaker of the New Zealand Parliament.

More recently, Morrison as Treasurer worked closely with Sir Bill English and Steven Joyce when they were Finance Minister and incumbent Grant Robertson.

It doesn’t mean New Zealand’s complaints about Australia will be disappear.

The current irritants — including the deportation of New Zealand-born criminals who have barely lived here — flourished under Malcolm Turnbull, who had a great fondness for New Zealand.

Turnbull, to give him his due, made changes to citizenship rules in New Zealand’s favour.

But if Peter Dutton had won, relations between New Zealand and

Australia may well have worsened.

Dutton had used the Kiwi deportees and New Zealand’s offer to take some of Australia’s asylum seekers to raise his profile for an eventual bid at the Liberal leadership.

Morrison is no bleeding-heart liberal. He started the stop-the-boats policy as Tony Abbott’s Immigration Minister. He is a committed Christian and is from the conservative wing of the party but has worked closely and loyally for the liberal Turnbull.

There may not be any difference in approach to New Zealand between the Morrison Government and the Turnbull Government. But the transition should be smooth — and would be seamless were he to keep Julie Bishop in Foreign Affairs.

He has only nine months at the most before the next election, and New Zealand is not likely to be a priority.

But in the work that will be done jointly before then, in getting the CPTPP trade deal up and running, at the Pacific Islands Forum, Apec and the East Asia Summit, New Zealand has a head start with Morrison.