A united front across the Tasman

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard with New Zealand's John Key at the Apec summit in Japan in November. The pair do not know each other well but have similar backgrounds. Photo / Supplied

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard arrives in Wellington on Tuesday amid shared grief and a new, uncertain future that will further tighten the transtasman relationship with a series of initiatives of both substance and sentiment.

Gillard and her fragile minority government are an uncertain quantity for New Zealand politicians and diplomats viewing Australia through the prism of three - at times fractious - decades of long-serving Liberal and Labor administrations.

Gillard's predecessor, now-Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, was to have made his first visit to New Zealand as Prime Minister the week he was deposed.

Since then, Gillard has been preoccupied with her battle for political survival - still by no means assured - and with the almost apocalyptic sequence of flood, fire and cyclone that has shattered so many Australian lives and sliced into the national economy.

This has always been the mountain for New Zealand to climb: ensuring that our priorities as a minor economy, often taken for granted, are not submerged beneath Canberra's far broader strategic and economic interests and ambitions.

The challenge remains, even though the past 20 years or so have changed Australians' popular perceptions of New Zealand, reinforced by a new world of interlaced threats, economic imperatives, and emerging pragmatism.

This has been reflected in new military moves following the meeting of defence ministers Wayne Mapp and Stephen Smith in Wellington this week, which saw Australia seek New Zealand capabilities to fill gaps in its own defences, and confirmation of an Anzac ready response force for the Pacific.

More is expected to come after Key and Gillard meet.

The chemistry between the two will be closely watched by officials aware of the importance of the relationship between prime ministers to their work, despite the sophisticated, extensive bureaucratic machinery that now ties government business across the Tasman.

In the background will be the strange alchemy of opposing polarities that has so strongly influenced dealings between Wellington and Canberra.

At one extreme was the deep and personal antipathy between 1970s conservative prime ministers Robert Muldoon and Malcolm Fraser, and Labour leader David Lange and his Australian counterpart Bob Hawke a decade later; at the other, the close and effective working relationship between Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark and Australia's Liberal titan, John Howard.

New Zealand is running out a new red carpet for Gillard. She will address the nation's parliament, a highly symbolic appearance designed to underwrite the sentiments traditionally exchanged during such visits.

While three American presidents and those of China and Indonesia have addressed the Australian parliament, Gillard is the first foreign leader to receive such an invitation in Wellington.

And if the attraction of opposites holds true, Key and Gillard are starting off on the right foot.

There are similarities in their personal histories.

Key grew up on a state housing estate in Christchurch, the son of an Austrian-Jewish mother and a British father who died when Key was 6, who gained an accounting degree from Canterbury University before moving into auditing and project management.

Gillard was born in Wales in 1961, the same year as Key, migrating to South Australia as a child, and earned degrees in arts and law from Melbourne University before becoming, at 29, a partner in the big Australian law firm of Slater and Gordon.

But while Key focused on an international career in currency dealing, arriving late to politics, Gillard is an intensely political creature who thrived in the brutally Darwinian world of the Labor left.

As a prelude to her new role as Australia's first female prime minister, she was the second woman to head the national student union, entered federal parliament in 1988 and within three years joined the shadow cabinet.

After Rudd's 2007 victory, Gillard became deputy prime minister, holding the education and workplace relations portfolios before ousting Rudd in a traumatic challenge that almost cost Labor government.

Gillard arrives in New Zealand besieged by domestic crises. Her controversial agenda hangs on the support of three independent and one Greens MP in the Lower House, and from July on the Greens, who hold the balance of power in the Senate.

This week she was fighting to convince the independents to support the tax levy she needs to help pay for the massive costs of the flooding that has inundated vast tracts of the continent, ahead of a workload vigorously challenged by the Opposition.

And both Gillard and her government are trailing in the polls.

It is the kind of political landscape that in the past has pressed New Zealand far down on Australia's horizon.

But both countries have recently shared pain and catastrophe. Gillard's real sympathy was evident during the Pike River Mine disaster, when her nation offered and gave everything that was needed to help, as fast as it could be flown across the Tasman. In the recent floods, New Zealand sent both expertise and money, in the millions. Gillard and Key spoke and communicated by text as flood and cyclone devastated Australia, an exchange that opened personal channels.

Gillard also showed concern for expatriate New Zealanders during the floods, who were unable to receive an emergency federal relief payment because of their lack of resident status under the 2001 social security agreement.

After approaches from the High Commission in Canberra, Gillard ensured the payments became available, even if on an ex-gratia basis.

During her visit Gillard will be asked to place the issue on a permanent agenda, reviewing a range of anomalies that affect long-term expatriates, including lack of access to dole and welfare payments on the loss of employment.

Supported by a number of Australian MPs whose constituencies embrace large expatriate Kiwi populations, New Zealand will argue these are a shared problem for both countries.

Even before the floods, Australian officials were already looking at the policy issues involved.

Yet neither leader knows the other well. Gillard's political career has been sharply domestic, and she has visited New Zealand only twice as an MP.

Gillard and Key met officially for the first time last October during the East Asia Summit in Vietnam, where Gillard lobbied New Zealand support for her proposed detention centre for asylum seekers in East Timor, and discussed other priorities such as Fiji.

Gillard also arrives in Wellington as a rookie in foreign affairs, a status shared by many of her newly-elected predecessors but one which has drawn the sharp attention of analysts and commentators.

As she headed off on her first international tour as Prime Minister late last year, Gillard said of herself: "Foreign policy is not my passion. It's not what I've spent my life doing ... If I had a choice, I'd probably be more comfortable in a school watching kids learn to read in Australia, than here in Brussels at international meetings."

But Gillard has successfully navigated a steep learning curve.

In the six months following last year's election, she has attended the East Asia Summit, last year's Nato summit on Afghanistan, the Apec and G20 summits.

In the process, and in hosting visits to Australia, she has met US President Barak Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the presidents or prime ministers of, among others, China, Russia, Japan, Indonesia, the Asean nations, Korea, Britain, France and Germany.

Wellington, with its deeply embedded relationship, should be a comparative breeze. Even during the chaos of Rudd's last months and the crises that have preoccupied Australia since, the machinery has continued to run.

And Gillard will arrive at a time when a number of initiatives that ran through the Rudd era are coming to fruition or are well under way.

Key and Rudd in 2009 set a work programme that included acceleration of a single economic market, a new emphasis on shaping a future that placed net transtasman benefit above purely national interests, the Smartgate system designed to turn transtasman travel into almost domestic flights, and greater co-operation in science and technology.

Last year Foreign Ministers Murray McCully and Rudd agreed to further tighten aid and development co-operation in the southwest Pacific, setting an "ambitious" work programme for the two countries' officials.

While the tardy easing of travel formalities remains a disappointment for New Zealand, Gillard and Key are expected to put a new investment agreement into place, and to launch a new working group on science and innovation.

Linked through biotechnology agreements and the Australian Synchrotron, the two science sectors are already collaborating on a range of projects, and have launched a joint bid for the $3.1 billion, 5000-satellite dish Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, competing against southern Africa for a project to probe the origins of the universe.

Key and Gillard will also announce a new joint crisis management group to co-ordinate disaster and emergency management, based on the bitter experiences of Pike River and Australia's floods and cyclones, replacing previous ad hoc arrangements.

They will further outline transtasman ambitions in a communique and a separate paper after a meeting that will follow one of the most significant developments in transtasman relations for years.

Defence ministers Mapp and Smith this week put into place the ambitious concept of a joint ready response force capable of deploying rapidly across the region, both reviving Anzac ties and creating a new machinery for crises such as East Timor and the Solomons.

The move underscores a new pragmatism that has seen Australian anger and scepticism of New Zealand's defence and strategic priorities shift under the weight of its own budgetary pressures and rising demands on its capabilities and resources. Wellington's recent white paper may not have excited the Australians, but its clear message of security engagement, and its commitment to Australia, was appreciated.

And while air and naval combat capabilities remain severely limited, the revamped army and new ships have been welcomed by Canberra, whose own forces are struggling to cope - especially in strategic sealift, with the impending loss of the RAN's two biggest transports.

The Kanimbla and Manoora, bought second-hand from the United States, are virtually out of service, leaving Australia without their crucial capabilities until the arrival of new vessels in several years' time.

In an understatement after meeting Mapp in Wellington, Smith said Australia faced "challenges in amphibious capability".

The answer has been to enlist HMNZS Canterbury - the Navy's 9000- tonne multi-role ship capable of carrying troops, armour and helicopters - for joint operations, especially those involving the new rapid response force.

The two countries are also reviewing strategic co-operation and the mechanisms for setting transtasman security priorities, with a report due by the end of July.

This will involve greater and more efficient use of each other's capabilities, including transport aircraft.

With this under their belts and the bundle of moves expected to be announced next week, the omens look good for Key's meeting with Gillard.