KEY POINTS:
It is mid-afternoon and the cavernous halls of the Australian Technology Park in Redfern thunder to a deluge that turns Sydney streets into torrents. Senior officials kick their heels in the roar as Prime Minister Helen Clark is interviewed by a small queue of Australian journalists.
Later, she will appear live on the influential ABC TV current affairs show The 7.30 Report before appearing again in downtown Sydney's Sheraton On The Park hotel, with fellow Labor Leader Kevin Rudd, the former diplomat from Queensland who may later this year displace Prime Minister John Howard.
The immediate focus is Fiji and the expulsion of High Commissioner Michael Green. But for most of the week the Australian media has wanted to know about New Zealand's position on environmental sustainability and such issues as carbon trading, and not a sheep joke in sight.
Melbourne broadsheet The Age praised New Zealand's role as a world leader in renewable energy and editorialised: "Miss Clark has been polite about Australia's late conversion to the cause, after New Zealand alone advocated emissions trading at last year's Apec [Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum] summit.
"Should John Howard put this on the Apec agenda in Sydney in September, he will in effect be acknowledging New Zealand's leadership."
While Clark has captured headlines of surprising and uncharacteristic breadth and depth, Economic Minister Trevor Mallard has been leading a series of seminars and meetings that have attracted hundreds of cutting-edge businesspeople to the prospect of buying, adopting or teaming with New Zealand technology.
Some serious business and networking is being conducted, largely out of the glare of publicity that has surrounded Clark on a week-long trade mission to Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. Grants to three transtasman ventures underline a key objective of the mission: matching high-tech companies from New Zealand with partners in Australia, and taking on the world.
New Zealand's Industrial Research is developing with Australian partner Mimotopes synthetic peptides for therapeutic pharmaceuticals; Catapult Genetics NZ Ltd, formed by the merger of New Zealand's Catapult Systems and Genetic Solutions of Australia, is working on diagnostic genetic markers to screen large animals for productive traits such as increased fertility and disease resistance; and KODE Biotech and Australia's CSL are developing a blood-typing product to beat life-threatening reactions to blood transfusions.
The grants were made under the Australia New Zealand Biotechnology Fund established after Clark led a ground-breaking mission in 2002, exposing Kiwi ingenuity and technology to a market that largely had no idea it existed.
The "last one out, turn off the lights" perception of New Zealand was then deeply etched across the Tasman.
But as researchers and companies began talking to each other, official lights began switching on. Wellington signed a biotechnology arrangement with Queensland and a memorandum of understanding with Victoria and New South Wales. Three years ago, a formal biotechnology alliance was sealed between New Zealand and Australia's federal and state governments.
Later this year the two countries will make a joint appearance at a major international biotechnology fair in Chicago.
Bioscience is not the only target. In Melbourne, Clark named the Navy's huge, 9000 tonne ship, HMNZS Canterbury. New Zealand companies, which had earlier earned more than $800 million for their work in the construction of Anzac frigates for the New Zealand and Australian Navies, won business worth $110 million for the Canterbury from the lead contractor, Melbourne-based Tenix Defence.
More defence work is in the offing, including existing contracts for six other Navy ships. Kerry Clarke, of Australia's Defence Materiel Organisation - responsible for procuring a massive, multibillion-dollar shopping list for the Australian Defence Force - spoke of the potential to several hundred transtasman business executives at a seminar designed to encourage a joint technology and manufacturing approach to global markets.
Australia is 30 per cent below the industrial capacity required to fulfil the programme, highlighting big potential for New Zealand participation in the big defence, security and aerospace sector. Further identified potential lies in the booming resource industries, and in engineering, food processing, agricultural, water and environmental technology.
Clark told the seminar that as "really distant and really small", New Zealand had to be good to survive, and needed to find solutions to problems that other players had put in the too-hard basket. She said Time magazine reported that forward thinking and innovation were flourishing here.
This time around, Australia is listening seriously. The mission was targeted at specific sectors in the three eastern states, in which New Zealand arrived as an economic and trade equal, rather than as a much smaller petitioner to the federal Government in Canberra - which at present is entirely absorbed in the political blood-letting of an election year.
In this way, New Zealand was able to poke its head above receptive horizons. But there has also been a significant shift in Australian perceptions of New Zealand. Getting the nation's attention may be difficult, and long-standing and patronising prejudices still exist, but exposure since the creation of closer economic relations almost 25 years ago, the emergence of transtasman companies and the greater pragmatism of a newer generation is allowing New Zealand to stand on its merits.
There was a huge shift in the way Australians saw us during the 1990s. And with the turn of the century, younger Australians discovered the country as an adventure playground. Huge growth and greater diversity in tourism have modified perceptions.
Across Australia's sprawling suburbs, Fisher and Paykel washing machines in the laundry, Kiwi white wines in the fridge, and Lord of the Rings on the movie screen have presented an entirely new view of a country previously seen as a cemetery for rusting Morris Minors.
While Mallard and a team of "business champions" have been introducing Kiwis and Australians to each other in carefully targeted seminars and meetings, Clark has been headlining the mission at major events.
Hundreds of Australian businesspeople, including executives of some of Australia's biggest corporations, turned out to hear her speak at Transtasman Business Circle lunches in Melbourne and Sydney. In Melbourne she was also the guest of the fledgling New Zealand Victorian Business Group, where the top table included Melbourne's charismatic Lord Mayor, John So.
Clark met each state premier: Steve Bracks in Victoria, Peter Beattie in Brisbane, and Morris Iemma in Sydney, where she also announced that a statue of a New Zealand soldier would be installed on the city's Anzac Bridge - the site of an earlier, small diplomatic victory.
Former High Commissioner to Canberra Simon Murdoch, now head of Foreign Affairs in Wellington, noted that Australian flags flew at each end of the bridge - typifying the Australian development of "Anzac" as an exclusively Aussie term. He successfully argued that the New Zealand flag should top one end of the structure.
In Brisbane, Beattie was effusive: "Too often, I think, the relationship between Queensland - and indeed Australia - and New Zealand is taken for granted. We are in many senses cousins, and we shouldn't forget that ... We love New Zealanders, because when they come here they tend to spend their money. They're well-behaved, and they're great citizens."
In the not too distant past, signs advertising employment on construction sites in Queensland included the advice: "New Zealanders need not apply."
So things do change: even with the Australian media, which usually barely acknowledges the existence of the nation, frequently ignores or trivialises the visits of our most senior and influential figures, casts us in patronising or insulting stereotypes, and regards us as a self-serving parasite in the security of the region.
Since Clark arrived in Australia she has been deluged with requests for interviews, appearing in the nation's most influential newspapers and television and radio current affairs and talkback programmes.
Part of this can be attributed to the fascination and respect the Australian media - and the broader Australian community - has for Clark as a leader and for the role women play in New Zealand. Heather Ridout, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group that represents the country's manufacturing sector, said she felt at home in New Zealand because "women seem to be running everything". It is a typical reaction among many Australians, who find it hard to accept that New Zealanders stopped thinking about women in power several decades ago.
But on this visit New Zealand has been accorded serious media attention not seen since the radical overhaul of the nation's economy. Heavyweight coverage and opinion has appeared in such publications as the Australian Financial Review, The Australian, The Age, and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Said The Age: "Small and isolated, New Zealand has its problems, many in common with Australia, but its dynamic national culture adds great value to bilateral relations."
We may not yet be the mouse that roared, but at least we are starting to talk with a louder voice.
