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CANBERRA - Prime Minister Helen Clark will this morning be piped aboard the Navy's newest ship at the start of a week-long visit to Australia designed to lock New Zealand further into the Australian economy and help kick-start an Anzac assault on cutting-edge world markets.
Helen Clark, who flew to Melbourne late yesterday, will also meet Prime Minister John Howard and the man opinion polls predict will replace him, Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd.
High on the agenda of their talks will be September's Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum summit in Sydney - which will include the leaders of such global players as the United States, China, Russia and Japan - and regional security and economic issues.
A key New Zealand contribution to the region will be the 8000-tonne HMNZS Canterbury, to be commissioned into the Navy today at Port Melbourne as the first of seven new vessels to be built under the $500 million Project Protector programme.
The Prime Minister will be greeted by Chief of Navy Rear Admiral David Ledson and officially piped aboard the ship after the commissioning ceremony.
But the focus of Helen Clark's five-day swing through Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney with Economic Development Minister Trevor Mallard will be business and the prospects of increasing trade with the country's biggest export market.
A key goal of one of the missions in Trade New Zealand's Export Year will be to help small to medium-sized businesses break into the market, or to expand existing business in Australia.
After a similar mission five years ago, trade officials will also be hunting out potential commercial transtasman symbiosis, helping to match New Zealand and Australian companies in joint assaults on other world markets.
Prime ministerial prestige will also be used to promote cutting-edge New Zealand technology, including the nation's role in the Melbourne-based Australian Synchrotron, a huge electron accelerator that spins electrons at close to the speed of light to provide beams of intense radiation for leading-edge scientific research.
New Zealand gave $5 million to the project and Auckland engineering company Buckley Systems built the huge magnets used to accelerate electrons around a circuit the size of a football field.
Helen Clark will visit the Synchrotron today.
Last night she attended a dinner hosted by the New Zealand-Victoria Business Group and today she will address corporate chiefs at a Transtasman Business Circle lunch. She will meet other business leaders in Brisbane and Sydney.
More than 50 New Zealand companies are represented on the trade mission.
After the 2002 mission the Government signed a biotech alliance with federal and state governments in Australia and set up the Biotechnology Partnership Fund.
