Editorial: No matter to Crowe about

Opinion

See readers' Kiwi jokes about Aussies

So the Prime Minister plans to flog off one of our public assets to the Australians.

He's offered to lend them intemperate New Zealand-born movie star Russell Crowe - but he won't be letting them have the pavlova, Phar Lap or Crowded House.

"Everybody knows that they're ours and for Australians to claim ownership of them is quite inappropriate," John Key told the Australian press this week.

Now he's done it.

Key hastily fled to Thailand, but it was too late. Nothing delights our cousins across the Tassie so much as an old-fashioned display of Kiwi insecurity.

If it makes you happy, retorted one correspondent to an Australian newspaper, claim the pavlova that nobody eats, claim the dead horse, and for God's sake claim the bloke that annoys the hell out of most Australians.

Another was more succinct: "Why do Kiwi horses run so fast?" she asked. "They've seen what they did to the sheep."

And there lies the problem. The Aussies always have the last word in any argument. That word is: "baaa".

This is why we need a new accord, a new alliance. Yes, we need to acknowledge our differences, but also to celebrate the areas of agreement.

Like the fact that nobody wants to take responsibility for Russell Crowe. And that really, pavlova is quite sickly sweet and needs to be reinvented - with a sharp dash of Cointreau.

Key's antagonistic comments came the same day that the Australian defence minister assured America that the Kiwis were onside again. He told a Washington thinktank: "New Zealand has very much come back to the fold."

It seems even he couldn't resist a sheep joke.