New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison during a meeting at Admiralty House in Sydney in February. AP Photo / Bianca De Marchi
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison during a meeting at Admiralty House in Sydney in February. AP Photo / Bianca De Marchi
EDITORIAL:
Our cautious emergence from lockdown to break the chain of Covid-19 coronavirus transmission now has a clear path - shoulder to shoulder with our old mates, the Australians.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison this week said a joined safe zone is "still some time away" but also stressed: "It isimportant to flag it, because it is part of the road back".
Talk of a transtasman travel zone "as soon as it is safe to do so" is especially tantalising for business, tourists and estranged families. It is also reminiscent of the optimistically cooperative years in the late 1970s which resulted in the Closer Economic Relations policy, finally signed in January 1983 - at the time, one of the most comprehensive, effective and WTO-compatible free trade agreements in the world.
Since then, trade agreements have proliferated with other nations and transtasman relations strained with Australia's treatment of Kiwi migrants and deportation of offenders.
We remain firmly in step in many significant areas, however. Quarantine procedures were harmonised in 1988; all trade tariffs and quantitative restrictions were removed in 1990; and in 1995 we linked food standards, Australia amended its inscriptions for postal services and telecommunications, while New Zealand amended its inscriptions for aviation and shipping.
Our Open Skies Agreement removed the last substantive aviation restrictions between Australia and New Zealand in 2002, allowing airlines virtually unrestricted access to, within, and beyond the territory of the other party.
President Barrack Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly said in 2008: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. It's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."
This would seem a perfect time to set our differences aside. Indeed, Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said the Australasian population need to see itself "as one" with a system united in the attack on Covid-19.
That all said, we still have little steps to complete. Aotearoa has to keep following that straight old line inside current level 3 restrictions, before even hoping to reduce further and aim for an Anzac alliance. This is no time to go walkabout.
