Barry Soper: This Government is right to stand up to Aussies

COMMENT: There's talk in Australia that their Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton hankers for higher office. Let's hope he never achieves it. This former Queensland cop has such a myopic view of the world that Donald Trump would be proud of him.

Clearly Dutton has little respect for this country and even less for the people who live in it.

He's been engaged in a war of words with Andrew Little after our Justice Minister dubbed Australia's deportation character test as nebulous and airy fairy. The point Little was making was based on what our two countries used to mean to each other, the humanitarian ideals we used to share.

Not ripping families apart, sending people back to New Zealand who've hardly ever set foot in the place and have learnt all their bad habits in Australia.

Dutton said he hoped our Justice Minister wouldn't repeat his comments saying we don't really contribute anything to the defence effort of stopping boats coming here from Indonesia and South East Asia and advising Little to reflect on the relationship between our two countries where he says they do the heavy lifting.

He seems to be suggesting that if Little doesn't button it, they'll let the boats come here which seems to be overlooking the fact that they're rather a large land mass and chances of the boats by-passing them with their human cargo are remote.

For too long New Zealand has been pussyfooting it with the Ocker shockers, bending over backwards not to offend them, way back to the time Helen Clark stood meekly by while John Howard turned our people living there into second class citizens, and it's just got worse.

At least this Government is beginning to stand up to them with Winston Peters rightly accusing them breaching United Nations protocols they'd signed up to protecting the Rights of a Child. The 17-year-old child in this case has after several months been released to his family in Sydney even though Dutton remains determined to kick him out of the country.

The acting Prime Minister says at the very least someone should be given a hearing before they're evicted from a country and while he seems happy to rib the Aussies, he's not about to buy a fight with Trump. Peters wisely refused to comment on the President's bully boy text to the Iranian President telling him to "never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer the consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before."

Foreign Affairs, Peters said, is between people of different countries, not temporarily empowered political personalities, and we should never forget it.

Perhaps he'd do well to send that as a text to Peter Dutton.