IN THIS TOGETHER
When journalist Laura Tingle was researching how Australia and New Zealand each battled through their respective 1980s currency crises, she asked some New Zealand officials from the time what lessons they’d taken from Australia’s experience the previous year.
“They just looked at me as though … ‘What do you mean?’ It was as though they didn’t even consider there might be anything to learn from what Australia had gone through.”
These devaluation emergencies were twin watershed events that helped shape each country, the policies they gave rise to still a bedrock of both economies. But at the time, they sparked no discernible exchange or even curiosity.
Tingle, award-winning chief political correspondent for Australian state broadcaster the ABC, says she’s been shocked how comprehensively the two countries ignore and even disdain one another, despite being the most closely economically tied nations in the world. They have a unity and cohesion “the European Union could only dream of.”
“Yet most people in both countries know nothing about it, and haven’t been that interested.”
Tingle says the pandemic will probably change that, and to give mutuality a nudge, she has written an extensive analysis in the scholarly Australian journal Quarterly Essay rather provocatively titled, “The High Road: What Australia Can Learn from New Zealand”.
She says she
