Jibes across the Tasman

Scott Morrison, the self-confessed bulldozer prone to mansplaining, exasperated Ardern.

- Bernard Lagan

With just a stretch of sea dividing them and many, many thousands of New Zealanders and Australians living in each other's countries, you'd think their leaders would get along, mostly. But animosities have been frequent. New Zealand's truculent Robert Muldoon mightily annoyed his patrician, towering Australian counterpart of the early 1980s, Malcolm Fraser, though both were political conservatives.

Weary of Muldoon's jibes about Australians - crowned with his infamous observation that every Kiwi crossing the Tasman raised the IQ of both countries - Fraser finally erupted in 1982.

Both were in Rotorua for the annual conference of Pacific leaders when Fraser, learning that Muldoon was asleep in the hotel room directly below him, began leaping up and down on the floor. It was 1.30am.

In the mid-90s, when Australia's razor-edged Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, was in Queenstown for a weekend summit with his New Zealand opposite, Jim Bolger, Keating's staff let it be known to the travelling Australian press - this correspondent included that Keating was finding Bolger "tedious".