{"id":925,"date":"2009-08-19T15:27:54","date_gmt":"2009-08-19T15:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=925"},"modified":"2009-08-19T15:27:54","modified_gmt":"2009-08-19T15:27:54","slug":"oz-nz-cabinet-meeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/08\/oz-nz-cabinet-meeting\/","title":{"rendered":"Oz-NZ Cabinet Meeting"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Australian and New Zealand Governments are to hold their first-ever joint Cabinet meeting<\/a>, in Sydney on this Friday 24 August.\u00a0 The political parties in charge of the two countries are currently of opposite hue:\u00a0 Labor in Australia, and National in NZ.\u00a0
\nIn some respects, the only surprise here is why this took so long.\u00a0 For a\u00a0period \u00a0before it was self-governing, New Zealand was a dependency of the British colony of New South Wales, and indeed\u00a0NZ achieved self-government four years before NSW did (1852 vs. 1856).\u00a0 The preamble to\u00a0Australia’s Federal constitution mentions NZ as one of the founding states, which would still provide NZ fast-track entry to the Federation should it ever wish.\u00a0 Immediately following Federation in 1901, both countries had cabinet ministers born in the other country, and New Zealand cabinet ministers (along with those from Papua New Guinea and from Norfolk Island) are now regular participants in the various Ministerial Council meetings of COAG<\/a>, the Council of Australian Governments, the Australian Federal-State body tasked with co-ordinating policy.\u00a0\u00a0 (As a consequence, COAG meetings, which rotate locations, sometimes take place in NZ or PNG.)\u00a0 The two countries have agreed freedom of trade in almost all products and services and freedom of movement (at least for each others’ citizens), and have even talked about a common currency.\u00a0 They have shared defence activities since at least the joint ANZAC\u00a0force\u00a0landed at Gallipoli, Turkey,\u00a0in 1915.
\nApart from actual political unions, such as the USA and the EU, I wonder what other two political entities have this degree of co-ordination.\u00a0 Even the British-Irish Council of the Isles<\/a>, which links the various national assemblies of Eire, Great Britain, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Northen Ireland, Scotland and Wales, does not involve much\u00a0substantive collaboration.\u00a0 No doubt different languages make joint cabinet meetings difficult across many borders:\u00a0 The only example I can recall in recent years were the joint Franco-German cabinet meetings held under Francois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Australian and New Zealand Governments are to hold their first-ever joint Cabinet meeting, in Sydney on this Friday 24 August.\u00a0 The political parties in charge of the two countries are currently of opposite hue:\u00a0 Labor in Australia, and National in NZ.\u00a0 In some respects, the only surprise here is why this took so long.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","p1","y2009","m08","d19","h15"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}