Virulently proportional

Sir: James Allan’s rhetorical assault on Jacinda Ardern suffers from a plethora of boringly familiar trans-Tasman prejudices.

To take one example, Allan  ascribes New Zealand’s low defence spending to  benign circumstances which allow it to avoid hard decisions. But the opposite is true, as, unlike Australia, it does not have the unearned serendipity of mineral wealth which would make expensive weapons systems possible.