Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a fifth generation New Zealander who could have left but didn’t.  Globalisation’s great, but so is home.

But I really like Australia.

And because I worked for an Australian newspaper here for a few years, I know what it’s like to be treated as an Aussie by Kiwis, and it is unedifying stuff.  Talk about sheep jokes – the Kiwi inferiority complex runs awfully deep, fuelled in the case of Australia by the fact that the Aussies just don’t care what we think.

Boy, that’s infuriating.  So too is a particular kind of Australian executive sent to New Zealand to “fix the local operation” and who assumes NZ is little Aussie, except that Kiwis know nothing.

But Australians, to over-simplify, are also an optimistic, confident, forward-looking crowd.  They have mineral wealth, irritatingly good weather, enviably good universities and science, a population that supports far more economic opportunity than our does and – most galling of all for the Aussie-bashing Kiwi – Australia is also proving a lifeline amid IMF and OECD predictions that the world economy will shrink in 2009, for the first time in 60 years.

About the best a Kiwi looking for wins against Australia can hope for is a triumph at the footy and the last laugh when climate change makes Australia too dry to inhabit while soaking us in more rainwater than we can handle.

Not only does Australia remain our biggest two-way trading partner by a country mile, but it remains our buffer against the rest of the world, our safety valve if the labour market goes septic, and is largely responsible through ownership of most our banks for ensuring that this is one of only three or four OECD countries that can still say their banks are sound.  In other words, we remain a trustworthy corner of the globe while all around is black.

Whether you call it dependence or good fortune, these signs of Australia’s importance to our ability to weather the global economic storm mount up continuously.

Just this past week, for example, Auckland International Airport issued predictably grim figures on the numbers of passengers arriving in New Zealand from offshore.

Big dives in numbers from the US, Europe and Asia.  The flow from Australia?  Solid as a rock.

In part that’s because trans-Tasman airfares remain almost stupidly competitive.   We don’t yet have Ryanair-style 1 British pound flights to Australian destinations.  But international airlines like Emirates and, most recently Lan Chile, would rather fling a few bodies cheaply over the Tasman than pay to park their planes on the tarmac at Sydney or Melbourne at the end of a globe-crossing run.  That’s terrible from a carbon emissions point of view, but the route remains deeply discounted.

Cheap travel is underpinning an ongoing strength in the two-way flow of people, goods, services and ideas between NZ and our nearest neighbour. Sydney to Auckland may be the same distance as London to Moscow, but they’re the closest friends we’ve got, and look how things are panning out for them.

As former Labour leader Mike Moore used to put it: “The Aussies are our closest friends, even if we don’t like them.”

With New Zealand troughing its way through a second year of recession, Australia’s Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens was musing aloud this week in a speech to the Australian Institute of Company Directors about the possibility that Australia is finally in a recession too.

“The Australian economy has been contracting, though on the best information we have, not at the pace seen in a number of countries, where quarterly declines of real GDP of 3, 4, and even 5% have been observed in the last quarter of 2008 and are likely to have occurred in the first quarter of 2008.”

Hardly the kind of panicky talk emanating from other parts of the world.

While Australia’s terms of trade have fallen back from their extraordinary bull run – a 60% rise in five years – they look to be settling at levels still 40% higher over the same period, a long way from a catastrophic reversal.

“Perhaps that will not persist,” Stevens concedes. No one can be sure that another crisis won’t knock the fragile confidence that has emerged in international markets in only the past six weeks or so. “Alternatively, perhaps what commodities markets are telling us is that some factors beneficial to Australia – foremost the continued likely emergence of China – remain in place.

“It is probably not entirely coincidental that the clearest signs of a turning point in economy activity appear to be accumulating in China,” Stevens suggests.

Because Australia doesn’t have to use taxpayers’ money to recapitalise its banks, the country is also less burdened by the tricky business of deciding when to return banking systems to the real world in countries where government bailouts, “bad bank” asset carve-outs and nationalisations have been the forced reaction to recent turmoil.

The RBA board considered reports at its meeting on April 7 which showed retail spending only just beginning to fall in February after a strong run over the New Year; much stronger household confidence than business confidence; and a sharp bounceback from the very cautious readings coming out of the Australian business community earlier this year.

Stevens also reckons the combination of a floating exchange rate, a much more flexible labour market and better macro-economic policy settings are helping the Australian economy adapt quickly compared with jarring downturns in the 1950′s and 1970′s.

He also sees the same opportunity for Australia to emerge stronger than before this recession as New Zealand’s Finance Minister Bill English was talking up in his pre-Budget throat-clearer this week in Auckland.

And for a drily rational banker, Stevens is placing a lot of store on attitude.

“The first thing to maintain is some faith in ourselves and the prospects for our country over time.

“Unfortunately, there is no lever marked ‘confidence’ that policy-makers can take hold of.  Our task is very much one of seeking to behave, across the board, in ways that will foster, rather than erode, confidence.”

Among Australia’s fundamental strengths are political stability – “something becoming a bit less common” – public finances that are in “very sound shape”, financial and regulatory system that remain strong and tested and, finally, Australia is deeply engaged with Asia.

That same day, the RBA board decided to cut its benchmark interest rate by another 0.25 percentage point, confounding market expectations of a bigger cut, based on a more pessimistic view.

This coming Thursday, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand faces a similar test.  It is widely expected to deliver another 50 basis points cut when it meets on April 30.

It will be interesting to see, in the spirit of ANZAC Day, whether the confidence in prospects across the Ditch influences a more optimistic view here.  For borrowers wanting to lock in interest rates at the bottom of the cycle, a 50 basis point cut might be good news, but 25 points is probably not.  Unless the world deteriorates sharply again, we must now be very close to the limits of monetary policy easing.

Things are not the same here as in Aussie, but they might just be similar enough to mean that RBNZ Governor Alan Bollard will also go with a 25 basis point cut, and keep just a little more of his dwindling powder-keg dry.