It looks like our fractious relationship with Australia for the last few years might be about to get a lot better after the change in government over there.

Jacinda Ardern met with new PM Anthony Albanese for the first time today and the signs are really encouraging.

A couple of things have caused real stresses in our relationship with Australia in the past few years: the 501 deportees and the problem with China.

On the 501s, Albo hasn’t committed to anything yet, but he dropped enough hints for us to have hope that he is going to make a few changes that we would like.

He clearly is going to keep sending the Kiwi crims back here, but it sounds like he might stop sending those crims who, although born in New Zealand, have spent so long in Australia, that they are really Australia’s problem and they have no connection with New Zealand anymore.

He said he would use common sense on that front and conceded that he’s be annoyed too if he was in Ardern’s shoes.

That’s a good sign that would make a big difference, because this deportation policy has caused so much friction, you can recall it even lead to Ardern telling Scomo off in front of media a couple of years back.

China has been really challenging for us as well, because Australia’s gone really hard on China. They’ve gone so hard, that they’ve copped tariffs forward and they’ve been reasonably cross that we haven’t followed with them in that direction and gone as hard as well.

It’s lead some Australians to criticise us and accuse us of being backstabbers, sucking up to China, and so on.

The indications today though are that Australia seems to be wanting to reset its relationship with China to perhaps taking a bit of a softer approach.

The clue is in the fact that neither of the Prime Ministers mentioned China in their opening remarks even though there is no doubt they would’ve spent a long time talking about China.

That suggests perhaps that Albo isn’t going to go as quite hard on China as Scomo did, that might take the pressure of us to go hard as well, so that is fairly encouraging.

Obviously, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that Jacinda is going to have a better relationship with Albo than Scomo given that he is Labor just like she is Labour.

Whatever the case, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s just welcome, especially if it means that person to person relationship leads to a better country to country relationship, and if it means Australia starts treating New Zealand a little bit better than it has in these last few years.