If a revolution ever happens in Australia, it won't start in Australia. We're not that kind of people. We follow; we don't lead.

If a revolution happens, it will happen overseas first. New Zealand, for instance. The perfect place for an ideas summit. A small revolution might come of it, not bombs and corpse-lined streets but the peaceful death of the two-party power base in politics. Female prime ministers. No mere lip-service apology to right the wrongs of a racist past, but hard cash as compensation. A political party, with seats in parliament, that exclusively represents the interests of the country's indigenous people.

If you think Australia and New Zealand are peas in a pod, you are mistaken.

In social justice, New Zealand has, for most of its modern history, been advancing the lantern into the future's blank mist, where Australia has been hesitant to venture. In indigenous land rights, most obviously. For 33 years, reconciliation has officially been underway. Tribes and the Crown are hammering out reparation deals, one long legal battle after another.

In the lead-up to the last Australian election, the Howard government sent the military into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities on the pretext of protecting children at risk of abuse and death. Prime Minister Rudd intends to continue the policy, in principle at least. New Zealand, meanwhile, has the fourth-highest infant-mortality rates in the OECD. Maori poor are major contributors to that statistic. Would Prime Minister Helen Clark send troops in to run hotspot Maori communities?

"Unthinkable," she says, frown-laughing and steadying her cuppa.

Why unthinkable?

She shakes her head as if the answer is axiomatic. "It could not happen in New Zealand. We live in a totally different reality. Maori occupy a completely different position in the broader New Zealand community. They're not isolated in what Americans would call reservations. We just don't have that. There's a lot more contact between people. There'd be very few European families here who didn't have a Maori relative. I think in mine there are at least two."

‘Assimilation': a taboo word in Australia. A word for politicians, the clergy, bureaucrats, historians and dinner-party worrywarts to fret about using. And understandably so. In Australia it accrued an extra meaning: the breeding out of Aborigines, watering them down from brown to white. Doing away with that meant leaving Aborigines as a separate, sidelined people not to be bothered too much with Western ways: perhaps one day, miraculously, they will grow strong and healthy in a viceless dreamtime where parasitical grog-runners and art dealers are shooed away forever . If assimilation must take place, we'll not call it that, but substitute a genteel softener, a word such as ‘integration'.

In New Zealand, assimilation just is. There is no sinister sub-plot of ethnic cleansing. Those of Maori descent make up 17% of the nation's 4 million people. Aborigines are 2.5% of Australia's 21 million. That superior percentage is one explanation for Maori political clout. Their traditional warlike way is another. In 1840 the colonising British, sick of conflict with tribes, drew up a treaty. Those tribes soon learned that a treaty, like any legal agreement, can be overridden, altered, broken. But it provided a foundation document for the nation, albeit a contestable one, and a tenet for future Maori generations' political and financial grievances.

Later this year, New Zealanders go to the polls. Clark, 58, is tipped to be voted out of her ninth-floor office in ‘the Beehive' (so-called because of its squat, honeycomb design), the government wing of parliament in New Zealand's capital, Wellington. She has been prime minister for nine years. That's a fair time by any democracy's standards. Kiwis are due an electoral swing. In February, support for Labour - unlike us, Kiwis spell it the British way - was estimated at 32%, compared with 55% for the conservative National Party. Australia may have just voted out a conservative government but its mate across the ditch is set to go the other way, though a recent Morgan survey claims Clark is making ground: 35% support for Labour, 40.5% for National.

Yet if National wins, the reconciliation process is unlikely to change. The new PM would be the 46-year old John Key, a millionaire financier from working-class stock, tailored to the white-shirted nines but with a pleasant hint of plainness, goofiness. His Canberra equivalent would be a flashier male with slicker rhetoric. He'd crack a joke about the footy. Then, when the note-taker was switched off, drop in a ‘fuckwit' or ‘dickhead' in reference to a parliamentary opponent to appear combative, no fool, not too polished and twee. Clark's Canberra equivalent might do much the same.