OPINION: Has Australia just declared war on brave little New Zealand, or at the least, the Labour Party?

Is Australia's opposition leader Bill Shorten the southern hemisphere's version of wicked Vladimir Putin, using "foreign powers" for his own ends?

And is New Zealand a "foreign power", and a potentially hostile one at that?

FAIRFAX MEDIA Julie Bishop said she would find it difficult to trust New Zealand if Labour were elected.

Improbable as any of these propositions sound, you'd have to conclude - after listening to Australia's Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, at full splendid flight - that they are the new realities.

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* Bishop says she won't build trust with a NZ Labour government after citizenship row

We are living, of course, in the days of diplomatic intemperance everywhere.

Jack Price/ Fairfax NZ Labour's Jacinda Ardern addresses the diplomatic row with Australia.

But Bishop and colleagues seemed to be channelling the wilder elements of the era of Trump as they ripped in to Shorten and his colleagues for persuading a Labour MP across the ditch to ask a question that dropped Barnaby Joyce right in it.

The result of the manoeuvre was to get official confirmation from the New Zealand government that Joyce was indeed a New Zealand citizen.

The Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, railed that this amounted to Shorten entering an international conspiracy to try to bring down Australia's government.

FAIRFAX MEDIA Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce during question time.

Bishop was not so constrained.

"New Zealand is facing an election," Bishop said.

"Should there be a change of government, I would find it very hard to build trust with those involved in allegations designed to undermine the government of Australia."

Barnaby Joyce, an accidental Kiwi, had his moments even before his affair was revealed.

In short, if the current NZ Labour opposition won government in a few weeks, well, Wellington may as well just go and call itself Pyongyang.

This later drew a naughty question, ruled unparliamentary, from Labor's Tony Burke.

"If the Foreign Minister won't be able to work with the New Zealanders, how will the Foreign Minister be able to work with the Deputy Prime Minister [Barnaby Joyce]," Burke asked, drawing one of Bishop's feared death stares.

In Parliament, Bishop, having dropped a ballistic missile on the NZ Labour Party just weeks out from an election, advanced the argument - apparently without irony - that "it is a principle of international law that nations do not seek to interfere in the domestic political processes of other countries".

Bishop's colleague, the irrepressible Christopher Pyne, decided to beat the war drum even louder.

"The Leader of the Opposition [Shorten] has shown he is quite happy to plumb new depths, to collude with other political parties, this one in New Zealand, to undermine the Australian government," he frothed.

In the Pye version, the adventure in New Zealand might have just been the start of the international wickedness.

"How many other foreign governments, or foreign political parties in other countries, has the Labor Party been colluding with to try to undermine the Australian government?" he demanded to know.

"Has he been talking to the people in Indonesia, or China, or the Labour Party in the UK?"

Pyne forgot to mention Russia's Putin, but we got his drift.

He seemed barely more than a breath away from suggesting a special counsel should be appointed to investigate possible treason.

These are exciting, or at least extravagant, days.