Global Courant 2023-04-27 14:30:42
The swearing-in ceremony had an unusual guest. Hundreds of New Zealanders were about to take an oath to become Australian citizens, and the head of the New Zealand government encouraged them in their push for dual citizenship.
There was reason for everyone to celebrate. Australia was about to reverse a two-decade-old policy and restore rights to the nearly 700,000 New Zealanders living in Australia so they can easily gain citizenship, putting them on par with Australian migrants across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand.
Australia and New Zealand often describe each other as their closest international partners. But in recent decades, Australia’s treatment of New Zealand migrants – making it more difficult for them to obtain citizenship and thousands being deported under a new law – has led to a rift between the two allies. Australia’s new centre-left government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has taken steps to address these issues.
Speaking at Sunday’s citizenship ceremony in Brisbane, Australia, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said his presence was a sign of the “ties that bind us all together”. That sentiment was later echoed by Clare O’Neil, Australia’s Home Secretary: “Our Kiwi cousins are our very best friends in the world.”
Yet tensions remain. Behind the bonhomie, enduring ties between these neighbors were strained, particularly in the areas of migration and foreign policy. Chief among these was a sudden policy change by Australia in 2001, when a Conservative government made it much more difficult for New Zealanders to become citizens.
Those changes followed decades of dog whistles by the Australian right about New Zealanders, particularly those of Indigenous Maori or Polynesian descent, who were cast by some as benefiting from Australian hospitality and unemployment benefits.
Australia created a special visa category for New Zealanders that allowed them unlimited employment rights, but prevented them from receiving the same rights and protections as permanent residents and citizens. This condemned hundreds of thousands of New Zealand migrants, especially lower-income workers, to a level of long-term insecurity that no other migrants to Australia have had to endure.
On Sunday, after years of pushing, Mr Albanese announced a streamlined process for New Zealanders living in Australia to obtain citizenship after four years. The 2001 changes should never have been implemented, he said. “True friends have equal relationships, and that’s the partnership New Zealand and Australia have,” he said.
But even as Australia reestablished trans-Tasman migration balance, some New Zealanders said it was not an altruistic move. New Zealand reckons with a skills shortage and a slowing economyand the news was met with dejected resignation amid concerns that even more kiwis would flee to Australia and its much larger economy.
“Australia is the net beneficiary,” said Grant Duncan, a political commentator and researcher at Massey University in New Zealand. “They get on average highly skilled, employable Kiwis who earn a good income, and therefore they contribute to the Australian economy as skilled workers and, of course, as taxpayers.”
Even more damning was the right-wing opposition in New Zealand.
“The Australian government played Hipkins like a didgeridoo,” David Seymour, the leader of the libertarian Act party, told local news outlets. “They just raided New Zealand talent.”
Australia and New Zealand are closely linked. Citizens of each country have always been able to live and work indefinitely in the other; and dual nationality is so common that several Australian politicians have been forced to resign after learning they were also New Zealanders without even realizing it.
The couple has a sweeping free trade agreement and an integrated military history.
But they follow a slightly different foreign policy course – unlike Australia, New Zealand opposed the Iraq war and is adamantly nuclear-weapon-free. Australia’s plan to build nuclear-powered attack submarines with the United States and Britain has sparked consternation in New Zealand over how it would affect the Treaty of Rarotonga, which declared large parts of the Pacific as nuclear-weapon-free. labels.
“Our concern is not to see the militarization of the Pacific,” Nanaia Mahuta, New Zealand’s foreign minister, said last month.
For Australia and the United States, the submarine deal, part of a new partnership known as AUKUS, is a counterweight to China’s growing influence in the region.
Differing approaches to race and migration have also complicated the trans-Tasman relationship, as far back as 1901, when New Zealand refused to become Australia’s seventh state, partly because of concerns about how what the “White Australia” policy would become of would apply to his Polynesian country. or indigenous Maori citizens, said Paul Hamer, a researcher at Victoria University of Wellington.
Those differences have reverberated through the decades. “Much of it is unsaid,” he said of the historic racial component in Australian policy-making. “Occasionally it’s out in the open.”
In its most recent iteration, Australia changed its immigration laws in 2014 to allow visa cancellations and deportation on grounds of “character”, often related to a criminal conviction. As of 2015, about two-thirds of the nearly 3,000 New Zealanders deported have been Maori or Polynesian, according to the New Zealand government.
For the deportees, many of whom have children in Australia, the policy has been brutal, said Filipa Payne, the founder of the advocacy group Route 501. New Zealand is ill-prepared to receive them and has taken few steps to help them reintegrate. . “We’ve struggled,” she said.
In January, Andrew Giles, Australia’s immigration minister, ordered that individuals’ connection to the Australian community be considered before any deportation is carried out. As a result, deportations have already dropped by about a third, Ms Payne said, and by her estimate, more than half of people already deported to New Zealand would not have been deported had they been given a way to reside. .”
The directive does not apply to those who are already being deported, which could take many years.
While many New Zealanders in Australia expressed deep relief at the changes in the law and the security they provided, some held little affection for their large, brash adopted home.
Dean Hillyer, an engineer for a gas turbine company, first moved to Australia 12 years ago, looking for an alternative to New Zealand’s poor housing stock and miserable South Island winters. Moreover, he said, “the work I’m doing now just doesn’t exist in New Zealand.”
Mr Hillyer, 47, will apply for Australian citizenship “sooner rather than later”, he said, especially after hearing from New Zealanders who had been denied access to certain benefits related to disability and health. But even after so long in Australia, the decision was purely pragmatic, he said.
“It’s more for financial reasons than being patriotic or feeling like I owe the country,” he said.
