New citizenship rules help restore trans-Tasman mateship balance
Friday, 21 April 2023
ANALYSIS: The announcement early today that New Zealanders would gain new citizenship rights in Australia is a late capstone to the legacy of Jacinda Ardern’s prime ministership.
Since 2001, the rights of New Zealand citizens in Australia and their pathways to becoming citizens have been steadily eroded.
From July 1, any New Zealand citizen who has lived in Australia for four years can pay A$490, pass an English test, Australiana test – presumably involving questions about Don Bradman, Dame Nellie Melba and bilbies – and a criminal check, and become a citizen.
Any New Zealander opting to do this will also be able to retain New Zealand citizenship and so become a dual citizen.
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“This is the biggest improvement in the rights of New Zealanders living in Australia in a generation and restores most of the rights Kiwis had in Australia before they were revoked in 2001,” Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said.
This is a very big deal for the trans-Tasman relationship and for New Zealanders’ rights. Essentially a New Zealander moving to Australia will now have better citizenship rights than an Australian moving to New Zealand.
It will now be incumbent upon Hipkins to match the four-year eligibility period offered by the Australians. New Zealand’s is five years.
One important difference will remain, however. Australians migrating here have immediate access to a wider array of social services and government benefits, whereas New Zealanders in Australia will have to wait. They will have to aim to be citizens to qualify for some government benefits, such as HECS – the Australian version of student loans – disability benefits and the like.
For the Australian Government and the Australian Labor Party (ALP), this change serves two purposes. The first is that it gels very well with the Anzac mateship theme Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will be pushing over the coming weekend as Hipkins heads to Australia.
The second is that there will now be hundreds of thousands of people who can register to become Australian citizens on July 1 who will potentially be Labor voters. Most of the federal electoral seats with the highest population of NZ citizens are in Queensland.
In addition, over the past 20 years Queensland has often been the swing state in federal politics. This could mean a couple of extra seats in Queensland, seats that could fall to Labor. Structurally, it is good for the ALP – making a political virtue out of a virtuous policy.
Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who has one of the highest concentrations of New Zealanders living in his electorate in all of Australia, has been a vocal supporter of New Zealanders’ rights. A decade ago about the only public supporter of New Zealanders was One Nation politician Pauline Hanson.
This is an incredible addition to her legacy for Ardern, locked in after she left but well in train since the middle of last year. This is the circuit-breaker that ends years of Australians slowly treating New Zealanders more and more shabbily.
The 501 visa issues, whereby New Zealanders resident in Australia have been deported on character grounds, appear to have mostly been sorted out.
New Zealand was never arguing that Australia shouldn't deport New Zealand criminals, but only those who had no clear connection to Australia. Nearly a year ago Albanese said that he was going to be applying common sense in those situations. While it's still unclear exactly how that is being applied, it does appear that the egregious cases have mostly dried up.
This is a significant moment for Hipkins, who gets to bring home the bacon, but even more it is a victory for Ardern. The former prime minister was very quick to make sure she crossed the ditch to see Albanese once he got elected prime minister last year.
This backed up a significant amount of work New Zealand diplomats have undertaken in Australia for many years, work that was set back after Scott Morrison’s surprise election victory in 2019.
Former NZ Labour minister and high commissioner to Australia Dame Annette King, clearly fondly regarded by ALP figures in Canberra, has also been working in the background, tilling the ground for this sort of announcement.
In the end, however, the decision was Albanese’s and that of his government. And one thing he has been consistent on is a fair path to citizenship for everyone.
“This is a fair change for New Zealanders living in Australia, and brings their rights more in line with Australians living in New Zealand. This is consistent with our ambition to build a fairer, better managed and more inclusive migration system,” a statement put out by the Australians said.
This change is not one to be downplayed. It reverses more than two decades of sniffy Australian nativism that saw New Zealanders as bludgers at worst or just as a junior partner that could be treated with a bit of contempt on basically spurious grounds.
Apart from a little noise from some quarters, this decision will cost Albanese nothing while going some way to doing what he and his foreign minister, Penny Wong, have attempted to do throughout the region: treat neighbours with more respect and ensure Australia isn't just clumsily throwing its weight around.
In early 2020 just as Covid was about to engulf both New Zealand and Australia, Ardern travelled to Sydney and upbraided Morrison for his country’s dumping of convicts who were essentially Australian. The relationship was transactional and successful but decidedly frosty for the rest of Morrison’s time in charge.
He made clear when visiting Queenstown during the short-lived trans-Tasman bubble in 2021 that there would be no movement on either 501s or citizenship.
Less than two years later, that has all changed.