For a very long time, the concept of New Zealand and Australia as meaningfully different nations did not make much sense. The Tasman Sea was awash with two-way traffic in the 19th century, when we were outposts of the same empire, with ideas and people floating between the two countries freely. Australia’s 1900/01 constitution famously retains an option for New Zealand to join its federation of states. The two countries did not send proper diplomatic missions to each other’s capitals until 1943, and did not create separate “citizenships” until 1948.
In the decades since we have established ourselves as properly different countries, albeit ones that are extremely closely linked, with over half a million New Zealand citizens living in Australia. Over the weekend those links got even closer, as prime ministers Chris Hipkins and Anthony Albanese announced a huge change to the way New Zealanders can get citizenship, which has been far more difficult since 2001.
Kiwis living in Australia will soon be eligible to apply for citizenship after four years of living in the country, with all their children born since mid-2022 in the country automatically made citizens. This replaces a cumbersome and expensive system by which New Zealanders who had lived in Australia for years had to apply to become permanent residents of Australia first, despite already being de facto permanent residents anyway.
This is a major win for Hipkins and New Zealand. It brings Australia’s system into line with New Zealand’s and will make many New Zealanders lives measurably better, as they are able to access social services for themselves and their children in the country they have moved to. Even NZ First leader Winston Peters, who publicly decries the Labour government as “dishonest” separatists, acknowledged that the deal was a victory.
But before long an old obsession was trotted out to attack the deal: the “brain drain”. Australia is not just a richer country than New Zealand, it is one that distributes those riches differently, consistently paying workers a higher proportion of GDP. Would this not, asked several prominent economists, just send more Kiwis over the ditch for higher wages, contributing to existing skills shortages? One editor even suggested the government may have been “played” by those cunning Australians.
These arguments do New Zealand a disservice.
For one, there is scant evidence that this will meaningfully contribute to more people crossing the ditch. Between late-2003 and late-2022, 778,000 Kiwis migrated to Australia from New Zealand, suggesting that the tougher path to citizenship John Howard introduced in 2001 didn’t really stop many. If you’re the kind of young person who typically did make that move, the prospect of citizenship after four years is hard to see as much of a pull factor – over and above more immediate benefits like higher pay, better working conditions, and that half of your friends are doing the same. It could keep some Kiwis in Australia longer, sure, but anyone who is happy to become a citizen of Australia is likely a lost cause for us anyway.
We should also look at brain drain figures with some hesitancy. While it is true that we saw a net loss of Kiwis to Australia of about 3,000 in the three months to September of 2022, it’s also the case that in the same period about 33,600 people moved to New Zealand from Australia and other countries, leading to a substantial net gain (9,400) of overall Kiwis. This trend is borne out the further you look – in the year to February our net migration gain was about 52,000 people, or roughly 1% of the country. In other words, we do lose quite a few people to Australia, but we are making up for it with migrants from elsewhere.
This shouldn’t hide the fact that there is a real issue with the fact that so many Kiwis see Australia as a better place to get ahead than the land of their birth. It’s not hard to see why: pay is dramatically better, with the median hourly wage about NZ$10 higher. Rent is broadly comparable while Australia’s centres boast big city perks that Auckland still lacks, like reliable public transport and dense housing. “Home” is just a short, relatively-inexpensive flight away if you need it.
But the answer to this challenge shouldn’t be just trying to build the walls up higher or guilt Kiwis into staying. It should be making New Zealand as good a place to live as Australia with comparable (or better) incomes and working conditions. It should be unlocking Auckland and Wellington and Christchurch’s potential to be thriving centres in the south Pacific, not museum pieces full of damp Victorian villas and stand-still traffic. Doing this is far from easy, but possible, given in living memory New Zealand was the richer of the pair. How we return to that should be the key question of our politics in the years to come.
Henry Cooke is a freelance journalist covering New Zealand politics
