Fran O’Sullivan: Jacinda Ardern’s Australian campaign delivers for Kiwis

The relationship between Anthony Albanese and Jacinda Ardern helped to change Australian attitudes. Photo / Pool

OPINION:

It took courage and political gall to verbally stalk the aggressively rambunctious Scott Morrison, then charm the hell out of his successor, the more cerebral Anthony Albanese. But Jacinda Ardern did just that.

Just one week after Ardern left Parliament, it is clear that Kiwis — particularly those living in Australia — owe her gratitude.

The upshot of the outspoken and passionate campaign Ardern waged to publicly call successive Australian prime ministers to account and shame them over the second-class treatment their governments had meted out to New Zealanders has now borne fruit.

At 1 am this morning (NZT), Prime Minister Albanese announced that New Zealanders who have lived in Australia for four years on temporary, special category visas and who meet standard Australian criteria, will be able to become citizens.

It would be trite to suggest that Ardern’s unique style was the only factor weighing on the Australian Government’s decision. It was obviously grossly unfair for Australia to also deny social services benefits to New Zealanders who had long paid Australian tax. On achieving citizenship, they will now qualify for that assistance.

It should also be noted that in reality, it is in Australia’s economic interest for hard-working and skilled New Zealanders to be offered a direct pathway to citizenship. It will incentivise some Kiwis to make their future in Australia at a time when international labour shortages impinge on many countries.

Since Ardern resigned, first as Prime Minister and then as Mt Albert MP, there has been a great deal of mean-spirited comment over her political legacy on the international front, where she has been criticised as a show pony.

The commentariat has, however acknowledged her undoubted crisis management: think the Christchurch mosque attack, the White Island eruption and the early years of Covid-19.

While the breakthrough was finalised under Chris Hipkins’ prime ministership, in truth, the credit belongs to Ardern, supported by careful diplomacy by New Zealand’s High Commissioner to Australia, Dame Annette King.

It was not until after the two PMs’ joint meeting in Sydney last July that Albanese telegraphed that Australia was prepared to move on a new “pathway to citizenship” for New Zealanders living across the Tasman and would adopt a more “commonsense” approach to deporting New Zealand citizens convicted of crimes.

Ardern’s formal bilateral meeting with Morrison the year before had been politically charged. It took place just as the Covid-19 pandemic was gathering pace.

The Australian Prime Minister had already moved ahead of international authorities and warned his country to prepare for a coronavirus pandemic. But while the topic was on their meeting agenda, Ardern studiously ignored it while she whipped into Morrison at their news conference.

I wrote then that it was as though their meeting “took place in a parallel universe where threats of global pandemics, multiple deaths and a potential international recession did not exist”.

But Ardern was fixated on shaming Morrison.

All the rhetoric around “we are family” that both sides in this relationship have promoted for decades, in reality counted for zilch when the Kiwi cousins were treated as inferior.

By combining empathetic advocacy with logic, the former New Zealand Prime Minister broke through the walls that Australia had erected against its “Kiwi cousins”.

Hipkins has acknowledged the contribution of former prime ministers to the policy shift, adding “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″.

He leaves Wellington this morning for his own first formal bilateral meeting with the Australian Prime Minister.

Poignantly, this is Anzac Weekend.

While the official agenda does indeed allow for the place Anzac Day holds for both Australians and New Zealanders — given the large numbers from both countries who were casualties of world wars — there are new threats on the horizon.

Views have been sharpened — and been shaped — by the Ukraine crisis and the recognition that the Pacific is no longer a benign neighbourhood.

Both prime ministers will attend the Nato summit in Europe in June. New Zealand is also considering joining Pillar 2 of Aukus, the trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The White House has already sent diplomat Kurt Campbell to Wellington to talk with defence and foreign affairs officials on the proposal. The British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly would no doubt have also canvassed the expansion of the security pact to include New Zealand if he had not high-tailed it back to London yesterday to manage the developing Sudan crisis.

In a perceptive speech to the FOMA conference a week ago, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade CEO Chris Seed said many of the assumptions that have underpinned New Zealand’s foreign policy for decades no longer hold.

“We are seeing an increasing shift from rules to power. A shift towards a world where the existing rules and norms of the international system are being increasingly challenged, often eroded, and too frequently disregarded.

“Certain countries are increasingly exercising hard power to test the limits of the rules-based system, at the expense of rules that serve smaller countries like New Zealand.”

Seed instanced, as the clearest example, Russia’s unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine — a clear breach of the territorial integrity and sovereignty at the heart of the United Nations Charter.

He also singled out the shift from economics to security, adding that economic relationships are being reassessed in light of a more militarised, more securitised, less stable world.

“The medium of diplomatic exchange in the Indo-Pacific has, for the last 20 years, been economic. “We are now seeing a marked shift towards diplomacy centred on power and security.”

This scoping of MFAT’s evolving position will have been read well by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs (Dfat) in advance of Hipkins’ visit.

It would be naive to assume that the deepening international security environment and the tough choices New Zealand may in future face does not play a part in the weekend’s private discussions between the two prime ministers.

Already, Australia and New Zealand have announced plans for their armies to work more closely together. Plan ANZAC, named after the joint WWI force, aims to improve army interoperability with more co-operation over training, capability, readiness and personnel.

Then there are the other defining moments in our nations’ histories.

Hipkins will be accompanied to Brisbane by four influential Māori leaders: Ngahiwi Tomoana, Liz Mellish, Traci Houpapa and Pania Tyson-Nathan.

At a time when Australia is debating what it calls “The Voice” and giving aboriginal people a greater role in federal and state governance, seeing the value and confidence these stellar Māori leaders bring to international discussions might just inspire Albanese to go further and faster in Australia with proposals to enhance indigenous leadership.