Deal on benefits will end sniping

By GREG ANSLEY

CANBERRA - An almost audible sigh of relief will come from both sides of the Tasman on Monday when Prime Ministers Helen Clark and John Howard sit down to sign the new social security agreement.

For the two Governments, it will end 30 years of bickering.

For expatriates, it will kill the mythological Bondi Bludger, if not the sheep jokes.

And it will set rules everyone can understand for the wave of migrating New Zealanders that last year peaked at a net 30,000-plus - the biggest since Australia began recording the flight of the Kiwi in 1959.

Both sides accepted something had to give.

When the first transtasman social security arrangements were drawn up, travel across the Tasman was fairly even in both directions.

But in the 1960s, just as as a vast flock of young New Zealand baby boomers began stretching their wings, the week-long and relatively expensive sea voyage to Australia was replaced by fast and cheap jet airliners.

The mass migration had started, fuelled by the bright lights of Sydney, the endless summers of Queensland, and plentiful work that paid more than at home.

In the 1970s, as oil prices soared and Sir Robert Muldoon Thought Big, the exodus really began, leaping ahead with every downturn of the New Zealand economy.

The parallel rise in the cost of benefits to New Zealanders - and the much smaller direct reimbursement by Wellington - was a budgetary and political wart that finally became a constant pain at prime ministerial level.

It was a real corrosion of an important and much broader relationship for both countries.

And there was the Australian media, which reduced most transtasman debate to sport, defence and the image of an army of dole bludgers snatching everything they could from open Australian hands.

In regular cycles the myth of the Kiwi sponger would be dragged from the shadows.

Even two weeks ago, Sydney's Daily Telegraph headlined its front page "Kiwi dole ban," and TV dug out a handful of miffed New Zealanders on benefits.

No amount of statistical argument could knock a good story.

Expat New Zealanders have lower unemployment and higher labour force participation rates than most other groups - including Australians. As a population group they are higher skilled and higher paid. They permeate the upper echelons of business and create their own.

They even populate Parliament: Howard's ministry includes two New Zealand-born MPs.

And Canberra still gets the most out of CER - in the year to December, Australia's transtasman trade surplus exceeded $A2 billion.

The present two-year wait for the dole and other benefits has not deterred New Zealanders coming here to work, and the work ethic has been reflected in a wide expatriate acceptance of the new benefit restrictions as fair enough.

Now, if only we could clobber them at cricket and win back the Bledisloe Cup ...