It is one thing to argue for the expats' rights to all the benefits of Australian taxpayers, which they are, but when we start pressing for the rights of expats who have broken the law or belong to a motorcycle gang, I think we are pushing our luck.
I don't blame Australia one bit. I wish we could deport every non-citizen who commits a violent crime or abuses the privilege of being here.
The ability to move freely between New Zealand and Australia is a privilege we treasure probably more than we stop to realise. If you think about it, New Zealand would be remote indeed without it. The big, warm, companionable country nearby is an enlargement of ourselves, a society much like our own, but with a population nearly five times larger and the opportunities that offers.
Our right to freely go there rests on nothing but historical sentiment. There is no treaty, no formal agreement that established a common labour market. The Closer Economic Relations agreement of 1982 which removed barriers to the flow of goods and services, was long thought to have done the same for people. But it didn't because there were no barriers to people.
Australians and New Zealanders have freely migrated between the two countries since the beginning of their colonisation. If one economy was in recession its unemployed would gravitate to the other. Neither country gave it much thought until both of them adopted more diverse immigration policies in the late 20th century.
Australians became concerned, with some cause, that New Zealand had become a "back door" for immigrants from other places, and concerned also, with arguably less cause, about the number of Kiwis who had gone there without work and appeared to be surfing on the dole.
At the millennium the Howard Government proposed the first restrictions on Kiwi residents' rights to welfare. Initially it had asked the New Zealand Government to reimburse the Australian Treasury by $1 billion a year. It also wanted New Zealand to agree to set up a common immigration border for both countries.
The newly elected Government under Helen Clark would not agree to effectively paying New Zealanders the dole in Australia, nor to a common immigration policy that would have cut across New Zealand's arrangements with Pacific island states.
Victoria University historian Paul Hamer, who has made a study of the negotiations and wrote about them in the Herald last month, said, "If New Zealand did not yield on these fronts, the distinct possibility existed that Australia would ... end the free flow of labour across the Tasman."
The best that Clark and her Foreign Minister Phil Goff could do was to propose that, in Hamer's words, "each country look to its own conscience over what labour market benefits it would pay to the other's citizens ... The Howard Government accepted with alacrity and imposed its restrictions".
As time passes the discrimination becomes ever more unfair to the children of expats who have grown up in Australia. New Zealand governments are doing what they can for them. Malcolm Turnbull announced a restoration of their right to tertiary education allowances when he was here.
But if Australia is of a mind to expel them after prison sentences for minor offences or even for criminal associations, we can only appeal to the Australian conscience. Those who went to Australia as children might never have been told their position is so tenuous.
We can argue they are Australian, their family and social connections are there and their rehabilitation more likely there. But all of that is an untidy consequence of New Zealanders' unique status in Australia. Let's hope they don't fix it.
