Perhaps it was Queenstown’s chill when the Prime Ministers of Australia and New Zealand met last month that allowed them to keep as low as the thermometer’s zero reading.
Even by the standards of the staged banality that infects trans-Tasman leaders’ joint appearances – Jacinda Ardern’s rebuke of Scott Morrison at her feisty 2020 Sydney press conference excepted – Anthony Albanese and Christopher Luxon were at their wearisome best; a pavlova flown up a mountain to facilitate more tedious prime ministerial banter for the cameras on which nation invented it.
As if.
With the surge in New Zealanders leaving long-term for Australia – nearly 30,000 net last year – it is surely a wonder that neither leader seemed willing to address what is for New Zealanders still in their own country the pressing issue with Australia; the leaching away of their young and skilled across the Tasman.
The leaving is hardly new. Nearly 80 years ago, in his posthumously published memoir Report on Experience, the expatriate Kiwi scholar, writer and soldier John Mulgan wrote of those who leave: “They are a queer, lost, eccentric, pervading people who will seldom admit to the deep desire that is in all of them to go home and live quietly in New Zealand again.”
For decades New Zealand similarly consoled itself – that most of those who leave would eventually find their way back. But the evidence no longer supports this, especially for the greatest component of people who leave New Zealand – those heading to Australia. More than 90,000 have, during the past two years, applied for Australian citizenship, suggesting they see the wide brown land as their forever home, spurred by Australia’s decision in 2023 to ease the pathway for New Zealanders to obtain that status.
Worryingly, nearly half of the New Zealanders applying for Australian citizenship weren’t born in New Zealand, according to new data from the Australian government released in July. This suggests that New Zealand’s policy of replenishing its losses to Australia with migrants from other nations is turning into a back-door method for their entry to Australia.
It is becoming harder to see how New Zealand gains if more of its people are fleeing, fewer are returning, and even those migrants it relies on to replenish its population leave in droves. Perhaps New Zealand needs to ask a difficult question: is it simply too easy for its people to up sticks for an Australia that has vastly changed in the 52 years since freedom of movement between the two countries was made official in 1973?
Back then, the net flows of migrants both ways across the Tasman were comparable, a reflection of what was then a much smaller wealth disparity between the two countries. Propelled by Australia’s long-running mining boom and its associated high rates of inward migration, wages across many Australian industries and professions have since outstripped what’s on offer in New Zealand.
It is difficult to see the trend reversing, or even easing soon. Does New Zealand stand idly by, watching too many of the expensively educated, sorely needed and most productive disappear to Australia? Does it become a nation of the elderly, the young and a vanished middle? A first step toward an answer would be a fresh analysis conducted jointly by both the Australian and New Zealand governments that examines which nation is winning and who is losing under the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement – the five-decade old pact that encourages New Zealand’s outflows.
On the most recent evidence, New Zealand’s winners are already in Australia – leaving their country the poorer with every departing plane.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for The Times, London.
