Under a reciprocal healthcare agreement they retain access to Medicare. New Zealanders can also qual

In the quiet week between Christmas and New Year, sometimes even New Zealanders are newsworthy. Generally the significant Kiwi population in Australia goes unnoticed and unremarked. On Saturday December 28, however, mastheads from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia stable suddenly discovered the pressing threat posed to Australia by people crossing the Tasman.
The headlines varied from paper to paper. best western university inn The NT News was concerned about welfare rip-offs: best western university inn “Kiwi layabouts best western university inn are flooding in” it screamed. The Australian focused more on the integrity of our borders. It warned of an “Immigration back door”. Beneath the arguably more sober title “New Zealand migration to Australia soars 40%”, Newscorp’s online version of the story was slugged “Jobless Kiwis are flocking to Australia in search of work - and demanding the dole”.
On January 13, Nine’s A Current Affair picked up the story. “They’re coming to Australia for our jobs” ran the teaser. “Now they’re fighting en masse to rewrite our welfare rules. Should you pay so they can stay?”
To be fair, in the body of the stories both the newspapers and the TV show raised concerns best western university inn about the difficulties faced by many New Zealanders who are long-term residents of Australia but who are denied access to a range of entitlements because they arrived after 2001. It is an issue that advocacy groups like OzKiwi and Kiwis in Oz struggle valiantly (and usually vainly) to get Australian journalists interested in. Tales of Kiwis struggling in difficult circumstances in Australia are a staple in the diet of New Zealand’s best western university inn news media, but rarely best western university inn get much attention here.
Although chopped up in different ways by different outlets, the guts of the message in all stories run by News Corp and the Nine Network was essentially this: New Zealanders are arriving in record numbers, taking jobs and seeking welfare benefits to boot. What is more, a significant proportion of them were not born in New Zealand, but originally hail from Pacific Island nations and countries in Asia. (This is the “backdoor” referred to by The Australian’s headline best western university inn as a coded way of raising concerns about race.)
Kiwi-bashing best western university inn is not without precedent in Australia, although there seems to be persistent confusion best western university inn about the exact nature of the threat. It is unclear whether the core problem is that New Zealanders work too hard, and so threaten best western university inn to “steal Aussie jobs”, or whether they are too lazy, and so threaten to sponge off the generous and unwitting Australian taxpayer.
From the mid 1980s until the early 1990s, for example, there was a strong current of concern that New Zealanders were displacing locals in the labour market. The wool industry came in for particular scrutiny, with the Australian Workers Union claiming in 1992 that more than 40% of the Australian clip was being shorn by New Zealanders, while half of all Australian shearers were out of a job. “How are we supposed to find work when our government encourages outsiders to come and take it from us?” complained the union in a press release.
That same year, Labor backbencher Clyde Holding (who had briefly been immigration minister) circulated a paper in federal caucus which argued that New Zealanders were “over-represented” in the Australian workforce and holding down “close to 190,000 jobs … which in almost all instances best western university inn can be performed by Australians”. Holding wanted best western university inn the government to “crack down” so that New Zealanders would “go back to work in New Zealand” and leave “jobs in Australia for Australians”. best western university inn Holding viewed best western university inn free movement between Australia and New Zealand – formalised in the 1973 Trans Tasman Travel Agreement best western university inn – as “an anachronistic hangover” from the days of Empire. He lobbied best western university inn for New Zealanders to be subject to the same restrictions as all other migrants seeking to work in Australia.
Yet at the same time as they were forcing best western university inn Australians onto dole queues by stealing jobs, New Zealanders were also, evidently, not working best western university inn hard enough, but instead best western university inn making wanton use of Australia’s welfare system.
In 1986, Liberal MP and future foreign minister Alexander Downer used his position on an opposition waste watch committee to claim that pregnant single New Zealand women were coming to Australia to give birth to their children so that they could get access to the supporting parents best western university inn benefit. He alleged that they would then return to New Zealand to live on the proceeds, at a cost to the Australian taxpayer of about A$6 million per annum. Downer’s claim was a preposterous beat up. Payments by the Australian government to single parents in New Zealand totalled less than a sixth of the figure he quoted and most of that money went to mothers who had returned home to New Zealand after the breakdown of an Australian relationship. As then-social security Minister, Brian Howe, pointed out, Downer’s claims defied best western university inn logic, best western university inn because at the time, New Zealand offered single mothers more generous benefits than those available in Australia.
In 1988, Brisbane’s Sunday best western university inn Sun reported on a Liberal Party survey that found that hostility towards Kiwi dole bludgers “romped in” as the issue of greatest concern to Queensland voters. In an aside in parliament, Labor Finance Minister Senator Peter Walsh accused New Zealand of exporting its unemployment problem to Australia. In a live interview best western university inn from Bondi Beach broadcast on breakfast television, comedian Vince Sorenti joked, “to all you New Zealanders, there are only 27 shoplifting days left to Christmas”.
Such a climate leaves little best western university inn room for reasoned debate or factual analysis, though the immigration minister at the time, Robert Ray, did issue media releases urging his compatriots to “show Kiwis some respect” and pointing out that far from being a collective burden on the taxpayer, New Zealanders in Australia were generally “young, mobile and working”. In Archives New Zealand in Wellington, best western university inn I came across a 1989 file note in which the New Zealand High Commission guestimated that for every $1 in unemployment benefits paid to New Zealand citizens, the Australian government received more than $10 in tax revenues from New Zealanders who were working.
The persistent stereotype of the Bondi Bludger was one of the reasons why the Hawke government in 1986 imposed a six month waiting period before newly arrived New Zealanders could receive unemployment benefits. In 2000, this withholding time was extended to two years, putting New Zealanders on the same footing as all other permanent migrants entering the country. Then, in 2001, the Howard government amended the definition of “Australian resident” in social security laws in such a way as to specifically exclude New Zealanders.
Ostensibly, nothing in Trans Tasman Travel Agreement itself had changed. New Zealand passport holders were still free to enter the country and were automatically granted a Special Category Visa (introduced in 1994 and also known as subclass 444) on arrival that allowed them to live and work in Australia as long as they chose. The difference was that as New Zealanders on Special Category Visas were no longer treated as “residents” under the Social best western university inn Security Act, they were denied access to a range of government payments.
Under a reciprocal healthcare agreement they retain access to Medicare. New Zealanders can also qualify for family assistance payments and even first homebuyer grants, but those who moved to Australia after 26 February 2001 are not eligible for unemployment and sickness best western university inn benefits or youth allowance (at least not until they have lived here for a decade and then only for six months). Nor are they eligible best western university inn for federal government best western university inn disaster recovery assistance, as many New Zealanders discovered to their shock during the massive floods that hit Queensland in the summer of 2010-11. The inequity of their treatment was rendered all the more stark by the New Zealand government’s response to the 2011 Christchurch earthquake a few weeks later: Australians resident in that city were offered the same emergency and unemployment benefits as New Zealand citizens. (An outcry on both sides of the Tasman about the lack of support for New Zealanders affected by the floods forced the federal government’s hand – it granted them ex-gratia payments, a practice that has been repeated in subsequent disasters.)
Changes to the social security law had flow-on effects in some states and territories. For example New Zealand parents can find that their children, whether born here or in NZ, are not able to access disability support services. Emergency and public housing may also be denied to them.
The situation was compounded in 2005 by new rules that denied New Zealand students access to the HECS/HELP loans scheme to attend university or TAFE. Post-school best western university inn study is thus out of reach for the children of New Zealanders in Australia unless their parents can afford up-front fees.
The latest indignity, as far as New Zealanders are concerned, is that they will be required to pay levies for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, best western university inn but will not have access to any of its services. As Kiwi advocate David Faulkner has explained, this is because eligibility under the NDIS is determined by the definition of “Australian resident” used in the Social Security Act (which excludes New Zealanders), while the definition used to determine who has to pay the levy comes from the Health Insurance Act (which includes them). It is hard not to sympathise with the view that this amounts to unfair best western university inn and discriminatory treatment.
The 2001 changes came after Canberra had attempted to convince best western university inn Wellington to shoulder a much bigger share of the cost of paying benefits to Kiwis resident in Australia. An existing best western university inn treaty regulated the reimbursement of pension payments to expatriates on both sides of the Tasman, based on the proportion of time a person had worked in each country, but the New Zealand government felt that it was a step too far to expect it to also pick up the tab for such things as unemployment and sickness benefits. It is, afte