English: NZ seen as ‘soft entry point’ to Australia

Prime Minister Bill English concedes New Zealand is considered a “soft entry point” for migration to Australia.

He says he wants to investigate the issue, because it is often raised by Australian government officials.

But he says his Government has no plan to change the two countries’ reciprocal travel deal, which makes it easy to move between to them.

The New Zealand Government has expressed disappointment with recent changes in Australia which will make it harder to get citizenship and more expensive to attend university.

Labour and New Zealand First say New Zealand has partly brought the problem on itself because it has become a “back-door” route to Australia.

This was driving some of Australia’s increasingly tough policies on expatriate Kiwis, they said.

English said yesterday that the concern that NZ was a soft entry point had come up in talks with Australia about establishing a common border.

“We do want to look into the issue because the Australian authorities have raised that in the past.

“We are confident that our immigration and border control is sound, and certainly meets our expectations.

“But the fact is New Zealanders have always been able to move to Australia. There’s no suggestion that is going to change.

“We would like to understand precisely what their concern is. Because there’s no evidence that the New Zealanders moving to Australia constitute some unique or special burden on Australia.”

The issue was not raised during a visit to Sydney by Foreign Minister Gerry Brownlee last week, but English said it “commonly circulates” among Australian officials.

He did not know how this concern could be resolved, partly because it had been “quite hard to pin down exactly what the problem is”.

Australia’s concerns that Pacific Islanders could use NZ as an alternative route into Australia influenced tighter immigration rules in 2001.

English also said more uncertainty was probably ahead for Kiwis living across the Tasman. While he had not been briefed about any further Australian proposals which could affect them, he said economic woes and an “Australia First” approach could lead to further fallout.

There had been a lot of publicity in Australia about the number of nonAustralians on welfare, which he said signalled “an ongoing focus” on migrants’ entitlements.