Aust minister: We’re family
A senior Australian minister has pledged a stronger relationship with New Zealand, saying her country’s laws leave some New Zealanders in a ‘‘suspended state of temporariness’’.
Australia’s Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil, delivered a speech at Wellington’s law school titled Australia and New Zealand: We’re not just friends, we’re family.
O’Neil did not mention the controversial 501 policy, which has seen people with tenuous links to New Zealand deported here after serving prison sentences.
O’Neil refused to take questions from media after the speech.
Stuff understands O’Neil was also in the country working on potential changes to immigration and on the 501 deportee policy.
‘‘We have a system in Australia where some New Zealanders who happened to be in Australia on certain dates have something close to citizenship rights, and people might arrive five days after a change of policy and live under totally different laws in our country as a consequence,’’ O’Neil said.
‘‘They are Australian all but for the fact that they were not actually born in our country.
‘‘Yet they are excluded from joining the Australian public service, for example, and from getting different types of government benefits.
‘‘It is just unfair and untenable when we want to walk forward with New Zealand in this great partnership in our region,’’ O’Neil said. For New Zealanders, getting Australian citizenship is expensive, difficult and far from assured.
Comparatively, Australians can become New Zealand citizens more or less automatically if they have lived in New Zealand for five years, and if they pass a character and language test, and have lived in New Zealand for at least eight months of the five years.
O’Neil said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese held concern for the ‘‘very large number of people leaving our country who are essentially in a suspended state of temporariness in their existence in Australia’’. O’Neil said she was tasked by Albanese to look into those issues and believed she could make significant progress over the next couple of years.
The speech largely focused on cybersecurity and its risk to both Australia and New Zealand.
‘‘This threat is not going anywhere, it affects both our citizens, both our countries very deeply,’’ O’Neil said.
She called foreign interference and espionage a huge threat that was covert, hidden and malicious in its intent.
‘‘Foreign interference is a threat to our collective stability, prosperity and sovereignty,’’ she said. ‘‘It fosters a division that erodes trust in our institutions, and it immediately threatens the social cohesion that New Zealand and Australia have spent decades upon decades building.’’
In July, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Albanese committed to work on streamlining citizenship options for New Zealanders in Australia by Anzac Day next year, with a pledge for Albanese to consider giving New Zealanders more equal voting rights.
Albanese also announced Australia would take a ‘‘common sense’’ approach to the controversial 501 policy.