Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has tweaked the country's deportation policy. Photo / Adam Pearse
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
OPINION
It is rare to see the Murdoch press lavish praise upon public servants, much less those with ties to the Labour Party.
But Australians picking up a copy of the country’s only national broadsheet, The Australian, on Tuesday, were greeted with a front page splash which did precisely that, revealing New Zealand diplomats, headed by former High Commissioner to Canberra Annette King (who went unnamed in the story) had heavily lobbied the Australian Government over its 501 deportation policy.
Of course to The Australian audience (capital T, capital A) New Zealand diplomats arguing their country’s interests effectively is more a cause for damnation than praise. It’s not so much a story of diplomats doing a top job, as it is an accusation the Australian Government folded in the face of persistent nagging from New Zealand.
If only our diplomats were as successful at enforcing the rules of cricket.
This week’s news cycle has been dominated by revelations that Direction 99 (the name for the directive of the Anthony Albanese Government to consider someone’s ties to Australia before deporting them) has led to some fairly unsavoury types remaining in Australia when they might otherwise have been deported.
The Australian ran a column hinting that this was so counter to the national interest that one of the only rational explanations could be found in the Government’s other migration reform: the establishment of a pathway to citizenship for New Zealanders resident in Australia. This, it is thought, would fuel substantial, Labor-leaning gratefulness in Kiwis, feathering the Albanese Government’s path to future electoral victories.
The direction was put under review, and on Friday it was announced greater weighting would be given to community safety in deportation decisions. It’s unclear whether this means a substantive reversal of the original direction or whether this is a middle ground.
The minister in charge, Andrew Giles, is being discussed as a prime candidate for a mid-term reshuffle. He was the chief victim of almost daily attacks in Question Time. The Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is ideally placed to front such attacks, having served as a hardline Home Affairs minister in the last Government, where he seemed to think that deportees (whom he once described as “trash”) marked his path to the prime ministership. His currently diminished position seems not to have disabused him of that notion.
The issue has become a roundabout way of attacking former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who, it is alleged, exerts a pernicious wokifying influence upon the Australian Labor Party and who, it appears, exerts the same synapse-curdling influence upon a thin but loud segment of the Australian electorate as she does in New Zealand. She is the face of a certain type of politics (wellbeing, for instance, is popular in government) that is currently a topic of great conjecture.
Migration is one of the few issues on which New Zealand and Australia’s positions are mutually incomprehensible.
The incomprehension is more marked because we use the same language on the issue, but that language means quite different things.
For both nations, migration is an issue of fairness.
For New Zealand, fairness means treating potential deportees bound for New Zealand the same way New Zealand does; for Australia, fairness means treating potential deportees the same, regardless of citizenship.
There appears to be no domestic constituency sympathetic to the plight of New Zealanders in Australia, although if there is, the coming few elections (post the recent citizenship changes) will show it. The only people whose voices matter in an electoral sense are those who have attained the right to vote through citizenship, and who are therefore unable to be deported (well, mostly). These people tend to have more pressing, retail concerns than the plight of their less lucky compatriots.
The New Zealand Government has so far been muted in its response to the imbroglio. It is right to be.
A ramp-up in deportations could be catastrophic for the Government’s law and order ambitions, but allowing Australia latitude to respond to domestic political concerns over the change in policy is worth it - it simply will not do for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to drag the issue, and the wider relationship, back to its 2020 nadir.
The average New Zealander does not quite understand the uniqueness of our effectively open border. The same does not exist between the likes of Canada and the United States and many other close, culturally similar neighbours. It exists in a stronger, more codified form, in the European Union, but there it is subject to such constant strain it was probably the single greatest cause of Brexit.
Between the Global Financial Crisis and Brexit, the UK became the employer of last resort for moribund continental economies, creating dangerous inter-European imbalances. Powerless to change European migration settings thanks to strict European rules, the country opted to leave the bloc entirely.
A change of that magnitude here seems highly unlikely, but the Brexit example was thought of by the Key Government as instructive. The essentially open border with Australia remains because both countries maintain its settings on their own terms. If Australia feels it cannot respond to what it sees are legitimate domestic concerns in border policy, New Zealanders may find the broader more important settings are impacted. The fact Australia has the unilateral ability to change these settings is key to sustaining the public’s consent for them.
This essentially common labour market is a crucial component of the New Zealand economy.
Despite losing large numbers of people we’d rather keep, including doctors, nurses, teachers, police, and, thanks to a decision this week, potential soldiers (but not existing or recent service men and women), New Zealand’s labour market often fails to produce sufficient employment, and employment in areas where New Zealanders have skilled. Recent peaks in emigration have tended to correspond with moments of high unemployment, following the GFC and Christchurch Earthquakes and during the current the self-induced recession in which the population of Timaru has made its way across the Tasman in just a year. Australia acts as a stress valve for our weaker labour market. Being unable to export this unemployment offshore could be catastrophic.
Sadly, the secular stagnation of the New Zealand economy has left us a price-taker on the matter of the border and the price, it seems, is a steady stream of troubled Australians taking a one-way trip across the ditch.
It would also be foolish to think of deportations dragging the relationship back towards the “corrosive” era, as Ardern once characterised it.
Other links remain strong, and despite Aukus causing a few wobbles when it was announced, it seems to have brought the countries closer together, rather than further apart - even if New Zealand doesn’t actually end up joining pillar 2, which is possible.
Australia appears to have been initially shocked by just how big a deal Aukus is in New Zealand.
It shouldn’t have been. New Zealand may never formally associate with the agreement, but the fact the deal involves strengthening US defence ties and nuclear propulsion (though not arms - as everyone in Australia is at pains to emphasise) means the deal crosses two deeply emotive and immovable faultlines in New Zealand politics.
It sounds bizarre at first gloss, but it is not an exaggeration to say that regardless of whether or not New Zealand formally affiliates itself with Aukus pillar 2, the deal is likely to be a larger domestic political issue here than in any Aukus member country bar Australia.
The Americans, British, and Japanese (currently courting pillar 2) all have more significant and immediate security concerns. New Zealand does not.
The nuclear and American aspects of Aukus bring up a painful agglomeration of memories of abandonment by allies and friends and even state-sponsored terrorism in the heart of Auckland (ironically at the hands of the Aukus-gilted French). For a certain generation, the deal represents the end of a certain type of independent foreign policy practiced here for four decades. This is understandable. The loudest voice in that position, former Prime Minister Helen Clark, was in Parliament and later in Government during the nuclear free era - and whose instincts about the United States and China were proven right in Government, firstly by the disaster in Iraq, and secondly by the miracle of the China FTA.
Australia, its eyes focused ever northward, did not seem to understand the roots of those anxieties to begin with, but does now, even if it doesn’t agree with them.
Whether that means New Zealand will sign up to pillar 2 is difficult to say. For one thing, it seems that the three pillar 1 partners aren’t quite on the same page about what pillar 2 might be - and what Australia thinks pillar 2 is would appear to be out of New Zealand’s price range.
The debate over the ditch is that pillar 2 would involve linking up with “third countries” on a project-by-project basis, collaborating on discrete technological development projects, sharing the cost, and procuring that development from a contractor in one of the pillar 1 or 2 countries.
It’s hard to see any New Zealand firm save perhaps Rocket Lab (which is a real possibility) being chosen as the contractor for a pillar 2 project, and equally unlikely to see New Zealand having the resources to meaningfully contribute to R&D projects led by the Aukus partners (pillar 1 alone is estimated to cost roughly New Zealand’s entire annual GDP).
The main concern on the New Zealand side is that we maintain the ability to operate interoperably with Australia (it’s been a feature of recent speeches by Foreign Minister Winston Peters). This means at least some sharing of pillar 2 technology where it is relevant to New Zealand (for example on tech developed for P-8 aircraft New Zealand and Australia share). New Zealand might need to learn to pay its way more when it comes to paying for this technology.
That might not mean sharing through Aukus. Opting out of Aukus might not actually irk the Australians who seem to “get” New Zealand’s domestic political challenges. Australia has already been handed a significant victory in the fact New Zealand’s public position on the deal is that we think it is good for regional security, despite that being a matter of some conjecture.
The most interesting question is posed by the American side of things. At least some people in the American system, namely Deputy Secretary of State Kirk “pivot to Asia” Campbell, seem to view Aukus as a bit more than a submarine development pact, and something more like a broader security deal - part of a hedge to preserve US primacy in the region, if not unilaterally, than at least in aggregate.
Campbell is responsible for kicking off the pillar 2 debate in New Zealand. Perhaps the will we, wont we dance is best viewed as between New Zealand and the northern Aukus partners, rather than the southern.
Australia needs these submarines. If it fails to get them (as is quite possible) then Aukus will be one of the greatest strategic blunders in the country’s history. The risk for Australia is that the United States might not see it that way, and might become distracted by the deal’s growing scope.
New Zealanders are so preoccupied by asking whether joining pillar 2 is in our interests, we’ve forgot to ponder whether it’s in Australia’s.
Thomas Coughlan visited Australia on the Canberra Fellowship Programme, funded by the Australian Government.
"When it doesn’t perform, everybody notices. When it does perform, nobody notices.”