The real reason New Zealanders hate Australia

I was leaning against our troubled Britz campervan in Rotorua, New Zealand, watching the somnolent shadow cast by a BP station stretch across the pavement, when my curiosity got the better of me.

“Why is it that so many New Zealanders seem to dislike Australians?” I blurted out to the 40-something-year-old local mechanic fixing our van.

Tristan, a man of seemingly few words among strangers, was nonplussed at first, his round face shifting to one side as he looked away. After pausing, he offered this analogy: “I think the whole New Zealand-Australia thing is kind of like Holden and Ford — that’s probably it.”

No, I remember thinking, that can’t be. For one, Tristan hardly sounded convinced of that theory himself. For another, we all know adherents on both sides of that thorny debate are wholly cognisant of the historic rivalry underlying it. By contrast, I’d hazard a guess that most Australians lack even a fleeting awareness of the disdain with which many New Zealanders now regard them.

Fast-forward four months to today and I’m told that the deep-seated reasons many New Zealanders despise Australia stem from the existence of those places of limbo that have long been described by human rights experts as “tantamount to torture”.

“Most Australians don’t even know this because it doesn’t make the news [in Australia],” said Joanne Cox, who chairs the Oz Kiwi Association, a peak advocacy body for New Zealanders living in Australia.

“But in New Zealand, it’s seen as racist, it’s seen as hateful, and New Zealanders resent being treated this way — especially because it’s in no way reciprocated by the New Zealand government.”

Cox was speaking of Australia’s notorious immigration detention centres and policies — so infamous for their inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and refugees that it’s often missed that New Zealand citizens have comprised the largest cohort of detained individuals since 2016.

Much like all frontiers in Australia’s long-standing war on immigrants, the over-representation of New Zealanders in immigration detention is a reality born not of sloppy policy-making but rather a series of amendments to the Migration Act underpinned by racist design, say critics.

In late 2014, the ambit of section 501 of the act was significantly expanded, arming the Abbott government with sweeping powers to deport non-citizens on character grounds.

Among the most consequential of changes was the redefined scope of “serious offence” to mean a sentence of 12 months or more. In practice, this came to encompass anything from multiple short sentences that combine to meet that total, suspended sentences and even sentences served years ago. Indeed, a person’s juvenile record or time spent in a rehab facility could also raise the spectre of deportation, even if they hadn’t committed any crime in the intervening decades.

In the result, deportations of New Zealanders from Australia “just exploded” following the implementation of these policies, Cox told me, with Kiwis disproportionately accounting for over half of all those targeted by the new laws.

“Thousands of New Zealanders have been deported since the beginning of 2015, many of them to a country they don’t or no longer recognise as home, leaving them separated from their families,” she said.

“I’ve seen people’s minor offending as a child catch them up to 40 years later, people deported because of traffic offences and others for non-payment of fines. It’s caused immense damage, immense cruelty.”

One of the most recent examples to surface involves a 74-year-old man with advanced dementia who was deported in December last year for property offences, despite having lived in Australia for over 50 years. Another was a man separated from his children after landing a six-month sentence for a range of trivial offending, including failure to wear a bicycle helmet.

“I never hurt anyone,” he told The Age. “The only person I hurt was myself.”

When asked how the section 501 policy was initially received among New Zealanders, Cox said there was an element of both surprise and cynicism. Surprise given the long-standing close bilateral relationship between the two countries, but cynicism when cast against Australia’s “very long and ugly history of mistreating refugees and asylum seekers”.

“To be perfectly frank,” she said, “it’s clearly a racist policy — the vast majority of [New Zealanders] deported are Māori and Pacifica.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Route 501 Advocacy and Support founder Filipa Payne, who told me it’s not a great leap to view the section 501 policy as reminiscent of the country’s White Australia policy.

“I think the White Australia policy is still very much alive today,” she said. “I don’t believe the visa cancellation policy was ever directed generally at New Zealanders — I believe it’s mainly directed at people of colour.”

Phillip Rewha, who’s been detained in Western Australia’s Yongha Hill immigration detention centre for the past seven months, was of a similar view: “It’s definitely racist — I’d say 95% of people impacted are not white,” he said.

But having lived and raised a family in Australia after moving here in the mid ‘90s, the 51-year-old told me that what’s worse than the latent racism at hand was the sheer hypocrisy.

“It’s very confronting to be told you don’t have a set of morals or you’re not a good person,” he said.

“The Australian government is guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and slavery. There’s no one in here for those crimes … it’s just madness.”

In Payne’s view, however, it would be a mistake to view the section 501 policy in isolation, as though the obstacles to Australian citizenship placed in the way of New Zealand residents under the Howard government in 2001 were unrelated.

“For over 20 years now New Zealanders have lacked a clear pathway to citizenship, and it’s exactly those changes that’s made them so vulnerable to deportation under the legislation,” she said.

“You can’t see [the section 501 policy] as anything but an extension of what Howard did in 2001.”

Indeed, some experts believe the 2001 changes — which force New Zealanders to compete with other nationalities for citizenship and remove many of the special analogous rights New Zealand grants Australians living in New Zealand — were themselves motivated by racist considerations, including concerns Pacific Island migrants were using New Zealand as a “backdoor” to Australia.

Whatever the truth, the Albanese government has in recent months flagged reform on both the section 501 and citizenship fronts, with more substantive announcements set for Anzac Day this year.

Yet until then, and until Australia reckons with the brutal realities of its treatment of New Zealanders, it seems unlikely – if anything I observed during my six weeks in New Zealand is a guide – that many New Zealanders will be in any rush to revise their damning assessments of Australia.

As Payne put it to me: “Some of the minor changes announced to the way s 501 should be applied don’t go far enough. The fact is the detention centres remain, the degradation still remains and the mandatory detention and deportation remains.”

So much, you might say, for Tristan’s charitable Holden-Ford analogy.