Australia vs. New Zealand — it's getting ugly

SYDNEY, Australia — Australia vs. New Zealand. Think of it as the U.S. versus Canada, writ small: a rivalry between two feisty little nations, members of a dysfunctional family of former British colonies called the Commonwealth, the bigger one inclined to pick on its little brother mercilessly.

Aside from the occasional spat (usually over claims of sporting prowess), these antipodean siblings — separated not by a land border but rather a choppy little sea — have been able to coexist and share toys (visa-free travel, crossover job markets, even standing armies) ... until now.

What's changed? An Australian has suggested what many — but by no means all — have secretly pondered in times of increasing joblessness and inflation: shut the Kiwis out.

Kelvin Thomson, a member of parliament in Australia’s ruling Labor Party, couched it in more cerebral, less inflammatory terms than that. But his recent call to put limits on Australia’s long-standing open-door migration policy toward its tiny eastern neighbor was what you might call a diplomatic smart bomb: it made some sense from a distance, but none to those living in the impact zone.

“It’s been in place for a very long time,” Thomson said of the 36-year-old rules that allow Australians and New Zealanders to move between each other's countries essentially as if neither nation had a border. But, he told GlobalPost in a telephone interview from his Melbourne office: “I think it needs to be renegotiated. In order to have a population policy you have to have a migration policy.”

It comes down to this: Australia, whose land mass almost matches the U.S. in size, has a population of about 21 million people, the vast majority of them cluttered in coastal cities. Many — including Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, the leader of Thomson’s own party — are on record as supporting a “big Australia” policy, driven by immigration. But renegades like Thomson hear population goals of 35 million (by 2049) and shudder; this barren, isolated land cannot sustain such numbers, he said, and recent polls suggest the Australian people don’t want to try.

His solution: put a stop to generous migration rules and in particular take an axe to the most conspicuous beneficiaries: New Zealanders, almost 50,000 of whom flooded the country as long-term arrivals in the year to last July alone.

Tossing such a proposition into the midst of an always sensitive relationship was bound to raise hackles, especially given these nations have a history of such close ties that through two world wars their armies fought under one banner, that of the ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps), and still serve side-by-side in various peacekeeping missions.

Easy migration to Australia is “so everyday,” said Rosemary Baird, a student at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury who is doing her Ph.D. on the Kiwi exodus to Australia. Of Thomson’s proposal, she said: “There would be a lot of opposition to it. I think a lot of New Zealanders regard it as their right to move to Australia without it being a major issue. There are so many of us there, and I don’t think they would necessarily go if it was complicated, if they had to go through a visa process and so on.”

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