‘Unsophisticated and unsuited’

Abstract

In the early 1900s, and in spite of the principles of the White Australia policy, Australia was forced to treat Māori crossing the Tasman in largely the same way as Pākehā New Zealanders. This served, first, to encourage New Zealand to federate and, second, to maintain healthy trans-Tasman diplomatic relations. However, extending uninhibited rights of entry to Pacific Island (and Asian) New Zealanders long remained a bridge too far for Australia. This was a cause of increasing tension with New Zealand, which had embraced closer ties with the Pacific and had, from the 1960s, allowed the immigration of thousands of Pacific Islanders. As late as 1971, the Australian cabinet agreed that Pacific Islanders were too ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘unsuited’ to settle freely in Australia. The election of the Whitlam government in 1972, though, led to the abandonment of this and other final vestiges of the White Australia policy. However, in the four decades since, Australia has progressively curtailed the rights of New Zealand migrants entering the country. There is good cause to believe that Australian dissatisfaction with New Zealand’s more liberal rules of entry for Pacific Island migrants is one of the reasons behind this.

Keywords

Discrimination immigration Pacific Islanders trans-Tasman relations White Australia

Introduction

One of the foundation stones of ‘White Australia’ in 1901 was the Commonwealth’s exclusion, along with other ‘coloured’ peoples, of Pacific Islanders. At the same time, the former Australian colonies hoped that New Zealand might join their federation, but New Zealand already had a different relationship with the Pacific. Not only had it annexed Pacific territories, but its own indigenous population was Polynesian and enjoyed greater comparative rights than Australian Aboriginals. For many decades after 1901, therefore, the close relationship between the two countries – based on the shared British heritage of their settler populations – was complicated by both the status of Māori in New Zealand society and New Zealand’s growing links with the Pacific.

This is an account of the political difficulties arising from New Zealand’s relative embrace of the Pacific, on the one hand, and Australia’s status as ‘the reluctant Pacific nation’, on the other.¹ At times, the issue has been fraught. The restrictions on the entry of Pacific Islanders from New Zealand to Australia were one of the last strands of the White Australia policy to be dismantled after stubborn Australian resistance in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not only that, but the freedom of entry for Pacific Islanders won in 1973 has been regarded by some as one of the key reasons for Australia’s imposition of renewed restrictions on the rights of New Zealanders in Australia ever since. This includes the severe limitation of New Zealanders’ access to welfare payments imposed in 2001.

This account does not attempt to set out the perspectives of Pacific people who have migrated to Australia from New Zealand themselves. Their voices need to be recorded on this subject, but that was beyond the scope of this article. Instead, this is an examination of official attitudes. As such, it is based to a large extent on the contents of departmental files archived in Canberra and Wellington, although many Australian government documents from the last three decades that would shed light on this subject remain restricted. Other sources include interviews conducted in 2013 with former Australian and New Zealand Ministers of Immigration and Foreign Affairs.

The narrative proceeds through several phases: the historical context before the 1940s; the push for the equal treatment of New Zealand citizens from the Pacific Islands between 1948 and 1973; the renewal of (indirect) restrictions from 1973 to 2001; and indications of ongoing Australian unease about the entry of Pacific Islanders since 2001.

Pre-1940s’ background

In the late 18th century, European explorers in the South Pacific were enchanted by the Polynesian peoples they encountered. On James Cook’s first voyage, he and the naturalist Joseph Banks compared Tahitians to ancient Greeks and even to Greek gods. Previous explorers, such as Samuel Wallis and Louis be Bougainville, had done much the same. Bougainville, in particular, regarded Tahiti as a kind of Eden. Not all European voyagers were quite as taken with Pacific Islanders, but, as Bernard Smith put it, ‘it was the classical vision which first permeated the European imagination’.² This sentiment clearly had a positive impact on European attitudes towards Polynesians in the early 19th century.

After Australia had established a penal colony at New South Wales in 1788, and a thriving whaling and sealing trade developed in the South Pacific after 1800, Pacific Islanders came into increasing contact with Europeans, and British sailors in particular. Some willingly enlisted as crew but were badly mistreated by unscrupulous ships’ captains. Governor Philip Gidley King, who, as Lieutenant-Governor on Norfolk Island, had formed strong bonds with two young Māori brought there in 1793 to teach his convicts how to dress flax, and had had another young Māori stay with him at Government House in Sydney in 1803,³ took what he hoped would be protective action. He issued an order on 26 May 1805 forbidding the ill-treatment of any Tahitians, Hawaiians or Māori who had come to New South Wales on board ships and requiring the safe return of such people to their home islands. King stressed that ‘all such Otaheitans, &c. are protected in their properties, claims for wages, and the same redress as any of His Majesty’s Subjects’.⁴

Well-intentioned as this may have been, it was largely ineffective. King’s successor as governor, William Bligh, felt obliged to make a similar order in April 1807, which referred to ‘any Natives of the South Sea’.⁵ In addition, Governor Lachlan Macquarie issued a further proclamation on 1 December 1813 that reiterated the substance of King’s and Bligh’s earlier orders. He believed that ‘the Natives of all the said Islands [‘of New Zealand, of Otaheite, and of the other Islands in the South Pacific Ocean’] are under the protection of His Majesty, and entitled to the good Offices of his Subjects’.⁶

At this early stage in Australia’s colonial development, therefore, Pacific Islanders enjoyed a level of official favour, even being regarded as royally protected and holding some of the rights of British subjects.⁷ It helped, of course, that Aboriginal Australians were generally regarded with such a contrasting disdain. This parallel was enthusiastically advanced by missionaries like Samuel Marsden, who, in 1811, described Māori as ‘far advanced in Civilization, and apparently prepared for receiving the Knowledge of Christianity more than any Savage nations I have seen’.⁸ By contrast, Marsden described Aboriginal Australians in 1819 as ‘the most degraded of the human race’.⁹

Over time, however, a divide began to open up in British colonial attitudes towards Māori, on the one hand, and people from the islands, on the other. In the later 19th century, Pākehā New Zealanders began to develop an embryonic New Zealand nationalism based on the myths of mutual respect between Māori and Pākehā forged on the colonial battlefields. Some even proclaimed a degree of kinship with Māori, as embodied in Edward Tregear’s notion of ‘The Aryan Maori’. In Australia, by contrast, Queensland sugar farmers began importing indentured Melanesian workers to cut cane in the early 1860s, and by 1901, Queensland had a Pacific Islander population of over 9000. While almost all came from the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands, they tended to be referred to simply as ‘Polynesians’ (an example of this was the Polynesian Labourers Act of 1868).¹⁰ From the 1880s, and the advent of Australia’s own nationalism based largely on the ideal of a White Australia, their presence became deeply resented. Pacific Islanders were excluded from membership of the new Australian Workers’ Union in the mid-1890s, whereas Māori were not.¹¹

An early action of the new Commonwealth government, therefore, was to pass the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901, which was designed to remove Melanesian people from Australia. The legislation defined ‘Pacific Island Labourer’ as including ‘all natives not of European extraction of any island except the islands of New Zealand situated in the Pacific Ocean beyond the Commonwealth’, and so lumped Polynesians in with the resented ‘Kanakas’. Māori thus now had a separate legal status in Australia to their Polynesian kin. In fact, Māori were generally exempted from these forms of racial discrimination in the hope that New Zealand would join the Australian Federation. Thus, under section 5 of the Naturalization Act 1903, Māori were permitted to apply for naturalisation in Australia whereas ‘aboriginal native[s] of Asia, Africa, or the islands of the Pacific’ were not. Furthermore, section 4 of the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 stated that ‘No aboriginal native of Australia Asia Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand shall be entitled to have his name placed on an Electoral Roll’.

Before the wording of this exemption for Māori in the Franchise Act had been finalised, one Australian senator expressed concern that enfranchising New Zealand’s ‘natives’ could have unintended consequences. Queensland Senator James Stewart feared that it might require Australia to extend the vote to the native peoples of any islands in the Pacific that New Zealand already administered (such as the Cook Islands) or later managed to add to its territory (as seemed possible at the time with Fiji).¹² As Stewart put it:

New Zealand wants to become a sort of suzerain over all the islands in the Pacific. If she succeeds, and if she subsequently joins the Federation she will bring her satellites with her, and then the question will arise whether the aboriginals of her island possessions have the same right to the franchise in Australia as the New Zealand aboriginals have. I am not prepared to admit that proposition. We are quite willing to admit New Zealand, into partnership with us, together with the Maories, but we should object to the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands being admitted to the franchise.¹³

The Bill’s wording was amended to meet Stewart’s concern. His position revealed an early Australian antipathy towards New Zealand’s relationship with the Pacific, and an unwillingness to contemplate Pacific Islanders gaining equal rights with other members of the Commonwealth through that association with New Zealand.

After complaints from the New Zealand government over the exclusion of two Māori shearers in 1905, the Australian government issued an edict to its customs officers that Māori were henceforth to be admitted freely to the Commonwealth without having to undergo the dictation test prescribed by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901.¹⁴ However, Pacific Islanders remained subject to the test, under which they could be asked to write out a passage dictated in any European language. At the same time, thousands of islanders began to be deported from 1906. Those who escaped this fate lived on in Australia with few rights and entitlements.¹⁵ In 1902, 1176 Pacific Islanders entered Australia without sitting the dictation test, but by 1912, the corresponding number had fallen to 92, and by 1934, it was only 18.¹⁶ In 1920, when the requirement for trans-Tasman travellers to carry passports instigated during World War I was removed, Australia and New Zealand agreed to the basic set of rules governing movement between the two countries that were to last for the following five decades. The provision for passport-free travel by ‘natural-born British subjects’ was not regarded as encompassing Pacific Islanders.¹⁷

The push for equal treatment, 1948–1973

In April 1948, the Tongan wife and two daughters of a British resident of Perth, Stewart Carrick, were ordered to leave Australia by Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell, after being declared aliens under the Immigration Restriction Act. The press noted the close relationship of Mrs Carrick to Queen Salote of Tonga but added that ‘these things, of course, mean nothing to Mr. Calwell’.¹⁸ Calwell was, indeed, a stickler for the maintenance of a White Australia, and after the war, had been busily deporting the Asian husbands and wives of white Australians.¹⁹ Shortly after ruling on Mrs Carrick, Calwell was asked in Parliament whether he would allow a Māori ex-serviceman who had married an Australian woman to settle in Australia.²⁰ Calwell told the House that ‘Within the meaning of the Immigration Act, they [Māori and Tongans] are regarded as the same people, and under existing law and practice, such people will not be permitted to settle permanently in Australia’.²¹

Calwell’s statement triggered outrage in New Zealand. Prime Minister Peter Fraser released a statement asserting that ‘any hint of discrimination, against our Maori fellow citizens would be indignantly and bitterly resented as an unforgivable insult to our country and every one of us’.²² Calwell also faced strong criticism from returned soldiers’ associations in both countries,²³ questions in the House²⁴ and condemnation in the press. Inevitably, he backed down. Fraser was provided with a statement from the Australian Department of Immigration that included the unlikely explanation that Calwell had merely been pointing out that he had a broad discretion under the Immigration Act to prohibit the entry of ‘any immigrant irrespective of race or nationality’. Nevertheless, Fraser was assured that free Māori entry to Australia was under no threat.²⁵

It seems likely that Calwell either simply forgot about the Māori right of entry or did not know about it. His subsequent clarification appeased New Zealand but rather laid bare the Māori exception that had existed quietly for decades. This was recognised by the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, which wrote:

there is now no logical answer to pleas from Australian girls married to negroes, Indonesians, and Malays, Australian men married to Chinese girls, or from any of the Polynesians of the Pacific who might ask for admission on the grounds that we have already extended hospitality to their racial brothers.²⁶

Indeed, the sense of injustice over the exclusion of Mrs Carrick prompted R.W. Robson, the editor of the Australian publication Pacific Islands Monthly, to write to Fraser on 7 May 1948, asking that he put the same case to the Australian government on behalf of Samoans and Cook Islanders as he had just done for Māori, since New Zealand administered those two territories and their people were fellow Polynesians. Robson acknowledged that New Zealand had no responsibility for Tonga, but hoped nonetheless that Fraser would be able to do something ‘for the Polynesian race generally’.²⁷ Fraser replied somewhat disingenuously, explaining that he had only intervened because the matter affected New Zealand’s direct interests, and he had ‘no personal knowledge of other cases affecting Polynesians to which you refer’. Such matters, wrote Fraser, did not appear to be ones ‘with which the New Zealand Government could concern itself’.²⁸

Robson, however, had made an important point, and that the New Zealand government was discomforted by it can perhaps be detected by what appears to have been a discarded draft of Fraser’s reply to Robson. This had Fraser acknowledging that:

If the interests of the Polynesian peoples of the Cook Islands, which are an integral part of New Zealand, or of the Trust Territory of Western Samoa, should be detrimentally affected, it should be my privilege, as Minister of Island Territories, to do my utmost to protect them.²⁹

It seems likely that Fraser had preferred to back away from such a statement. Robson published Fraser’s actual reply in Pacific Islands Monthly and remarked that:

It will certainly be a matter of interest to the people of Western Samoa and the Cook Islands – both of which are administered as territories of New Zealand – to learn that their exclusion from Australia is not a matter with which the New Zealand Government will concern itself.³⁰

Robson’s agitating may have had some effect: in early 1950, Fred Doidge, the New Zealand Minister of External Affairs in the newly elected National government, was briefly in Sydney and told Pacific Islands Monthly that he would ‘inquire concerning the ban placed on the Pacific Islanders’.³¹

However, progress was slow, and if the New Zealand government did raise the matter, it is unlikely to have done so forcefully. In April 1956, the Australian Immigration Department issued a policy directive that Cook Islanders were not eligible to enter Australia. This explained that:

The reason for the distinction between Maoris and Cook Islanders, despite their common ancestry, is that the latter unlike the Maoris, have not as a people had a long and continuous membership of a predominantly European community and could not be expected to assimilate in Australia easily.³²

This instruction occurred at the same time as a Western Australian cattleman named Melville was attempting to obtain entry permits for two young men from Aitutaki to work on his farm at Busselton. He noted in May 1956 that:

Seeking an entry permit for them was a new proposition for the Immigration people, but I saw it right through to the Minister himself – Mr Holt, who gladly gave his consent and after things one hears this may or may not be a progressive step in New Zealand–Australian Immigration relations.³³

It clearly was a step forward, but the job of immigration officials remained to make entry difficult. In 1958, Cook Islander Marjorie Crocombe, an anthropologist (and wife of the Pacific scholar Ron Crocombe), was required by the Australian Trade Commission staff in Auckland to undergo a full medical examination and purchase a return ticket prior to a visit to Australia. As she explained, ‘When I asked why these things were required, the Australian trade commission staff said it was because “Cook Islanders have a low standard of living” and that Cook Islanders “may not know how to behave” in Australia’.³⁴

The New Zealand government eventually took a firmer stance on the matter after an incident that had echoes of the denial of entry to the two Māori shearers in 1905. In February 1965, a 21-year-old Cook Island man named Nooroa Tuaiti sailed from New Zealand to Sydney on the Oriental Queen with a view to finding work there. He was accompanied by two Australian friends.³⁵ For a range of reasons, he was not allowed to leave the ship at Darling Harbour: according to Australian Immigration authorities, he had only £35 in cash and no return fare, was intending to stay indefinitely, had only been in New Zealand for three years, had a large family still living in the Cook Islands, and had no passport.³⁶ He had understood that, as a New Zealand citizen and a British subject, he did not need a passport to enter Australia, but as the Australian Trade Commissioner in Auckland, J.A. Morey, put it, ‘This man should have taken his birth certificate to the internal affairs people, been issued with a passport and have brought it to me’. Morey would then have considered the application.³⁷

It seems that there was another factor in the denial of entry to Tuaiti: his appearance and skin colour. E.L. Charles, Assistant Secretary for Immigration in Canberra, explained that the immigration officer had decided that Tuaiti ‘appeared to be fully Melanesian (and therefore not readily identifiable with Cook Island Maoris)’. He also thought it ‘not unreasonable’ that any Cook Islanders arriving to live in Australia should first have had some period of living in New Zealand ‘to enable them to have become identified with the European way of life’. Evidently, the Department of Immigration believed that Tuaiti’s ‘2 or 3 years’ was insufficient for this to have occurred.³⁸

News of Tuaiti’s exclusion created what the Australian High Commission called ‘something of a furore in New Zealand’. The Labour MP for Auckland Central, Norman Douglas, called the Australian action ‘a slight against a New Zealander’ and claimed that Australia was categorising New Zealanders ‘into first and second class citizens’. The Minister of Internal Affairs, David Seath, said that he did not believe that Cook Islanders should need passports to travel to Australia and called for a report on reciprocal travel arrangements between the two countries. The New Zealand University Students’ Association was also reported to be planning protests. However, Australian High Commission staff said that New Zealand immigration officials were ‘not particularly perturbed’ given their awareness of New Zealand’s own restrictions on the likes of Australian-born Chinese. As if to draw attention to New Zealand’s double standard, the High Commission had, in responding to media inquiries, suggested that allowing entry to Cook Islanders would be akin to New Zealand being expected to allow entry to Papuans and New Guineans.³⁹

However, by May 1965, the Australian Department of Immigration had conceded that since:

New Zealand has advanced to the stage of conferring full status upon the natives of the Cook Islands, Niue Island and Tokelau Island, then it is not a valid argument for Australia to compare these natives with the Papuan natives (or the Christmas Islanders or Cocos Islanders) who have not been granted by Australia a status which affords them (subject to exit permit) a free immigration access to Australia.

The department proposed that the 1920 agreement between the two countries be updated by the reintroduction of passports for all travellers and that ‘we might consider including in the “Maori” category those natives of the Cook Islands, and Niue and Tokelau Islands who have first been resident in New Zealand for a period of say three years’.⁴⁰

Australian officials may have seen this as a significant concession, but their New Zealand counterparts did not accept it, arguing that there should be no separate standard applied to New Zealand citizens from its island territories. They were agreeable to the reintroduction of passports so long as non-European and non-Māori New Zealand citizens (including Asians as well as Pacific Islanders) were eligible to enter Australia. In return, New Zealand would be prepared to accept the entry of all non-European and non-Aboriginal Australian citizens to New Zealand. Officials concluded that:

There seems to be no reason to assume that if the scope of the agreement is widened accordingly, the traffic will be preponderatingly one way or the other.… Perhaps the advantage is more likely to lie with Australia which, as a larger country with a bigger population, is more suited to absorb a few newcomers of different origin.⁴¹

Eventually, Australian immigration officials put their proposals for liberalising the entry rules to their minister, Billy Snedden. In April 1968, he took the matter to cabinet. He ventured that there was no indication that Pacific Islanders would migrate on to Australia from New Zealand if given the same freedom that Māori had enjoyed. He recommended that Asians who were New Zealand citizens or British subjects resident in New Zealand be allowed to enter Australia without restriction, if they held passports, and that New Zealand citizens from its island territories should be allowed in on the same basis as Māori.⁴² However, others within the Australian government were not minded to be so liberal. The Prime Minister’s Department noted what they saw as:

problems in the proposal to allow Islanders from New Zealand’s Island Territories to be placed on the same footing as Maoris in respect of entry to Australia. The reasoning is probably that Maoris have shown no real interest in coming to Australia to settle and Islanders will feel the same. However, the position may not be parallel. The Maoris would not want to leave their homeland in any large numbers but the Islanders have already left theirs – for the employment opportunities and the metropolitan life in New Zealand. Some Islanders may very well be attracted by opportunities in Australia, particularly if the New Zealand economy does not show significant improvement. If only a few Islanders were to come to Australia it would be likely that they would encourage others to follow. In such a situation it would be difficult to justify the free entry of Islanders from New Zealand territories when we do not allow this for Papuans and New Guineans.⁴³

The cabinet considered the paper on 17 April 1968. It felt that making the changes (with respect to both Asians and Pacific Islanders):

could carry implications for established immigration policy which it considered should be avoided. It was aware that change in the direction had been sought by the New Zealand authorities, but it did not feel able to vary existing arrangements and asked that the proposal be regarded as indefinitely deferred.⁴⁴

Despite this setback, the New Zealand government persisted. In August 1969, the Minister of Immigration, Tom Shand, wrote to Snedden and expressed New Zealand’s willingness to remove all barriers to Australian citizens’ free entry to New Zealand, with travellers to be asked for proof of citizenship on arrival in case of any concern that they were not citizens. He added that:

one is bound to accept the logic that people of Asian or Polynesian origin who are considered by either of us to be worthy of our citizenship should be entitled to all the benefits, just as they are subject to the responsibilities, that go with it.⁴⁵

Nothing came of this approach, however, first, because Snedden wanted to defer any consideration until after the Federal election in October that year,⁴⁶ and, second, because Snedden was then replaced as minister by Phillip Lynch.

The matter was taken up again in September 1970 by Shand’s successor, Jack Marshall. He made the case to Lynch that the world had changed since the 1920 agreement on trans-Tasman travel, and it was time that the Australian policy was ‘modified to conform with the trend of public opinion’. Marshall reiterated New Zealand’s willingness to do away with any restrictions on non-European Australians entering New Zealand who could prove their citizenship.⁴⁷ It seems that Lynch may have been willing to support New Zealand’s position,⁴⁸ but he was himself replaced as Immigration Minister in March 1971 by Jim Forbes.

Forbes took the matter to cabinet in May 1971. He set out five arguments in favour of making the change that New Zealand was requesting: the special relationship between the two countries; averting charges of Australian racial discrimination; non-European Australians having better access to New Zealand; the fact that ‘for 66 years the Maoris (much more numerous than other non-European New Zealanders) have been free to come here and this has not caused any significant migration to or problems for Australia’; and the further fact that ‘Cook Islanders are of the same ethnic origin as Maoris and there are practical difficulties in discriminating between them’.

Forbes then set out three points against any changes. First, the removal of the existing controls would cause other Commonwealth countries of the Pacific and South East Asia to resent controls on the entry of their citizens, and ‘Papuans (who are legally Australian citizens) could be aroused to seek similar freedom to settle here’. Second:

New Zealand’s substantial and increasing numbers of Pacific Islanders (settling in New Zealand at the rate of some 2,000 per annum) are unsophisticated and would be quite unsuited to settlement in Australia; many are tending to congregate in the industrial suburbs of Auckland, with resultant social problems.

Lastly, Australia’s commitment would be an open one and New Zealand could potentially ‘further relax its immigration policy towards non-Europeans’. Forbes concluded that the points against ‘decisively outweigh those in favour, even if one accepts that the numbers likely to settle here are not great’, and recommended that the residence rules remain as they were, with justification being provided to New Zealand on the first of these three reasons.

However, since the complaints had largely come from people wanting to visit Australia rather than settle in it, Forbes proposed that non-European/non-Māori New Zealanders be allowed into Australia for up to a year without prior permission, but not allowed to stay beyond that unless they could obtain permission on the same basis as any other non-European person.⁴⁹

A paper prepared by the Prime Minister’s Department supported Forbes’s position on residence rules. It said that:

New Zealand’s situation is a different one from ours and her decisions regarding entry for residence are not necessarily those we would make. To do as New Zealand suggests would mean that we would have to accept her decisions regarding residence. This could result in anomalies in the application of our general policy, for example, we would have to accept an unskilled New Zealand non-European although applying high standards to non-New Zealand non-Europeans.

However, Forbes’s proposal for relaxing rules for tourists was seen as problematic:

Whilst it may appear unlikely that many of the Pacific Islanders now entering New Zealand and regarded as unsuitable for residence here would be likely to attain New Zealand citizenship and then come as genuine visitors, the possibility remains that some could come and disappear.… Our international image could suffer more as a result of any subsequent deportations of New Zealand citizens (assuming that we could find the missing visitors) than by a refusal to allow free visitor entry. We therefore favour caution and no extension of the special treatment already given to New Zealand citizens.⁵⁰

Accordingly, on 25 May 1971, the cabinet decided ‘that existing controls over the entry to Australia on non-European New Zealanders should be maintained’.⁵¹

At the time, this racial exclusion remained one of the last surviving vestiges of the White Australia policy. It is not something that has always been noted by Australian historians. In 1994, for example, Geoffrey Blainey wrote that ‘The White Australia policy was virtually abandoned in 1966’, while in 2005, Warwick Anderson claimed that ‘By the early 1970s, a white Australia policy could not be said to exist’.⁵²

On 29 June 1971, Marshall made the announcement that his government would unilaterally remove any racial restrictions applying to Australian citizens entering New Zealand. The Australian Financial Review covered these developments on its front page of 6 August 1971. It claimed that:

Somewhere in the Australian Cabinet runs a hard streak of racial bigotry. While our restrictive immigration policy has been a constant source of friction with Asian countries, Cabinet has now made a decision on entry policy which Australia’s closest ally, New Zealand, regards as nothing more than an insult.⁵³

Australian officials continued to note news stories that perhaps reflected the underlying sentiments behind their ministers’ position. The Prime Minister’s Department clipped a 27 September 1971 story from the Australian headed ‘Polynesians: City Influx Causes Slums’, which claimed that ‘The Polynesians, mainly Samoans and Cook Islanders, speak little English and are unable to cope with the pressures of urban life’ in New Zealand.⁵⁴

Renewed restrictions after 1973

After Labor swept to power in Australia in early December 1972, the new Immigration Minister, Al Grassby, made it clear that he would do away with the restrictions as a priority. He declared that ‘the badge of New Zealand citizenship is enough for me’. The Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, and New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, issued a joint communiqué on 22 January 1973 providing for passport-free travel between the two countries for all citizens of Australia and New Zealand, as well as citizens of other Commonwealth countries with permanent residency rights in either country.⁵⁵

This announcement of the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement essentially represents the high-water mark in the history of access to and rights in Australia for New Zealand citizens. Since 1973, a range of restrictions have been put in place, usually unilaterally by Australia, which have affected New Zealanders’ rights there. The open-door policy with respect to access remains in place, but the entitlements that flowed from that right of entry in 1973 have been steadily eroded. In 1981, for example, Australia introduced the requirement for travellers between the two countries to carry passports. From 25 January 1984, New Zealanders had to be an Australian citizen in order to be able to vote unless they had been registered to vote before that date. In 1986, Australia introduced a six-month waiting period for newly arrived New Zealand citizens before they could become eligible for welfare payments. In 1994, Australia created a ‘Special Category Visa’ (sub-class 444) for New Zealanders living in Australia, and in 2000, it extended the stand-down period for welfare payments to two years.

In 2001, it went considerably further. At the same time as both prime ministers revealed the detail of a new bilateral social security agreement between the two countries, Australia announced that, from 26 February 2001, newly arriving New Zealanders would remain ineligible for welfare payments not covered by the bilateral agreement unless they took the previously unnecessary step of applying for and being granted an Australian permanent visa. This change was affected by an amendment to the Social Security Act that removed any such New Zealanders from the definition of Australian permanent residents. Since then, a range of other measures have been introduced by both the federal and state governments that have whittled away New Zealanders’ rights of access to tertiary student loans, public housing, disability services, disaster relief and so on. In 2014, legislation was even passed by the new Coalition government to exclude so-called ‘protected’ New Zealanders (or pre-26 February 2001 arrivals) from eligibility for a work participation bonus.⁵⁶

These changes have affected all New Zealand citizens, regardless of their ethnicity. In theory, government policies could no longer be specifically racially discriminatory after the Whitlam government’s passage in 1975 of the Racial Discrimination Act, section 9(1) of which made it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of ‘race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin’. However, there has remained a suspicion that at least some of the renewed restrictions have represented a form of indirect discrimination against Pacific Islanders.

When Australia’s liberalisation was announced in early 1973, Norman Kirk was sufficiently aware of Australian sensitivities to allay ‘fears that the change in policy would lead to a flood of islanders to Australia. Only about 37,000 were involved’, he explained, and ‘most had roots in New Zealand, and an affinity for Polynesian society’.⁵⁷ It is clear, however, that Australia felt somewhat exposed by the new open door. In 1979, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Australian immigration authorities were concerned about Canberra’s lack of control over who was permitted to enter New Zealand, suggesting even that ‘New Zealand would be a classic route for overseas terrorists if they were determined enough’. It added that overseas criminals could gain entry to Australia, ‘let alone overseas nationals not qualified to enter Australia under normal immigration processes’. Canberra’s favoured solution was for a common border policy for the two nations and the reintroduction of passports.⁵⁸

The comparatively straightforward entry of Pacific Islanders to New Zealand was evidently part of the Australian concern. In January 1975, 11 Pacific Islanders were being held by Australia for deportation, including one Tongan who had entered the country by ‘posing as a Maori’. An immigration official said that it was impossible to know how many others were entering by similar means.⁵⁹ While ‘dawn raids’ on overstayers are a notorious part of New Zealand’s history of Pacific Islander immigration control,⁶⁰ there is some evidence that Australian immigration authorities were not averse to their own heavy-handed tactics. In 1975, Pacific Island church leaders in Sydney complained of midnight house raids of suspected illegal immigrants.⁶¹ A decade later, a Tongan man in Canberra took proceedings against the Department of Immigration for what his lawyer described as the discriminatory enforcement of immigration law against Pacific Islanders.⁶²

Australian Immigration Minister Ian McPhee announced Australia’s requirement for passports for trans-Tasman travel on 24 April 1981 – which, as New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon indignantly remarked, was the eve of Anzac Day. Officially, the reason given was that ‘People involved in terrorism, drug trafficking or other illegal activities, can too easily pass themselves off as Australian or New Zealand citizens under the existing arrangement.’⁶³ New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Brian Talboys, denied that the Australian concerns had any ‘real basis’. There may, of course, have been other reasons that were not shared with New Zealand, just as Australia’s concerns about the ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘unsuited’ nature of Pacific Islanders were not publicly stated in 1971 as reasons for the maintenance of restrictions. A degree of scepticism about the official reason certainly existed. The Canberra Times decried the ‘stupid’ new policy, and noted that ‘the suspicion is abroad in Canberra and Wellington that Australia is trying to keep out or at least reduce the numbers of Maoris and Pacific islanders coming into Australia’.⁶⁴

The numbers of Pacific Islander migrants from New Zealand remained relatively low in Australia at the time. There were, for example, only 781 Samoan-born residents of Australia in 1981.⁶⁵ However, it was perhaps more the change in the nature of New Zealand immigrants that unsettled the Australians. Aussie Malcolm, now an immigration consultant, was responsible for New Zealand immigration as parliamentary under secretary, associate minister or minister from 1977 to 1984. In that capacity, he attended, as a courtesy, the regular summits of Australia’s state immigration ministers. He explained in an interview in April 2013 that ‘it was in that environment that I became aware that Australia did indeed see the Trans-Tasman Agreement in terms of racial issues’:

What was walking off the plane at Sydney, with affordable fares, were people the Australians were quite confused by. Because they weren’t white jokers who watched racing and barracked for football clubs. They were rather large brown people who didn’t speak English that well and came from Samoa and Tonga. And the Australians of course had no way of knowing whether these people were New Zealanders. Now I guess the odd Māori had slipped through – if he was a decent Kiwi bloke and he had a slightly tanned skin the Aussies probably didn’t get any of their racist hackles up. But when these guys who were big and fat and had thick lips and spoke with funny accents started crossing the border saying ‘I’m a Kiwi’ it did certainly blow the Aussies away. And that’s what led in the first instance to the demand for passports, because they simply didn’t believe it. They had a – what can I call it – they had a stereotype in their head that a Kiwi was a white guy like an Aussie. And when New Zealand started producing these Polynesians, who weren’t like Aussies, but who were New Zealanders, that rattled them. No two ways about it.⁶⁶

Malcolm recalled that his Australian ministerial counterparts would tell him, informally, that they had no problem with white New Zealanders settling in Australia, but that Māori and Polynesians represented a significant problem to them. Unsurprisingly, the Privy Council’s July 1981 ruling that Western Samoans born between 1924 and 1949 and their immediate descendants had the right of New Zealand citizenship caused some alarm in Australia. One Melbourne newspaper speculated about the potential for 100,000 new migrants to Australia under the headline ‘Immigration Shock over Western Samoans’.⁶⁷ After negotiating a compromise agreement with the Western Samoan government, New Zealand legislated to overturn the full effect of the Privy Council ruling in 1982.⁶⁸ However, the annual intake by New Zealand since the 1960s, under a quota system, of at least 1000 Western Samoans as permanent residents has clearly caused Australia some disquiet, as we shall see. Notably, this quota remained in place after the Labour government restricted the access of Pacific Islanders (most notably, Tongans) to the New Zealand labour market in 1974.⁶⁹

In September 1994, the Australian government introduced a universal visa system for all migrants. As noted, New Zealanders arriving after that date were placed automatically on a Special Category Visa (SCV). Essentially, this made little difference to their rights and status in Australia. SCV-holders were regarded as permanent residents, although the SCV was (and is) technically temporary, in that it terminates when a holder leaves Australia or if they cease to be a New Zealand citizen. In the parliamentary debate on the legislation that introduced these changes, the Liberal MP Philip Ruddock accepted that the unique immigration rules between Australia and New Zealand were ‘the only reasonable arrangements which discriminate in relation to people’s entry to Australia on the basis of their country of origin’. However, he added that each country had to maintain ‘the efficacy of these historic arrangements’, and he sounded the following warning:

I would not like to think that New Zealanders, in terms of the administration of what is, in fact, the common border, digressed so widely from our own criteria for determining entry that backdoor migration to Australia was possible for classes of people who would not access Australia by first going to New Zealand and then seeking to come to Australia. It troubles me from time to time that New Zealand is in the business of structuring its migration program in a way which may put some emphasis and weighting on country of origin or race in determining entry. If that were the case, it would be of concern to me because I do regard non-discriminatory criteria as being of the utmost importance.⁷⁰

Ruddock became Minister for Immigration upon the election of the Howard government in 1996. At the time, he saw no need to alter the free-movement arrangements with New Zealand, which he felt worked well.⁷¹ By the end of the decade, however, concern was mounting about the proportion of New Zealand migrants to Australia who were born in third countries, which had climbed from around 12% in 1990/1991 to 30.0% in 1999/2000.⁷² Demographer Bob Birrell remarked upon this trend in January 1999, highlighting the proportion of such migrants who were Pacific Islanders and Asians. This led to a press report that ‘The Federal Government is under pressure to crack down on Polynesians and Asians using New Zealand’s migration program as a stepping stone into Australia’.⁷³ Ruddock stated that Canberra was keeping an eye on the proportion of New Zealand migrants born in third countries but that it was not yet a concern. Nor did he have a problem, he said, with Pacific Island migrants from New Zealand.⁷⁴

The following September, however, the public tone changed when New Zealand Immigration Minister Lianne Dalziel announced an amnesty for overstayers who had lived in New Zealand for some time and were well settled with jobs and families. A large proportion of those likely to benefit were Pacific Islanders. Ruddock now suggested that the increasing numbers of New Zealand migrants to Australia born in third countries did ‘tend to suggest back-door migration’. He stressed that those to be granted amnesty had not met New Zealand selection criteria for immigration and would be able to go on and enter Australia. As he put it:

The decision to regularise the status of a significant number of overstayers will not assist our objective to achieve a common border and harmonised immigration policies.… Our preference is to have a common border. That means you apply the same criteria. Every time you make decisions which are unique it degrades the quality of those border arrangements.⁷⁵

To make matters worse, in Ruddock’s eyes, Dalziel announced shortly afterwards that the government was planning to replace various work-permit schemes and quota arrangements with Pacific nations with what became known as the ‘Pacific Access Category’, under which 1500 Pacific Islanders would be able to enter New Zealand each year. Ruddock expressed ‘disquiet’ over the plans, noting the contrast between New Zealand’s special arrangements with island states and Australia’s ‘non-discriminatory’ immigration policies.⁷⁶ His spokesman added in November 2000 that New Zealand’s arrangements with several South Pacific countries allowed those unable to meet Australia’s immigration criteria to enter the country via New Zealand, after first obtaining New Zealand citizenship.⁷⁷

The notion of ‘back-door’ migration, the amnesty and the proposed new access category for Pacific Islanders also attracted the attention of the Australian opposition. Labor MP Martin Ferguson asked Ruddock in Parliament on 27 November 2000 which countries New Zealand migrants had been born in, how long those born in third countries had lived in New Zealand before migrating to Australia and what proportion had required welfare assistance in Australia. He also asked how soon overstayers granted amnesty in New Zealand would be able to migrate to Australia, and:

With respect to the New Zealand Government’s decision to allow an additional 1,500 Pacific Islanders per year into New Zealand over the present 38,000 intake, how long are they required to remain in New Zealand before they are allowed to come to Australia?

His final question asked how much longer Australia would tolerate New Zealand ‘making its own migration decisions irrespective of their consequences for Australian taxpayers’. Ruddock replied that changes to the current bilateral social security arrangements between the two countries were in train.⁷⁸

Indeed, at the same time as the overstayer amnesty and new Pacific migrant intake were causing tension, New Zealand and Australia were renegotiating their aforementioned bilateral social security agreement. A review of the current arrangements initiated by the Howard and Shipley governments in August 1999 had revealed, by the following August, an Australian determination for New Zealand to reimburse Australia considerably more money for the welfare costs of New Zealanders resident in Australia. New Zealand’s response had been that Australia reaped many advantages from the flow of New Zealand migrants. However, New Zealand officials felt that it was clear that unless Australia was appeased, it would either further restrict New Zealanders’ access to social security (bearing in mind that a two-year stand-down for the dole and other benefits had been imposed on New Zealanders in January 2000) or possibly restrict free entry to Australia to the New Zealand-born only, and thus – officials noted – exclude groups ‘such as Pacific Island migrants’.⁷⁹

We can assume that the amnesty hardened Australia’s resolve to take action. Ruddock indicated at the end of September 2000 that New Zealand’s offer to overstayers meant that Australia might consider revisiting the free-entry provisions of the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement.⁸⁰ This was, of course, already very much on the cards. As it transpired, on 26 February 2001, the Howard government announced the new national measures under which newly migrating New Zealanders would have to apply for and receive an Australian permanent visa before being eligible for welfare payments.

Regardless of the fact that these measures applied to all New Zealanders equally, irrespective of their country of birth, New Zealand officials had been conscious that certain groups would be worse affected. In November 2000, Ministry of Social Policy officials told ministers that ‘because of the occupational skill requirements in the Australian criteria, a high proportion of those losing future social security entitlements will be of Maori or Polynesian background’.⁸¹ News of the planned changes prompted Aussie Malcolm to draw on his earlier impressions and comment that Australia was attempting to discourage Pacific Islanders and Māori from migrating.⁸² Asked at his joint press conference with New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark on 26 February 2001 whether Australia’s new measures were designed to deter Pacific Islanders from moving to Australia, John Howard called the question ‘preposterous, even offensive’.⁸³ Ruddock also stressed that the provisions were ‘non-discriminatory’, merely levelling the playing field for New Zealanders with prospective migrants from other countries.⁸⁴

There may, however, have been an ongoing belief among some Australian decision-makers in 2001 that Pacific Island New Zealanders were, as described in 1971, ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘unsuited’. Coalition MP Gary Hardgrave became the Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs in November 2001, and was not in cabinet at the time of the changes. However, he spoke candidly on Channel 9’s A Current Affair programme in January 2014 on what he saw as the link between the changes and the immigration of Pacific Islanders:

The idea of not giving them access to these benefits was to say ‘Hey, don’t come.’ They’ve still come anyway. I don’t think it’s the back door, it’s actually the front door, it’s the only door. I mean you just fly across. They get no support. They get absolutely no settlement services support, they don’t get any English-language training, they don’t get any skills on how to be part of our society. If you think the trickle of trouble we have got right now is an issue, open the floodgates up by giving everyone the dole, it will be a dam burst.⁸⁵

The reference to the lack of skills ‘on how to be part of our society’ was reminiscent of the Australian Trade Commission staff’s reported suggestion in 1965 that Cook Islanders ‘may not know how to behave’ in Australia. However, the depiction of Pacific Islander migrants to Australia as unsophisticated villagers is contradicted by the fact that new arrivals born in New Zealand have easily outnumbered new arrivals born in the islands since the mid-1990s.⁸⁶

Ongoing Australian concern

The 2001 changes have not been the end of the matter, in that there is still a degree of Australian concern about the ease of Pacific Islanders’ access to Australia via New Zealand. At a meeting of the Trade Subcommittee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade on 12 May 2006, Coalition MP Cameron Thompson expressed such concern to Foreign Affairs officials:

My query was to do with what struck me in New Zealand as rather porous borders between New Zealand and the Pacific islands. Is there any concern that people can find their way from anywhere in the Pacific islands to Australia through New Zealand? Is that an issue?… The sort of context I was looking at there was that I understand that Cook Islanders get New Zealand citizenship or something. I think that also applies to other places, whereby they get an easy accommodation with New Zealand citizenship there. Are there any concerns about that? Is there any pressure to change those arrangements as they apply in New Zealand?

Thompson was reassured by an official that the number of Pacific Islanders automatically entitled to New Zealand citizenship was ‘extremely small’.⁸⁷ The following month, however, he asked at the same subcommittee how easy it would be for people from the Pacific, who often ‘have multiple names’ that can ‘spawn multiple identities’, to ‘get a fairly easy right of entry into New Zealand and … wind up in Australia’. They could then end up ‘seeking welfare payments’, which Thompson suggested ‘could result in welfare fraud, basically, because a person could have multiple identities to make claims on Centrelink’.⁸⁸

Others also continue to view Pacific Island immigrants negatively. In 2010, former Treasury Secretary and National Party Senator for Queensland John Stone complained in Quadrant that:

Cook Islanders, Niueans and Tokelauans have enjoyed New Zealand citizenship since 1949. In addition to these Pacific Islanders, New Zealand provides for 1500 people each year from Samoa, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Tonga to settle in New Zealand. Once they have resided there for five years, and have not committed any serious crime (more precisely, not been caught doing so), they too are eligible for citizenship. They are then free to enter and remain in Australia. Today, most of our Pacific Islander residents are not here through our formal immigration programs (under which most of them would simply not qualify), but via the back door which the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement now constitutes.⁸⁹

In 2012, Bob Birrell told Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat programme that the migration of Pacific Islanders from New Zealand was:

an issue all right, and particularly in Sydney and south east Queensland – they’re concerned about it. It’s not one that surfaces publicly all that often – I think it’s an edgy issue. People are reluctant to point the bone at people who’ve come from the islands for fear of being dismissed as racists. But it is a concern. And I don’t think we’d ever in Australia contemplate limiting third-country migrants on the basis of race or country of origin, but I do think there is a good case to control that flow on the basis of skills and whether or not they’re needed in Australia.⁹⁰

Coalition MP for Bowman, Andrew Laming, rather contributed to the notion of Pacific Islanders being non-contributors in January 2013, when, in response to street brawls between Aboriginal and Pacific Islander young men in Logan, he tweeted: ‘Mobs tearing up Logan. Did any of them do a day’s work today, or was it business as usual and welfare on tap?’.⁹¹ The irony, of course, is that for many young Pacific Islanders who have arrived in Australia since February 2001, welfare is not available at all. Academics have argued that the very lack of access of young Pacific migrants to forms of support is what causes ‘isolation and social disengagement’.⁹²

In recent years, New Zealand politicians have mounted varying degrees of pressure on their Australian counterparts to reverse aspects of the 2001 changes given the development of a large number of long-term (and, indeed, in most cases, permanent) New Zealand residents in Australia without access to a social security safety net, the franchise, student loans and a pathway to citizenship. Asked in April 2013 why she had not repealed the Howard government’s changes, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said that:

There were some issues when former Prime Minister John Howard and former Prime Minister Helen Clark entered into that agreement. We think many of those issues would still be relevant to considerations about repealing that agreement and repealing that legislation.⁹³

Gillard did not spell out what these issues might be, but her vagueness invites the speculation that the ease of entry of Pacific Islanders to New Zealand may still be a key factor.⁹⁴ In December 2000, Clark had felt that the only real difference in the immigration policies of the two countries was the entry right for 1100 Samoans annually, but New Zealand’s close relationship with the Pacific would not change.⁹⁵ Others suspect that this remains the sticking point. Aussie Malcolm said in April 2013:

Now what outstanding issues might there be that could possibly worry Australia? Are they worried about the handful of investor migrants – multi-millionaires that come to New Zealand versus the ones that go to Australia? A little bit of competition between investor policies? Nah, that can’t be it. In terms of family the policies have been harmonised to New Zealand’s great disadvantage. We’ve harmonised our family policies with Australia obviously in an effort to kowtow to the Australians. Can you identify any place where New Zealand immigration policy is significantly different to Australia’s? Yes you can – Cook Islands, Niue and the Samoan quota. That is what it’s all about.⁹⁶

Phil Goff, New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time of the 2001 changes, said in April 2013 that the numbers of Cook Islanders, Niueans and Tokelauans were so small that they could not reasonably worry the Australians. However, he did concede that Australia ‘might worry a little more about the 1,100 quota from Samoa’.⁹⁷ A further suggestion that Australia has a concern about the very fact of New Zealand’s arrangements with Pacific countries, rather than the actual numbers, came in 2012, when the productivity commissions of the two countries reported on ‘Strengthening Trans-Tasman Economic Relations’. In their discussion draft, the commissions made the following observation, which was presumably authored principally by the Australian side:

in the trans-Tasman context, equal treatment [of migrants in each other’s countries] could only be implemented if there were effectively full alignment of the two countries’ migration and citizenship programs with respect to nationals from third countries. This is because migration is the key point of entry to the labour markets for both countries.… The extent of future ‘back door migration’ is difficult to assess. While both countries’ arrangements emphasise skilled migration, there remain distinct differences between their immigration policies. In particular, New Zealand has a Samoan quota and the Pacific Access Category (where Samoan citizens and people from Kiribati, Tuvalu and Tonga are invited to apply for residence under these schemes).⁹⁸

In their final report, the commissions backed away from this statement, instead concluding that:

While fully aligning migration policies to achieve a single trans-Tasman labour market may be desirable, in practice it would be possible to implement the principle of ‘equal treatment’ without this alignment, provided that there is ongoing cooperation, trust and engagement over migration and citizenship policy with respect to nationals from third countries.⁹⁹

Yet, Philip Ruddock, now the Chief Government Whip in the administration of Tony Abbott, remains of the view that New Zealand’s immigration relationship with the Pacific is a discriminatory measure in itself, and something that runs counter to his hope for a common border policy. As he put it in October 2013:

I would have liked to have seen New Zealand using similar criteria to us.… And in my view whatever you say about the criteria you might be using which is in the national interest, the one element that is immutable is discrimination on the basis of race, religion, country of origin and like factors. So if I want to get there I would be saying well unless you’re going to make Samoa part of New Zealand or Niue wants to join New Zealand … my view is that if you’re going to maintain specific arrangements with particular countries that are discriminatory as against others … I would like to think that we had a common border – but a common border would mean there had to be some changes. I’d talk about what the criteria should be but in the end they have to be totally consistent and I think it has some budgetary implications. I think it makes it easier for administrative purposes and like factors but I understand New Zealand has taken a different path and if it wants to continue to take a different path so be it.

The implication of this would appear to be that New Zealand’s relationships with the island territories whose people are New Zealand citizens by birth, with the countries contributing migrants under the Pacific Access Category and with Samoa in terms of the annual quota are concessions that do not sit comfortably with Australia’s desire for a non-discriminatory immigration programme. The history of the White Australia policy had heightened the need for Australia today to ‘put in place migration programmes that were non-discriminatory in terms of race, religion, culture, country of origin’, Ruddock explained. New Zealand, by contrast, has ‘had discriminatory measures. If you want to come from Samoa or Niue you come on a concessional basis’.¹⁰⁰

It remains to be seen whether more information about the official Australian attitude to Pacific Island migrants from New Zealand will emerge when Australian government documents about the 1981 requirement for passports and the 2001 social security changes are eventually released.¹⁰¹ One thing is certain: New Zealand and Australia have long differentiated themselves over their relationships with the Pacific, and this shows little sign of changing.¹⁰² In 2000, in the face of Australian concern about the overstayer amnesty, Lianne Dalziel suggested that:

The difference between Australia and New Zealand is that New Zealand sees itself as part of the South Pacific. We do have a special relationship with them. We have a significant number of New Zealand-born Pacific Island people, and significant numbers have migrated here.¹⁰³

Because of its relationship with New Zealand, Australia now has a large and growing Polynesian population as well, including a significant representation in its national sports teams. However, it appears to remain a distant prospect that Australia will one day see itself as part of the Pacific too.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I was reimbursed for some travel expenses incurred in researching this article by Monash University, where I am enrolled in doctoral studies. I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on a draft of this article, and Kate McMillan for encouraging me to write it. I would also like to thank Te Kawa a Māui/the School of Māori Studies at Victoria University of Wellington for its support.