“For me it was super easy, but for other people…”: Investigating assisted inclusion and the privilege to move 'freely' between New Zealand and Australia

Abstract

Borders were never designed to stop everyone from moving, and free movement for the privileged continues to be enabled around the world by bilateral and multilateral agreements. A bilateral agreement between New Zealand and Australia (the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement, 1973) allows citizens of these nations to perform 'free movement migration' between the two countries. Academic research has presented free movement migration as being based on the ability of governments to minimise the restraints and discriminatory behaviours that prevent or dissuade the movement of people between borders. Scholars have noted what constitutes idealised free movement migration, but fewer researchers have attempted to investigate and understand whether agreements that communicate free movement achieve their claims. This thesis engages with migrant populations living in New Zealand and Australia to evaluate the extent to which 'free movement' is actually realised by those moving between Australia and New Zealand under a free movement travel arrangement. This thesis provides a comparative account of free movement in both directions, to answer the following question: How do Australian and New Zealand migrants moving across the Tasman Sea experience and understand 'free movement' migration under the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement? This thesis adopted a qualitative inductive approach to answer this question, and a total of 20 interviews were conducted with two migrant participant groups: Australian citizens living in Auckland, New Zealand, and New Zealand citizens living in Sydney, Australia. Findings from these interviews were that trans-Tasman migrants experienced 'assisted inclusion' in the way their settlement and inclusion in society was assisted by physical infrastructure and the rights they were accorded. In addition, participant narratives gave evidence of the construction of identities in the space of free movement. In particular, an apparent but often unnamed colonial settler identity was both naturalised in the trans-Tasman space and positioned as superior to other identity claims, iii including that of indigenous peoples. This research suggests that wider social ideas about a shared colonial identity privileges movement both formally and informally for people who subscribe to this dominant and undisrupted identity. This research thus asserts that racism is embedded in the privilege to move freely between borders.