The Australia Letter is a weekly publication from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by electronic mail. This week’s subject is written by Natasha Frost, a reporter in Melbourne.
Becoming a republic, legalizing same-sex marriage, altering the Constitution to ascertain an Aboriginal advisory physique: To make these modifications to Australian life requires — or has required — a minimum of one nationwide vote.
Yet there’s a way more dramatic step that would — however nearly definitely won’t — happen with none polling in anyway: turning New Zealand into Australia’s seventh state.
The concept was just lately mooted within the valedictory speech of Jamie Strange, a departing Labour member of Parliament in New Zealand.
“Every time I visit Australia, I often ponder the thought, ‘Will we ever become one country, Australia and New Zealand?’” he stated final week, including: “My personal view — and it’s only a personal view — is that New Zealanders shouldn’t rule that out.”
(Among the advantages Mr. Strange listed was bringing the grocery store chain Aldi to New Zealand’s shores. Integrating the nation’s cricket groups, he mused, is likely to be a bridge too far.)
Speaking to the Australian news media this week, Barnaby Joyce, a former Australian deputy prime minister (and clandestine New Zealand citizen), acknowledged that such a change was unlikely to ever happen.
But, he stated, “we might as well put it out there,” including: “The defense policy, monetary policy — we might even win a rugby game!”
In Section 6 of the Australian Constitution, drafted in 1900, New Zealand was listed as a possible Australian state. (Federation — when Australia’s six states united to type the Commonwealth of Australia — passed off on Jan. 1, 1901.)
Some years earlier, Australia had invited New Zealand to hitch the federation. For a wide range of causes, New Zealand declined.
John Hall, a former premier of New Zealand, cited distance as a deciding issue throughout a convention on federation in Melbourne, Australia, in 1890.
“Nature has made 1,200 impediments to the inclusion of New Zealand in any such federation in the 1,200 miles of stormy ocean which lie between us and our brethren in Australia,” he stated, including: “Democratic government must be a government not only for the people, and by the people, but, if it is to be efficient and give content, it must be in sight and within hearing of the people.”
Australians, for his or her half, thought New Zealand may change its thoughts. Speaking on the identical convention, William McMillan, an Australian politician, expressed such a hope.
“I believe that,” he stated, “when public opinion has sufficiently penetrated New Zealand, even New Zealand, separated from this continent by 1,200 miles of water, will come into the Federation of the Australasian Colonies.”
Geography was not the one consideration for New Zealand. Reporting earlier this 12 months for an article about modifications to citizenship rights for New Zealanders residing in Australia, I spoke with Paul Hamer, a researcher at Victoria University of Wellington, in regards to the two nations’ historic relationship and their completely different approaches to race and migration.
“Australia wanted New Zealand to federate in 1901. It wanted to set up a racially discriminatory state — ‘White Australia,’” he stated. “New Zealand was hesitant because of its Maori population,” and finally selected to go it alone.
Those completely different approaches have reverberated throughout the many years. As my colleague Yan Zhuang wrote in final week’s publication, Australians can have their say about Aboriginal illustration in authorities in an Oct. 14 referendum. In New Zealand, a common election will happen on the identical day — and Indigenous voters will, as they’ve since 1867, have the chance to vote in seven electorates which might be reserved for Maori representatives.
There are loads of different causes such a merger doesn’t make sense, together with wildly completely different attitudes to nuclear energy, migration and the economic system.
So, all issues thought-about, neither the All Blacks nor the Socceroos might want to fear in regards to the intricacies of merge their rugby union and soccer groups with these of their rivals.
But that doesn’t imply that some, in each nations, gained’t proceed to ruminate on what might need been — and whether or not New Zealand ought to, as some economists counsel, merely import Australia’s tax code wholesale.
And within the meantime, Australia may contemplate formally adopting a suggestion from the Australian comic Celeste Barber, who in 2020 referred to as on then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to rename Australia “West New Zealand.”
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