A New Zealand advocacy group in Australia claims it has obtained some 40,000 signatures on a petition it will present to the Australian Parliament next week calling for New Zealanders to be given the same rights as other permanent residents residing in Australia, according to a Radio New Zealand report.

Last year, thousands of New Zealanders marched through Australian cities demanding equal rights after a series of media stories engaged in Kiwi bashing’ with some titles screaming, “JOBLESS Kiwis are flocking to Australia in search of work - and demanding the dole.” This year the New Zealand advocacy group, Oz Kiwi is aiming to put pressure directly on the Australian government to allow New Zealanders living permanently in Australia to naturalise within a designated time period so they can vote.

Spokesperson Timothy Gassin said the OZ Kiwi proposal was simple: that New Zealanders who move to Australia, who have been self sufficient and pay tax, should be given the full rights of other Australian residents and be allowed the option of becoming an Australian citizen.

Mr Gassin told Radio New Zealand that Oz Kiwi would meet with senators and parliamentarians this week to present their concerns and the petition which he claims has some 40,000 signatures.

Currently New Zealanders with a clean criminal record can enter, live and work indefinitely in Australia on a sc444 visa, which is granted automatically when they arrive. There are about 650,000 New Zealanders living in Australia on the Special Category Visa. An estimated 200,000 of these Kiwis are subject to the 2001 restrictions which deny New Zealanders a range of entitlements including welfare and various forms of government assistance from education and healthcare to disaster relief.

Dear Members of Migration Alliance,

The Annual General Meeting has been called for 2PM, 17th July 2015.

To view the notice, please click here.

Immigration numbers are too high, straining Sydney and Melbourne’s infrastructure and pushing up house prices beyond the reach of average Australians, former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr recently told The Australian.

“If you jam more people into Sydney, then they will get spikes in land and housing prices. We are stoking demand,’’ he said.

Are the estimated 50,000 foreign settlers a year in NSW responsible for the doubling of house prices in Sydney since about early 2000? The population of NSW is close to 6 million.

The Federal Circuit Court has ruled,in a decision that has importance for RMAs beyond the specific facts of the case, that the MRT erroneously affirmed the Department’s cancellation of a student visa. See Mirdan v Minister for Immigration & Anor, (2015) FCCA (24 April 2015).

The MRT’s decision was based, in part, on its finding that the visa holder was not a “genuine student” because he had not studied in Australia after the time that his student visa was cancelled, during a time period when he held only a bridging visa that contained a “no study condition”. 

The Court’s decision in this case therefore saved the visa holder from a “no-win”, Catch-22” situation where it would have been possible to avoid an adverse finding by the MRT only by contravening the conditions of his bridging visa.

The following email has been received by Migration Alliance:

'Please find attached a letter from Senator the Hon Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Parliamentary Secretary to the Attorney-General, and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Social Services, and the Hon. Philip Ruddock MP, Special Envoy for Citizenship and Community Engagement.

citizenship-consult.pdf