Australia is kicking Kiwis out, and New Zealand is unhappy about it
NEW ZEALAND’S deputy prime minister, Winston Peters, knows how to stir the pot. In the midst of a diplomatic tiff with his country’s biggest and usually chummiest neighbour, he suggested that Australia was in need of a new flag. Its current one, he complained, too closely “copied” New Zealand’s. Since the two ensigns are so similar, Australia’s should be the one to change. (Australia’s flag was designed first, but was formally adopted a year later than New Zealand’s, in 1903.) Mr Peters, who recently served as interim prime minister while Jacinda Ardern was on maternity leave, has a solution: an enormous kangaroo, “like the maple leaf in Canada”.
The tiff is over Australia’s increasing deportations of New Zealanders. In 2014 a conservative prime minister, Tony Abbott, tightened deportation rules. Any foreigner sentenced to a year in jail now fails a “character test” and has to leave the country. Kiwis may live and work freely in Australia. Since about 650,000 do so, the rule hits them the...