New South Britons came to land with established populations too easily
discounted as‘primitive’. Australian and New Zealand immigrants settled as
communities of imported social andfinancial capital. The development of
collective governance cultures among these settlers was a natural adaptation
to these novel far-flung environments. Each nation has its own unification
story, and each remained connected to the other as sibling rivals within an
ongoing British imperial polity. Both societies forged egalitarian development
paths which encouraged risk-taking, and aspired to be ruled democratically by
a propertied hard-working class.
Organized labour was an important institution in both societies, though in
New Zealand the balance was more towards petit-bourgeois farming and
farmer-servicing small businesses. The Farmers’Union ruled through the
Reform Party in the 1910s and 1920s. Export-dependent policies tied New
Zealand closely to its distant Anglo-parent. In consequence, the country was
less diversified than Australia in 1970, so the troubled waters of global
economic turbulence and changing British priorities forced a very rapid
re-evaluation of New Zealand’s relationship with Asia. This happened in
Australia as well. In the process—thanks in large part to cheaper air‑fares—
the two Anglo-wests rediscovered each other.
Welfare states emerged at similar times, developing similarly in the 1890s
and differently from the 1930s to the 1980s. Public income-support mechan-
isms remain works in progress, despite both countries being among thefirst in
the world to embrace them. New Zealand was able to make constitutional
changes more quickly—maybe too quickly—having removed the upper and
lower tiers of its initial political structure. When the 1980s ushered in a global
policy climate best understood as a return to laissez-faire, both countries
responded with distinctly different variations of this path, albeit, exception-
ally, under the auspices of Labour governments. A former parity of incomes
gave way to a significant income gap, meaning that substantially more New
Zealanders migrated to Australia than vice versa. With echoes of New Munster
in the nineteenth century, in this century New Zealand has indeed become
Australia’s Ireland.
New Zealand’s journey since the 1970s has increasingly been one of Asian
and Polynesian themes, not British. Australia likewise is much more ethnically
diverse than its early twentieth-century founders could ever have imagined. In
the 1990s, Prime Minister Jim Bolger said‘we are all Asians now’(O’Sullivan
2003). Geography, trade, and economic growth have created dramatically new
post-colonial realities for both. The markets for the dominant food staples of
New Zealand behave differently from those for Australian staple mineral
exports, and are less subject to the vagaries of globalfixed capital investment.
For people of Asian birth, New Zealand is an emigrant destination in its own
right, not simply Australia-lite. Once-exceptional Tasman paths have now
Australia and New Zealand