The Vanuatu opposition is calling on Australia and New Zealand to offer Vanuatu passport holders visa-free access.
This follows New Caledonia and French Polynesia granting visa-free entry, while most of the Pacific, including Vanuatu, has also been given the same access to the European Union.
In a statement, the opposition has expressed its gratitude to France and called on New Zealand and Australia to follow suit.
It says if Australia and New Zealand want closer economic relations, then they need to open their borders to grant visa exemptions to Vanuatu citizens.
The head of the Institute for Pacific Research at Auckland University, Damon Salesa, says much of the Pacific has been pushing for easier access to the two metropolitan countries for years.
Don Wiseman asked him why Australia and New Zealand are opposed.
Pacific Historian Damon Salesa
Photo: Supplied
Transcript
DAMON SALESA: Well I think on the Australia New Zealand side the kind of, recognised seasonal employment schemes are the way they're dealing with it in the political sense but what we've discovered in the process of all the negotiations around PACER-Plus is what is preferable to the Pacific Nations would be genuine labour mobility, so rights of access and residency. So I think something that's come up time and again in PACER-Plus, and it's particularly obvious in Australia, New Zealand has very large settled Pacific populations but Australia's one is very small and what there is in Australia has mostly come through New Zealand by right of New Zealand citizenship and access to Australia.
DON WISEMAN: Over and above the labour mobility provisions that they're talking about in association with PACER-Plus, shouldn't this just be a general offering by Australia and New Zealand to these countries, if it's good enough for the European Union it's good enough for New Zealand isn't it?
DS: Yeah I think many of the fears that might be entertained locally in Australia and New Zealand, we can see from places like the Cook Islands, where there hasn't been a wholesale emptying of populations into New Zealand. So I do think it's certainly feasible that you could open that access, I think the problem in Australia and New Zealand is more political problems around questions of migration, I think there's no real political will to reopen access for Pacific islanders, and New Zealand for instance rather than becoming easier for Pacific people to migrate to New Zealand it's become substantially harder since the 1990s.
DW: Yes, how big an issue is it for Pasifika peoples?
DS: Well I think it's enormous and we probably really need to re-imagine how we understand these societies and economies, because for instance a country like Tonga gets 40 percent of its GDP from remittances so the out migration of workers is a substantial driver of domestic development whereas in the past we've seen it as a loss to Tonga I think increasingly we're able to imagine it as a benefit and for instance in New Zealand, at the peak of the RSE season there's close to 2,000 Tongans working in New Zealand who work in Tonga. So that's two percent of Tonga's population and ten percent of its working population actually working off shore and then returning to Tonga. So I think there's all sorts of ways that we could imagine benefits coming directly back to the island if Pacific Islanders had better access to the high value work that we see in Australia and New Zealand.
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