Assembling the Antipodes: migration, finance and territoriality across Australia and New Zealand

Assembling the Antipodes: migration, finance and territoriality across Australia and New Zealand. Territory, Politics, Governance. Australia and New Zealand’s historically close cultural and economic ties have deepened since the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s. This paper develops an exploratory account of an emerging form of Antipodean territoriality that contributes another exemplar to interpretations of how public authority and private interests coalesce in the governance of space. Drawing on publicly available empirical material on contemporary migration and financial flows across the Tasman Sea and concepts from assemblage thinking, it is argued that these flows are stabilized through different institutional adjustments and enmeshments with cultural norms in both territories. Australian banks now supply financial capital to undergird a property (real estate) boom in New Zealand, the profits from which are returned to Australia. Concurrently, there has been mass migration of New Zealand citizens to Australia facilitated by the Special Category Visa, who are in turn replaced by mass migration into New Zealand. This research reveals how Australian-located power and interests exert a, albeit fragile and mutable, spatial reach into New Zealand territorial space to regulate, at a distance, migration into Australia while simultaneously legitimating the logics of financial extraction.