The Fight To Stay: How Australia and New Zealand Continue To Withhold Citizenship From People With Disabilities

A collage of screenshots of articles detailing the denying of visas due to medical conditions in New Zealand and Australia (Image Source: Áine Kelly-Costello, Overland).

By Catherine Zhang

Australia and New Zealand are often held up on a pedestal in the international community for being the forerunners of healthcare and upholding the notion of equality for all, including for immigrants. Although the two have been making immense strides in making healthcare cheap while retaining its high quality, and in being accepting of immigrants, they also both have a history of deciding which immigrants deserve these benefits and which don’t. In Australia and New Zealand, many immigrants are at risk of being denied visas because of their disability, and in certain extreme cases even face deportation over their medical status. Such disabilities cover a wide range of conditions from physical conditions as common as obesity, to intellectual disabilities that often do not require physical medical treatments at all but rather only counseling services.

This is in contrast to other countries with similar universal healthcare systems, such as those in the European Union who have committed to including people with disabilities under their health care coverage. On the other hand, Australia has continued to bar immigrants from obtaining visas if the immigrant’s medical condition is deemed to cost taxpayers more than A$49,000 over a period of ten years. Similar conditions have to be met in New Zealand, yet both of these countries assign a tax dollar amount to each condition which predicts the price tag of the services that one would need within the next ten years. However, this fails to consider what the immigrant will actually use up, and many end up not requiring anywhere close to the amount given. Until recently in 2019, the list of conditions that were written down as expensive enough to pass the threshold of A$49,000 were cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome, and autism. Other blanket bans in New Zealand had been applied to any immigrant that had tested positive for HIV, regardless of whether said immigrant had gotten infected in New Zealand itself. This means that at any point, an immigrant’s changing health status puts them at risk of facing deportation. Some of these conditions did not even require medical intervention, instead only demanding special education, but were still deemed too taxing a burden for the nation’s health care system. Even as some of these stricter bans have been lifted, it is still largely ambiguous and based on subjective reasoning whether an individual’s medical conditions have the possibility to stop them from getting a visa.

By painting community services such as healthcare and special education as a scarcity, these policies have opened Pandora’s box for potential discrimination by Australia and New Zealand’s governments. However, other countries with universal healthcare, like Canada, report that the medical costs of immigrants and refugees with such medical conditions only make up 0.1% of its public spending. This directly goes against the implication that New Zealand and Australia would run out of resources for its other public services by taking in immigrants with high medical needs. Disregarding the research from nations in a similar predicament, New Zealand’s leadership has remained adamant in its belief that its current discriminatory policies against immigrants with health issues must stay. Following a family’s petition to the New Zealand government, which begged for a review of Prime Minister Jacinda Arden’s immigrant health policies, the government responded that “[we consider] that it is necessary to retain these settings to ensure that we do not significantly impact New Zealanders in the long-term.” Responses like these have a larger ramification of perpetuating what is potentially dangerous rhetoric, putting a price tag on the lives of those with disabilities, and presenting immigration as nothing more than a financial burden to taxpayers. 

New Zealand and Australia prioritizing availability of medical care over accessibility raises a moral dilemma, of whether or not universal healthcare systems ought to limit the access of people who would present an abnormally large burden to healthcare services in order to ensure that the rest of the populace remains efficient for the rest of the population. This begs the question of whether such a healthcare system, that restricts the extent of treatment its users are entitled to, can even be considered effective in the first place? In the case of Canada, although the nation only sacrifices a relatively small amount of its public spending to accommodate immigrants and refugees with costly medical conditions, Canadians still face a highly strained health care system in the form of wait times, with the average duration for medically necessary treatment being nearly 20 weeks in 2018. This number deviates based on the type of specialist that is needed, and in some specialties such as orthopedic treatment, it can take as long as 39 weeks. Although not all of the conditions that are commonly barred visas in New Zealand and Australia require the type of treatments that incur the longest wait times, most of them ultimately still do require help from specialists rather than general practitioners. If a healthcare system is unable to withstand the burden of a relatively small portion of a population receiving care that they need to survive, then the system has larger problems than mitigating taxpayer burdens.

Adding to the problem, refugees and immigrants facing deportation due to their medical needs have further adverse effects on their well-being as many of their home countries lack the adequate healthcare they might need. Families have consequently been forced to engage in legal battles to try and stay in Australia or New Zealand, such as the parents of 8-year-old Shaffan Muhammad Ghulam, who is physically unable to travel via plane due to the risk of his breathing being obstructed due to low air pressure. Other migrants are facing the prospect of having to go back to a country with even more discriminatory views of their medical condition, putting themselves further at risk. One anonymous New Zealander, who identifies as homosexual, tested positive for HIV and is now uncertain about whether he can stay in New Zealand. To make matters worse, it would be dangerous for him to return to his home country—an unnamed South East Asian that is known for a culture of homophobia.

These legal battles place a profound financial and mental burden on the families of such individuals, who already face immense challenges through their loved ones’ health and medical bills. The uncertainty of these cases coupled with their expensive legal fees makes what is already a stressful situation even more unbearable. Despite multiple groups advocating for a reconsideration of these policies, New Zealand has refused to enact any changes. On top of the obvious cruelty, these immigration policies are also a reflection of historically unjust 19th-century immigration barriers that sought to exclude disabled people from what was idealized as a “perfect” society. These barriers had an intrinsic connection with colonial settler views which perpetuated ableism and white supremacy. People with disabilities, such as the deaf or blind, were often grouped together with other parties that were considered “lesser than”. Although today’s policies no longer consult a specific list of conditions through which to deny immigrants, these same practices are still being upheld. This is despite the global perception of Australian and New Zealand healthcare both ranking within the top 10 in the world, as according to US News.  And although the quality of these healthcare systems may be reflected in those rankings, these issues surrounding immigration should still be a great cause for concern and criticism. Many around the world applaud Australia and New Zealand for their immense progress towards gender equality, LGBT rights, and efficiency in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. However, few are aware of the rampant institutional and out-of-date ableist views that exist within the two country’s immigration policies. Universal healthcare is seen as one of the many hallmarks of a movement towards equality, but the blatant denying of visas truly ought to question whether this still stands.

Catherine Zhang is a first-year from Minnesota studying Business and Political Economy at NYU Stern. She is passionate about international economics and how political systems influence local, national, and global economies. In her free time, she can be found wandering around the aisles of the Union Square Barnes and Noble.