When I came to Australia at the age of 12, I never expected to find myself age 23 with no access to social security. If I lost my job tomorrow, I’d be broke in four weeks time – and there’d be no Newstart or Youth Allowance to fall back on.

In 2001, two years before my family moved from Auckland to Adelaide, the then Howard government changed the visa rights for New Zealanders who moved to Australia. Previously, Kiwis were immediately eligible for Australian residency. But after 2001, every New Zealander who crossed the Tasman was placed on a non-protected special category visa (SCV), a temporary visa that is unique to New Zealanders and can be altered at any time. We can live here, work here, and access Medicare. But beyond that, services are limited. If people on SCVs want permanent residency and the benefits attached to it, there are few available options. Permanent residency is granted when people meet criteria that make them valuable to the Australian community – and that usually means having a long-term relationship with an Australian citizen, being highly skilled, or being a wealthy under-50 year-old with plans to invest in an Australian company. For many people, especially young New Zealanders who moved here as kids, the criteria are hard to meet and the consequences of staying on a SCV can be severe.

While Australians living in New Zealand can access most social services, including single parenting payments and student loans, Kiwis in Australia do not get HECS, youth allowance, or even Centrelink job seeker support. If we have a bad month, it can quickly become a bad year, decade, or lifetime.

I’ve had a lot of luck. I’m part Maori, and my tribe, Tainui, helped to pay for my university degrees. During university I lived on a combination of part-time jobs, my parents, and the occasional emergency loan. For the past three years, I’ve had enough work to stay financially independent. But others are struggling.

In 2013, Erina Anderson founded Iwi n Aus, a volunteer lobby group working to shed light on the difficulties New Zealanders face in Australia. Erina spends a lot of time speaking with Kiwis in precarious situations, and recently met a woman who moved to Queensland with her husband in 2003. The husband was awarded citizenship in order to work in the Australian Army, but his wife and their three children were only given special category visas. Last year, the woman’s husband returned from military deployment wanting a separation from his wife. He kicked her out of the house and, when she sought help from social services and a women's refuge, she was denied access because she is not a permanent resident. “This was a woman who’d been awarded medals for all of the community work she did in the army barracks,” Erina says. “But she’s been homeless for the past year. It’s not until something goes wrong that you realise how vulnerable and neglected New Zealanders in Australia are”.

Earlier this year, a prime time current affairs programme ran a story that characterised Kiwis as “dole bludgers”, people coming to Australia to steal jobs and hack into the welfare system. Amongst other things, it ignored the difficulties faced by people who migrate because their parents or partners choose to do so. As a recent university graduate, I spend a lot of time searching for grants, scholarships, internships – the opportunities advertised to us from puberty through to graduation. But despite my ties to Australia, I’m often ineligible because I’m not a not a permanent resident.

It’s definitely a first world problem, but it’s indicative of something bigger. When migrants in Australia hit dead ends, the advice from government bodies, social services, and strangers who comment on Facebook threads is: if you can’t find the services you need here, go back home.

But “home” isn’t always the place you’ll find on your passport. For the ex-army wife sleeping rough, the choice to return to New Zealand is complicated by the fact that she has three children in Australia who she’s unwilling to abandon. For me, Australia is just my home: it’s where I went to school, met my partner, and have spent years building my life. But if things ever got tough – if I lost my job, or had an accident – then this home would start looking pretty inhospitable.