What Two Weeks in Bali Taught Me About the Privilege of Being Able to Leave
I've just come back from two weeks in Bali, and it's left me thinking about my work in a way I didn't expect.
Bali runs almost entirely on visitors. Everyone I spoke with, my lovely driver Ketut (fourth son), restaurant staff, the people running the accommodation I stayed in, had opinions about travel, often detailed ones, shaped by years of listening to tourists talk about the places they'd been or were headed to next. A few had travelled themselves, mostly within Indonesia. Almost none had been further than that, not because they didn't want to, but because actually leaving is a much bigger undertaking than it is for most of my clients.
That contrast has stuck with me since I got back, and I think it's worth sharing, because it says something about the work I do every day that's easy to lose sight of.
The passport you're born with decides more than you'd think
According to the Passport Index, the Indonesian passport currently sits around 57th globally, with a mobility score that gives holders visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to roughly 82 destinations. That sounds like a reasonable number until you compare it with a New Zealand or Australian passport, which opens close to 180 countries with no visa required at all.
Closer to Indonesia, it's a useful comparison too: Malaysian, Singaporean, and Bruneian citizens can visit New Zealand visa-free using just an NZeTA. Indonesian citizens can't. They need a full visitor visa, which means showing proof of funds (at least NZD $1,000 a month, or $400 if accommodation is prepaid), evidence of a return or onward ticket, and a genuine intention to leave again at the end of the trip, or finding someone to sponsor them through all of it. None of that is unreasonable on its own. It's standard for a lot of visitor visas, including the ones many of my own clients have navigated without a second thought. But it's a meaningfully different starting point from "just book a flight," and for someone earning a Balinese wage, meeting a NZD $1,000-a-month funds threshold is not a small ask.
Why this matters for the people I work with
Most of my clients are already, by definition, in a fortunate position. If you're reading this because you're thinking about a Skilled Migrant visa, an Accredited Employer Work Visa, or a skilled visa into Australia, you hold a passport that lets you consider moving somewhere else in the first place. That's not nothing. For a huge number of people, "where do I want to live" is never a live question, because leaving at all isn't realistically on the table.
I say this not to dismiss how stressful the visa process genuinely is for my clients, it is, and I spend my working life helping people through exactly that stress. Processing times, wage thresholds, points changes, paperwork that seems to multiply the moment you think you're finished: all of that is real, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't frustrating to live through. But every now and then it's worth remembering that the frustration itself is a kind of privilege.
Being annoyed at a six-month wait for a visa decision is a very different problem to not being able to apply for one at all.
I don't have a tidy conclusion to wrap this up with, and I don't think it needs one. It's just something I noticed over two weeks of conversations with people who were warm, curious about the world, and almost entirely unable to go see it. I came home wanting to be a bit more conscious of that gap, both in how I talk about my clients' challenges and in how grateful I am to get to help people cross a border that, for most of the world, stays firmly shut.
If you're in the middle of your own visa process and it's feeling like a lot right now, that's a completely valid thing to feel, and we're here to help carry some of that load. Get in touch with Queenstown Immigration if you'd like to talk it through.
This post is a personal reflection rather than immigration advice. If you have questions about your own visa options, please get in touch for guidance specific to your situation.
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