Mike O’Connor: It’s our right to send Kiwi criminals back across the ditch

The problem of Kiwis being sent back home after they break our laws isn’t ours, it is NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s, writes Mike O’Connor. POLL

Australians love their Kiwi cousins, an affection reflected in the visa-free residence and work rights which we grant them, the only non-Australian citizens in the world to enjoy these privileges.

There are about 600,000 New Zealanders presently living in Australia, with more than 200,000 of them choosing to live in Queensland and we must presume they are happy with the way they are treated. If they weren’t, then they would pack up and go back across the Tasman.

However, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is displeased with the way some of her citizens are being dealt with and made her displeasure known to Prime Minister Albanese during her recent visit to our shores. The problem lies with our policy of deporting New Zealand citizens who show no respect for our laws and who are consequently convicted of an offence, which carries asentence of 12 months or more in prison.

Ardern is leaning on Albanese to weaken the laws in the knowledge that the Morrison government intended strengthening them so that people convicted of crimes involving violence, weapons, non-consensual sex and breach of an apprehended violence order and which attract a prison sentence of two years or more would be deported.

Ardern complains that many of the people deported have not lived in New Zealand for some time and therefore should not be sent home.

New Zealand Mongrel Mob thug being deported in 2018.

“There are those who are being deported from Australia, who for all intents and purposes, are Australian,” she says.

But they’re not, are they. They are New Zealanders. Australia can’t deport its own citizens, but it can deport the citizens of foreign nations.

In 2020, Ardern accused Scott Morrison of deporting “your people and your problems” to New Zealand and now facing a slump in her popularity back home where her Labor Party’s ratings have fallen to 38.2 per cent, compared with the opposition Nationals’ 40.5 per cent and her personal approval rating is at 36 per cent, she turns up and starts beating the same drum.

Albanese has said that he intends to deal with her concerns in a “mature way”. If this is a signal that he is planning to give in to Ardern’s demands and soften Australia’s stance on Kiwi criminals who commit serious offences, then I suspect this would represent a serious misreading of public sentiment.

Ardern would be better advised to remind her fellow Kiwis who prefer to live in our country rather than hers, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding members of our society, that if they don’t break the law, they can stay here for as long as they please.

Activist Filipa Payne who co-founded a group called Iwi in Australia says she plans to report Australia to the United Nations for human rights violations for deporting Kiwi criminals and is planning a class action against the Australian government.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese greets his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern ahead of a bilateral meeting. (Photo by Mark Baker – Pool/Getty Images)

“It’s not just that people go there and decide to be a criminal,” she said earlier this year. “It’s the fact that we don’t get support in Australian society to sustain us to the standard to keep our families healthy so before we put the accountability on criminal activity, I think the accountability should go on the Australian government … they invite us into their country to work there.”

It’s all our fault, apparently.

First we lure them into coming here with jobs that pay more than they can earn back home and provide them with a higher standard of living and then we send them home when they commit serious crime.

How ungrateful are we? Ardern seems to think that the criminal element among Kiwi expatriates in this country is entitled to special treatment, exhibiting a sense of entitlement writ large.

Opposition Home Affairs spokeswoman Karen Andrews says that protecting our community from foreign criminals, murders, rapists and paedophiles sometimes means sending them back to their country of citizenship and having difficult conversations with the leaders of their countries who don’t want them coming back.

She is right. The problem isn’t ours. It is Prime Minister Ardern’s, who while telling us how we should be running our affairs, fails to mention that New Zealand has a similar policy and has deported more than 1000 convicted criminals.

Ardern has a history of telling us where we’re are going wrong and a bit of Aussie-bashing always plays well in the New Zealand media.

Prime Minister Albanese should paraphrase John Howard and tell her politely but firmly that we will decide who lives here and the conditions under which they do so.