Ardern right to call out Morrison for deporting 'Aussie' Kiwis

The Jacinda Ardern comments at her press conference on Friday with Scott Morrison by her side were indeed strong - taking aim at our policy of deporting Kiwis in trouble with the law.

"You have deported more than 2000 individuals," Prime Minister Ardern said, "and among them will be genuine Kiwis who do need to learn the consequences of their actions. But among [them] are individuals who are too young to become criminals on our watch, they were too young to become patched gang members, too young to be organised criminals. We will own our people. We ask that Australia stops exporting theirs ..."

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speak at Admiralty House. Credit: Getty Images

As one who did an in-depth story on this as a guest reporter for the ABC's Foreign Correspondent a couple of years ago, I have to say she is right in every particular and we Australians are wrong.

At the time I did the story, in the previous three years we had sent 1300 Kiwis - a huge percentage of whom had been raised in Australia, and just never got around to doing the paperwork to becoming citizens - while they sent just nine Australians our way.

Who thinks this is fair? Who thinks this is the way to treat our nearest and closest neighbour? I do not. It is a disgraceful policy and should be changed.

Into the spotlight

Eat your heart out, Hugo Weaving! You will recall your arrival in Australia in the summer of ’76-’77 as a pasty-faced Pom, and that in your first 10 days at Knox Grammar School I was your best friend – nay, your only friend – going several times to your house to listen to this stunning new album you’d brought  from England, called Tea for the Tillerman.

You’ll recall that you then tried out for the school musical and school play and got the lead parts in BOTH – going on to be the toast of the school and even Hollywood while the only boards I could ever tread were at Cremorne Wharf. And I just about bloody well never saw you again!

Well, NOW look at me! Tonight will see the end of my week at the Maritime Museum playing the role of Harry McNish in the dramatised reading of Gail Louw’s play Shackleton’s Carpenter, and four out of six nights have sold out, thanks for asking!

Have loved the whole thing, Hugo. While acting is a kind of storytelling I’ve never engaged in or understood, I’ve found it a joy to try and inhabit the role, to not only get the audience to suspend their disbelief and get into it, but to suspend my own and actually try and be someone else. For the first time, I get the thrill of what you were on about, just how truly skilled you were and are.

Hope you’re well. If you need me, I’ll be in my trailer.

Hugo Weaving's talent took him to the stage early on.Credit: ABC

End of an era

There is, of course, no more iconic retail site in Sydney Town than David Jones and many of us can remember traipsing with our mothers all through it for hours on bloody end as wee ones, with the only consolation being that if we were a good boy she would take us to the milk bar just down Elizabeth Street a way, opposite Hyde Park, and get a milkshake. This week I was told that the part of DJs that is specifically the DJs Menswear store is going to be entirely transformed. There will be no more DJs Menswear and courtesy of a joint venture between Cbus Property and Scentre Group – whoever they are – that part on 111 Castlereagh Street will have a 22-storey residential tower with 101 residences build about it. The part on 121 Castlereagh Street will also be completely redone, with six levels (floors seven to 12) of serviced office space delivering 11,500 square metres. Construction will begin in late May this year, and go for about three years. To my untutored eye, it looks like that rarest of Sydney things, a good development.

Scentre and Cbus Property have lodged plans to transform David Jones' old menswear store into luxe retail and apartments.

Fiction prediction

Yes, of course, I have had contact this week from various nutters saying the coronavirus is all part of “the rapture”, or the like, some kind of biblical prediction that the end of the world is nigh and atheists like me better get ready for a long time in hell. More interesting to me though than whatever the bible might have to say about the end of time is a novel written by Dean Koontz in 1981, The Eyes Of Darkness. A reader sent me photos of pages from the novel which shows that the plot turns on a killer virus called “Wuhan-400” named after precisely the same Chinese city where the coronavirus first showed up. Says the book: “Wuhan-400 is a perfect weapon. It's discovered that the bacteria can be destroyed through some combination of electrical currents and extreme heat. In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.” Weird, I know. But remember: complete fiction!

The novel coronavirus is believed to have originated in a Wuhan marketplace.Credit: Getty

Joke of the Week

Every night, Frank goes down to the bottle shop, get a six pack, brings it home and drinks it while he watches TV. One night, as he finishes his last beer, the doorbell rings. He stumbles to the door and finds a two-metre tall cockroach standing there. The bug grabs him by the collar and throws him across the room, then leaves.

The next night, after he finishes his fourth beer, the doorbell rings. He walks slowly to the door and finds the same cockroach, who this time punches him in the stomach.

The next night, when the doorbell rings again Frank won’t even risk it and instead slips out the back door only to find the same massive cockie waiting for him – who, this time, knees him in the groin and drops him like a sack of spuds.

Franks goes straight to the police, and tell the desk sergeant the whole story.

“I know,” says the copper ruefully. “We are doing our best, but there’s just a very nasty bug going around.”

Quotes of the Week

“The act itself and that somebody could perpetrate that act, particularly as a father. . . It is incomprehensible. Such depravity that only makes you ask – how does such evil happen in our land?” - Scott Morrison delivering a tribute in Parliament to murdered Brisbane mother Hannah Clarke and her three children, promising further government resolve to tackle the scourge of domestic violence.

“Note the misplaced outrage. How dare police deviate from the feminist script of seeking excuses ... and explanations when women stab their partners to death, or drive their children into dams but immediately judging a man in these circumstances as simply representing the evil violence that is in all men.” - Bettina Arndt congratulating police "for keeping an open mind" on whether Rowan Baxter, who burnt to death his wife and children in Brisbane, "might have been 'driven too far'."

“Harvey Weinstein operated with impunity and without remorse for decades in Hollywood. Yet, it still took years, and millions of voices raised, for one man to be held accountable by the justice system. This case reminds us that sexual violence thrives on unchecked power and privilege. The implications reverberate far beyond Hollywood and into the daily lives of all of us in the rest of the world.” - Tarana Burke, the original creator of the #MeToo movement, in a statement after the Weinstein verdict.

“In Australia, the extreme right-wing threat is real and it is growing. In suburbs around Australia, small cells regularly meet to salute Nazi flags, inspect weapons, train in combat and share their hateful ideology.” - ASIO director general Mike Burgess, warning that neo-Nazis are emerging as one of Australia's most challenging security threats.

“I thought I had seen just about everything as health minister in NSW, but a baboon threesome enjoying the grounds of Royal Prince Alfred is really surprising.” - NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard after a male baboon on his way from a research facility to a vasectomy managed to escape his transport with his two female companions and run amok on the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital campus on Tuesday afternoon.