‘Whitewash’: New Zealand foreign minister blasts Australian COVID inquiry

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters has blasted the Australian government’s inquiry into the handling of the pandemic while warning Canberra against taking further steps to make deporting New Zealand-born criminals easier.

The veteran politician urged Australians to “show a bit of gratitude” to Kiwi migrants for their economic contribution to the country, pointedly noting that an Australian man committed the 2019 Christchurch massacre, the worst terror attack in New Zealand’s history.

“Ned Kelly should show a bit of humility on this matter, and don’t come the raw prawn with us, to use an Aussie expression,” Peters said about the federal government’s recent efforts to allow more foreigners to be deported if they committed crimes in Australia.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters urged Australians not to take his country for granted.Credit: AP

The 79-year-old leader of the conservative New Zealand First Party is in his third stint as New Zealand’s deputy prime minister, having previously served in the role in Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government and Jim Bolger’s National government.

“You guys haven’t had a review, you’ve had a whitewash,” Peters said in Auckland about the Albanese government’s COVID inquiry released last month.

“And I’m out to make sure it doesn’t happen in my country ... We are going to get to the truth.”

Ardern established a royal commission into the pandemic in 2022 that has since been expanded and extended under Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who leads the conservative National Party.

As demanded by Peters, the royal commission will also examine use of vaccines and vaccine mandates, social and economic impacts of COVID policies and whether similar public health benefits could have been achieved with shorter lockdowns.

Peters said New Zealand’s tough response to COVID, while understandably strict at the beginning of the pandemic, became a “disaster” over time as “basic factual incongruities” were ignored in a bid to stamp out the virus.

Shutting schools for extended periods was a damaging decision, he said.

“Children were the least vulnerable [to the virus], and we knew that, but we shut the whole thing down,” he said.

“The cost to New Zealand is that we are still struggling to come out of that malaise. That is accentuated by our massive levels of truancy. If we hadn’t closed our primary schools, that would not have happened. But there’s an unwillingness to say we got it wrong.”

The new conservative NZ government wants their COVID royal commission to examine the social and economic harms of the strict conditions introduced by then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern. Credit: Getty Images AusPac

The Albanese government’s COVID-19 inquiry attracted criticism when it was announced for excluding examination of “actions taken unilaterally by state and territory governments”, but the final report proved more critical of state governments than many had expected.

Health Minister Mark Butler defended the inquiry on Sunday, describing it as a “very comprehensive, measured, sensible report that does examine a range of decisions that state governments were taking”.

“It doesn’t pull its punches at all,” Butler told Sky News.

Peters said the trans-Tasman relationship had been strained by the Albanese government’s adoption of a new immigration rule – known as direction 110 – designed to give administrative review officials more leeway to deport foreign criminals.

Peters said New Zealanders with little connection to their birth country, including those who had spent most of their lives in Australia, should not be deported in a bid to ease Labor’s political problems with immigration.

“Dare I say it: on March 15th, we had the worst terrorist event ever committed by an Australian in New Zealand,” Peters said, referring to the 2019 Christchurch massacre in which Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in two mosque attacks.

“I hate to think that we might be being used for political purposes.”

The federal government scrapped the previous “direction 99” after it was blamed for allowing dozens of convicted criminals to be released into the community rather than returned to their country of citizenship.

Peters said Australia had been a “massive beneficiary of New Zealand’s education and skills system”, arguing that New Zealanders were the highest-earning immigrants in Australia.

“All I want from you guys is a bit of gratitude,” he said.

“I don’t want to hear no jingoistic behaviour from your politicians. Don’t come the dingo with me.”

Immigration from New Zealand to Australia has sped up dramatically in recent years, with the country recording a net migration loss of 27,200 people to Australia in 2023 as Kiwis seek economic opportunities abroad.

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