New Zealand’s prime minister, Chris Hipkins, has welcomed Australia’s announcement it will overhaul its approach to deporting NZ citizens who have spent more than one year in an Australian prison.
The deportations of the New Zealanders – despite in some cases tenuous connections to New Zealand – have provoked frustration in the trans-Tasman relationship for years.
Rather than changing section 501 of Australia’s Migration Act, the Australian immigration minister, Andrew Giles, has issued a ministerial direction to his department to pay greater attention to the strength, duration and nature of a person’s connection to the Australian community.
Hipkins told reporters in Auckland on Wednesday that he particularly welcomed “the acknowledgement on the Australian side that actually some of the people that we are talking about have had a long history in Australia”.
“Some of them have been there since they were very young children, and sending them to New Zealand when they have no connections here other than a very historic one isn’t really a fair or just outcome,” Hipkins said.
The policy shift was “something that the New Zealand government had been working with Australia to achieve for quite some time now”, Hipkins said, adding that the change was “a first step” of what he hoped would be ongoing movement from the federal government on the matter.
The number of cancellations under the policy had increased nearly tenfold in a decade, largely as a result of the Australian government tightening the law to say the minister must revoke the visa if a person had been sentenced to 12 months or more in prison.
Hipkins will meet the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in Canberra next week.
Albanese pledged to consider changes to the policy after talks with the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern in Sydney last year, which she said allowed for a “reset” of the trans-Tasman relationship.
In 2019, Ardern said after a meeting with the then Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, in New Zealand that the issue had “become corrosive” in the trans-Tasman relationship.
The matter had become toxic for successive New Zealand governments in part because of public anger about criminal behaviour by deportees, who have been blamed by New Zealand’s police and Ardern for increased gang and gun crime.
In figures from last September, nearly 3,000 people had been deported to New Zealand from Australia since enforcement of the policy began in 2015. According to RNZ, 57% of the deportees committed crimes after arriving in New Zealand – a total of 14,000 offences, nearly 3,000 of them violent.
A spokesperson for Giles said the change would deliver a more “common sense approach” although deportations would still occur.
“The Department of Home Affairs must now consider the length of time someone has lived in the Australian community as one of the primary considerations when determining whether to cancel someone’s visa.
“Where individuals pose a risk to the community, the Australian government will continue to cancel their visas and remove them.”
The change would require decision-makers to pay greater attention to where a person has spent the majority of their life, regardless of when the offence occurred and its nature.
