James Hurinui has been ordered deported from Australia. Photo / Instagram
“I will never re-offend because my children need me more than any crime.”
That was the impassioned plea by James Piripono Hurinui as he pleaded with Australian authorities not to deport him back to New Zealand.
Months prior, his ex-partner Julie Thomsen, 36, had been tragically killed in a hit-and-run alongside a Queensland highway after her car broke down, leaving the couple’s four children without a mother.
“Our young children aged 13, 10, 8, and 18 months, are my only reason for needing to remain here in Australia,” he told the Administrative Appeals Tribunal of Australia in February 2020.
“Please have a heart and let me go home to help my children and mourn our loss. I haven’t seen my children since November 2019. I need to assure them that I will never leave them again. Please help me back to them.”
The tribunal relented and Hurinui was released on parole a short time later instead of being transferred to immigration detention.
But Hurinui didn’t keep his word and this time it appears there will be no reprieve for the 48-year-old, who was told earlier this month that he has lost his latest 501 appeal.
But in the scathing 42-page follow-up decision issued this month, it was pointed out that Hurinui wasn’t able to uphold his promise of staying on the straight and narrow for very long. He would go on to make headlines that same year after a bloody kidnapping and robbery of a hotel manager that was later dubbed by a prosecutor as a “night of terror”, followed by six weeks on the run that ended with a dramatic arrest involving mobile phone signal triangulation, a police helicopter and a specialised police response unit.
“It is difficult to imagine a more extreme example of a person having had chances to redeem themselves and instead having doubled down by reoffending,” wrote senior tribunal member John Rau, a lawyer and former Labor Party politician who previously served as deputy premier and attorney-general of South Australia.
“The Applicant now essentially pleads for a fourth chance to prove himself, making essentially the same representations as he made in 2007 and 2020. His history of pleading for ‘another chance’ and then reoffending is damning.”
Hurinui moved from New Zealand to Australia in 2004 at age 30 and met Thomsen, an Australian citizen who would later become the mother of his children, about six months later.
“They soon became methamphetamine users,” the tribunal decision notes. “This led to some serious drug-related offending by the Applicant.”
In August 2005, he used a screwdriver to rob a stranger in front of her 9-year-old son. He was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, resulting in his first deportation warning.
“As she was getting out of the vehicle you approached her and grabbed her by the blouse, pulling her from the car,” a Queensland district court judge noted during his sentencing hearing. “You pulled her handbag from her despite her resistance and then you got in her car and used the keys, which were still in the ignition, to drive away. You then stole $4000 [with her bank card] from the automatic teller machine...”
Hurinui admitted to the crime, explaining that the had gone to the car park to steal a vehicle because he had a drug debt to “fix up”.
But the incident was more than that, the judge noted, pointing out that Hurinui’s victim was left “traumatised” — no longer at ease around strangers and unable to go shopping alone.
In December 2007, while still serving time, Hurinui was told steps had been taken to cancel his visa. He fought the order on the grounds that he had recently become a father and wanted to be there for his son. Six months later, officials withdrew the notice but with what Rau would later describe as “the clearest possible warning about the consequences of re-offending”.
Hurinui said he was able to stay off methamphetamine for about 10 years after his sentencing. But his continued alcohol consumption contributed to an at-times turbulent relationship with Thomsen, including two domestic violence incidents in 2012. During the first, he admitted to having thrown a chair through the front window of her home after she asked him to leave. During the second incident, two months later, he punched her in the head and face, stopping when she pointed out their children were watching.
In 2017, the relationship ended and he resumed using methamphetamine, beginning to pick up numerous criminal charges again.
They included a September 2018 home invasion in which his decision to help himself to a fizzy drink resulted in his eventual arrest. A $4000 ring and a car were taken from the property, but it was an empty Pepsi can left at the home that allowed police to match his DNA.
After multiple bail breaches while awaiting trial, he was taken into custody on Dec 5, 2019. Nine days later, while still in jail, tragedy would strike.
Police still don’t know who killed Thomsen on the night of December 14, 2019.
The 36-year-old mother of seven — three from a prior relationship — was walking with another person from a petrol station after her car broke down at about 11pm along Warrego Highway in Hatton Vale, a rural Queensland town about 70km west of Brisbane.
Pieces of the vehicle believed to have hit her were found at the scene where she died, but police were never able to identify the vehicle or its driver despite a press conference a month after her death asking for witnesses to come forward so her devastated family could have closure.
Thomsen’s niece described her aunt to the Brisbane Courier-Mail as a caring person who didn’t deserve to die the way she did.
“Julie was such a good mother and always made sure her children came before her,” Demia Jade told the newspaper. “She didn’t have the best upbringing, but she made sure her kids did.”
A month and a half after her death, Hurinui appeared before a judge to face sentencing for the burglary and other charges that had accumulated. The judge acknowledged the “somewhat unique” mitigating circumstances regarding Thomsen’s recent death.
“I accept that there are some four children who need a parent, but they also need a parent who will do a lot better job than you have done in the past while you have been their father,” the judge said.
Hurinui was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment but the judge allowed for him to be released on parole after a month so he could be with his children.
Immigration officials took steps to cancel his visa for the second time in February 2020, spurring the second appeal.
“My children, and I, will be severely impacted both emotionally and brokenheartedly, if my visa remains cancelled,” he said. “We have been devastated and our hearts have been ripped apart by the death of my partner and the children’s mother.”
While awaiting the Administrative Appeals Tribunal of Australia’s decision, he took a drug and alcohol programme followed by six months in which he was caring for his children.
But by the time the tribunal’s decision to let him stay was issued in January 2021, he had already returned to drugs and crime — again leaving a victim traumatised.
On Nov 28, 2020, Hurinui and co-defendant Steven Trevor Daley put a hotel manager through a three-hour ordeal that Crown prosecutor Christopher Cook would later describe as akin to video game Grand Theft Auto.
“There is no really sane motive the Crown can point to — it was just senseless violence,” Cook said at Hurinui’s sentencing, according to the Gold Coast Bulletin.
The two had entered the hotel looking for someone by the name of David, but when the manager asked if he could help they turned their focus to him, with Daley punching the man in the back of the head and pushing him into one of the rooms.
Daley later punched him twice more in the face, causing blood to splatter on the bathroom wall, before both men ransacked the room, Southport District Court Judge Geraldine Dann would recount at their joint sentencing. They took his keys and demanded to know where the hotel’s money was kept, but he said it had already been deposited. Daley hit the wall with a rusty hammer and took $100 and cash from the man’s wallet.
Hurinui then demanded that the three of them go to the manager’s car and they left. The manager emerged from the car hours later with a fractured jaw and nearly $16,000 siphoned from his bank account. The pair drove away in his car, leaving him on the side of the road roughly 90km from the hotel.
When police finally apprehended Hurinui two months later, “you repeatedly lied to the police in direct contravention of CCTV footage about touching the complainant and you incredibly told the police the complainant had simply wanted to provide his money”, the sentencing judge noted.
“Your actions have had a daily impact on every aspect of [the victim’s] life,” the judge told the duo.
“He has neck pain and stiffness; he wakes frequently because of that. He has nightmares most nights — flashbacks — and he lives in a constant state of heightened anxiety. He no longer feels safe in his own home. He has trouble dealing with people and going to and being involved in ordinary situations such as completing shopping or being in shopping centres and places where there are other people.”
Hurinui was sentenced in January 2022 to three years and nine months’ prison, with parole eligibility after one year, for charges of kidnapping, robbery and assault.
It triggered his third and final notice of deportation.
Hurinui hasn’t seen his children in person since his arrest for the November 2020 kidnapping, but if he was allowed to stay in Australia he would like to resume caring for them upon release from prison, he told the tribunal in his latest appeal.
That seems unrealistic, the tribunal responded this time.
“At present he has no plans regarding rehabilitation or counselling,” Rau noted in the decision. “The practical difficulties of looking after four children as a single father would be significant.”
His two youngest children are currently in the care of their grandmother, while the two oldest have stayed with multiple relatives and friends. Those who have cared for the children since their mother died have said deporting their father would have a significantly negative impact on them.
“I am truly sorry for the crimes I’ve committed and have been punished throughout the courts but please don’t punish my babies for my mistakes,” Hurinui said.
But returning the children to Hurinui’s care could also be destabilising for them, the tribunal found. Caring for them in 2020 while addicted to methamphetamine was “totally irresponsible”, Rau said.
“I accept that the Applicant genuinely wants to be a father to his children and that this is a strong motivation for him to not reoffend,” he wrote. “That said, his record condemns him. He has given the same assurances about not re-offending before, and they have turned out to be worthless.”
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