Editorial: Kicked out - Aussies take tougher line

Editorial

When a chartered aircraft touched down in Auckland in the early hours of Tuesday, September 18, it marked what looked to be an escalation in Australia's deportation of unwanted New Zealanders.

With 28 passengers, evenly split between evicted Kiwi-born offenders and Serco staff to guard the so-called Con Air flight, the headcount raises the stakes a whole notch since 2014 when Australia first took up a hardline stance of Section 501 of the Migration Act.

More than 1300 returned New Zealanders in four years equates to an average of almost one a day. Fourteen in a day puts a whole new perspective on the Aussie oustings.

The Weekend Herald reporting on one of these passengers Debra Forster - a Gold Coast developer with convictions for driving without a current licence, failing to turn up for a court date and, perhaps, identity theft - also throws new light on the practice. While some of her actions are certainly illegal and counter to what any proper society should tolerate, there's no evidence of violence in her case files. When the hardline policy on non-Australians was first brandished, politicians spoke of killers and rapists and imported menaces to the lives and limbs of Fair Dinkum people.

The latest talk has softened to this sort of speak from an unnamed spokesperson for the Australian Border Force: "The Australian Government takes the responsibility of protecting the community from the risk of harm arising from non-citizens who choose to engage in criminal activity or other serious conduct of concern seriously."

Serious conduct? It would appear the Australian authorities have forgotten the injustices wrought on some of their first European-born citizens and are intent on repeating the process. With the final word on who stays and who must go in the hands of the Minister of Immigration, it also appears natural justice has been suspended for expedience and convenience.

Forster was an unusual case in one respect by going public with her ordeal. Most of these repatriates will avoid publicity, humiliated in their homecoming. Yet the impacts on families and communities of these returned will not be insignificant. Forster's mother spent most of her retirement savings trying to help her daughter through a legal fight she could never win.

Reintegrating and rehabilitating offenders is already more likely to fail than not when the person is back in a familiar and reassuring place. The odds against these strangers in a strange land will be even more stacked. Whatever these people have done wrong, their incarceration in marginally humane detention centres and denial of just process is unlikely to land them here fully primed to tackle the challenges ahead of them.

As the planeloads of the shackled and shunned touch down in Auckland - under cover of a 2am departure and unseen by all but a few Customs and Police - is the Australian crawl of evictions turning into a tide?