Australia is introduced tough new deportation laws for noncitizens of bad character that sweep up New Zealanders who may have lived in Australia since childhood.
The new laws provide for automatic deportation of noncitizen criminals. The Immigration Minister used to decide if a criminal who was not an Australian resident was to be deported. Deportations are now automatic, although there are some exemptions and the opportunity for the Minister to intervene in special cases.
Anyone sentenced to more than a year in prison, or for a child-sex related offence automatically loses their visa and is detained to await deportation. This can include cumulative sentences over decades. Anyone spends a total of more one year in a prison is not a petty offender.
If you are a guest in another country, that is not a citizen, you do not go around messing up the place and making a nuisance of yourself. Sooner or later your host will lose patience and send you on your way.
There are injustices in these deportation laws because of a quirk of the New Zealand citizenship law. Some New Zealanders living in Australia cannot pass on their New Zealand citizenship to their children through decent. You cannot become an Australian citizen simply by being born there.
The injustice therefore is some of these New Zealanders who are Samoans whose children spend most of their lives in Australia will be deported back to Samoa because they have Samoan citizenship. They have neither New Zealand nor Australian citizenship.
It is one thing for a criminal to be deported from Australia to New Zealand – both are developed countries. It is another to be deported to a backward Pacific island.
If the New Zealand Labor Party and the New Zealand Greens would take time out for standing up for New Zealand criminals at home and abroad, they might be able to plead with greater success for a deal for these children of New Zealanders who find themselves in a quirky citizenship status. For these children of New Zealanders, their deportation is unusually harsh because they end up back in Samoa, not New Zealand.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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