Who’s going to make the gravy?

Christmas is painful for Karolina Roberts. She spent two of them on her own, her partner Jarl Wiki locked away inside the notorious Villawood immigration detention centre in Sydney.

New Zealand-born Wiki had done bad things, make no bones about it. He’d done drugs. He’d done jail time for robbery with menaces.

But he’d also done his time – and then he was plucked off the street so Australia could lock him up in Villawood, without trial, without cause, without right of appeal. Why? Because he was born in New Zealand, and they saw a chance to get rid of him.

Karolina was there at the outside of the wire fence in November 2015 when Labour MP Andrew Little inspected the centre and met the inmates. That Christmas was terrible. ‘‘I remember it with a lot of grief,’’ Karolina tells me this weekend, this Christmas Eve.

There is a song by Melbourne songwriter Paul Kelly that has been worming into my head this week, named ‘‘How to make gravy’’. It is a letter from a father jailed at Christmas, a letter sending his love and pain and his recipe for the gravy he would usually make for his family.

This Christmas, 175 New Zealanders are locked up in Australian immigration detention centres, unable to share Christmas dinner with their families. Some of them have committed no crime.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has ruled that this detention regime breaches the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

And this week, the New Zealand Supreme Court waded in with some quite extraordinary commentary on another nation’s laws. The court refused to allow Iraqi refugee Maythem Radhi to be extradited to Australia to face justice for allegedly sending 353 asylum-seekers to their deaths on the rusted, overcrowded SIEV-X.

Justice William Young was concerned that even if Radhi were acquitted, he would be caught in limbo in Australian detention centres, unable to return home to his wife and three children in Auckland. The Bill of Rights Act provides that New Zealanders ‘‘have the right not to be arbitrarily arrested or detained’’.

Many would agree that Radhi should indeed answer such serious allegations before a jury – but New Zealand would argue that he must first be guaranteed a fair trial and lawful detention.

‘‘Administrative detention of Mr Radhi following the expiry of any sentence of imprisonment would be open-ended in terms of duration,’’ the Justice said. ‘‘There would be no right of access to the Australian courts to challenge it other than on formal grounds of illegality. This detention would, in all probability, last for a number of years.’’

Stepping further into judicial activism, the court directed that Andrew Little, who is now the Minister of Justice, should consider whether the Australian detention regime does indeed breach the Bill of Rights.

Given the already-tense relations between Malcolm Turnbull’s Australian government and the new Government of Jacinda Ardern, the Supreme Court has handed Little a tinderbox. To declare the detention regime in breach of human rights would be explosive, an unequivocal statement that Australia’s actions holding those 175 Kiwis are inhumane.

Jarl Wiki is back in New Zealand for Christmas – a country that he left when he was still young. The prolonged detention wore him down, and eventually he signed the papers thrust in front of him by Australian authorities, agreeing to be deported to New Zealand.

His relationship couldn’t survive the tyranny of distance: Karolina is making a new life in Australia, Wiki is trying to find his way in a country that he barely knows.