Deportations sidelined as ministers meet Fatal crash at Tirau
NZ, Aust have abundance of matters to discuss, says Foreign Minister Peters
Foreign Minister Winston Peters hasn’t raised concerns about the deportation of New Zealanders from Australia at a meeting with his transtasman counterpart, despite calling the situation “indefensible” after the last time they got together.
After talks with Aussie Minister of Foreign Affairs Marise Payne in Auckland yesterday, Peters told reporters there hadn’t been time to raise the skyrocketing numbers of Kiwis being deported across the ditch since Australia introduced tougher laws in 2014.
“It wasn’t raised this time either, because we had a whole lot
of things to discuss,” he said.
But the Government had not given up pressing Australia on the problem, and particularly New Zealand citizens who had lived in Australia most of their lives being sent over, Peters said.
“Of course we are going to keep on focusing on getting a far better understanding and what we believe is a far fairer legal outcome, particularly when people arrived in Australia when they were three, four, five, six years, seven years of age.”
The deportation concerns cropped up when Payne and Peters met earlier this year and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in February described the deportation regime as ”corrosive” to the transtasman relationship when she held talks with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
“But the point is that we have to begin on the basis that Australia has got, as we have, every right to write its own domestic policy,” Peters said yesterday.
Payne said her Government had no plans to budge on the issue, nor on the other rights of Kiwis in Australia.
But she turned to the Cricket World Cup to demonstrate the strength of Antipodean camaraderie.
“I think it’s a good test of how close Australia and New Zealand are if unprovoked I can walk into a conference in Auckland and complement New Zealand reaching the finals of the World Cup in the face of my own anguish on that matter,” she said.
Payne later added she would be taking a Black Caps shirt home and rooting for New Zealand in tomorrow’s final.
Justice Minister Andrew Little traded barbs with Australia’s Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton, over the deportations in 2018, after saying the Australian policy was the product of “venal” politics.
New Zealand’s High Commissioner to Australia last year told politicians across the ditch Kiwis were disproportionately affected by the regime because of a crossover with changes to the rights of Kiwis in Australia introduced in 2001.
Meanwhile, asked about why both New Zealand and Australia had this week joined 20 other countries in signing a letter to the UN human rights council condemning China’s treatment of Uighurs in the Xinjiang region, Peters replied: “Because we believe in human rights, we believe in freedom and we believe in the liberty of personal beliefs and the right to hold them.”
Peters and Payne say they also discussed regional security and faced questions about the human rights concerns in West Papua. Peters said he had raised the issue when he met with Indonesia Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi earlier in the day. One person is dead and several others are hurt after a crash near the south Waikato town of Tirau yesterday afternoon. Police were called about the two-car crash on State Highway 5, about 5km east of the town, at 2.30pm. One person has died in the crash, police confirmed. Another person is understood to have moderate injuries and two have minor injuries. State Highway 5 was closed between Waimakariri Rd and Harwoods Rd in Tapapa.