Too nice to jeer at Aussies

We are being gentle with misguided Australian Lucinda Baulch, who refused to take a Covid test after arriving here, instead spending 28 days in managed isolation while steadily giving us the finger.

We’re not rolling our eyes or pointing and jeering at her, that is. We’re not yokels.

It’s our way to be gentle, which as an Australian she would not understand. If a New Zealander pulled a similar stunt in Sydney or Melbourne they’d be on a plane back instantly with a righteous boot up the trousers. We, the Kiwi taxpayer, instead shouted her an extra fortnight in a Wellington hotel serving as a quarantine facility.

I trust she got her bed turned down and a chocolate left on the pillow nightly, not forgetting the miniature shampoos and soaps to souvenir on her way out, as is our custom.

Auckland will put up with her for ‘‘a night or two’’ as she put it, and she’ll be off. Meanwhile, three new Covid cases have been found in the community there.

Baulch says she wants a judicial review of what she calls her ‘‘unlawful detention’’ at the hotel. Yes, it looks like she’s one of those deniers of reality who goes to the internet and seeks out minority opinions to agree with.

She is a veterinary nurse, and therefore likely knows more about the science of a human pandemic than any so-called medical expert anywhere. Or something.

Baulch arrived in January accompanying three children who were moving into the foster care of families here. She’d been fostering them herself and so offered to make the trip with them, she says.

More than that we don’t know, but we are free to marvel that she must have come in full knowledge of the pandemic, the testing and lockdowns both here and overseas, and have known in advance that she’d have to be tested before quarantining and heading back again. It would be on the internet after all. Along with the loony stuff.

The children were swabbed and tested negative here. Presumably she didn’t make a fuss about that.

Judith Collins says Baulch should be deported. Deporting suggests revenge. We could do with some of that in view of Australia’s grim attitude to New Zealand offenders there.

You can be deported if they don’t like your character, which can mean you’ve been found unfit to plead or have mental health problems. We don’t retaliate because we’re nicer, though Jacinda Ardern has said their policy is ‘‘corrosive’’ in our relationship.

A recent example of Australia’s reluctance to face up to itself is its fast footwork in rescinding citizenship of a 26-year-old woman who left New Zealand at the age of 6. She was picked up at the border of Turkey on her way from Syria with her two surviving children and is accused of having links to Islamic State. She previously had dual citizenship. Last I heard she was our problem.

Australia doesn’t hesitate to deport people who’ve lived entire lives there apart from when they were babies or small children. It doesn’t matter if they leave partners, children, parents and friends behind and they know no-one here. Amazingly, only 40 per cent of them reoffend.

It doesn’t offer to take back its mosque mass murderer, though. The white supremacist, from New South Wales, is serving a life sentence without parole here rather than in the country where he must have begun developing his violent, racist views.

He’s not the sort of person I like having around. I deeply dislike his character. And we can’t even throw him back.