Australia: The Prime Minister of New Zealand Mr. Chris Hipkins has welcomed Australia’s statement that it will change how it handles deporting NZ citizens who have served more than a year in an Australian prison. The deportations of the New Zealanders have damaged the trans-Tasman relationship for years, despite their often shaky ties to New Zealand.

The Australian Immigration Minister, Mr. Andrew Giles, has issued a ministerial directive to his department to pay more attention to a person’s strength, duration, and kind of connection to the Australian community rather than amending section 501 of Australia’s Migration Act.

The Australian government tightened the rule to require that the minister revoke the visa if a person had been sentenced to 12 months or more in prison, which led to a roughly tenfold rise in the number of cancellations under the program in a decade.

After discussions with the former New Zealand Prime Minister Ms. Jacinda Ardern in Sydney last year, which Mr. Albanese claimed allowed for a “reset” of the trans-Tasman relationship, she promised to take the concept into consideration.

After a meeting with Mr. Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister at the time, in New Zealand in 2019, Ardern claimed that the matter had “become toxic” to the trans-Tasman relationship. The issue had grown poisonous for New Zealand’s previous governments in part due to public outrage over the criminal activity of deportees, who New Zealand’s police and Ardern have blamed for an upsurge in a gang and gun crime.

According to statistics from last September, since the policy’s implementation in 2015, about 3,000 persons from Australia had been deported to New Zealand. In total, 14,000 offences were committed by the deportees after they arrived in New Zealand, with approximately 3,000 of those offences being violent, as per RNZ.

WORLD ROUNDUP: Samsung’s profit drops to 8-year low as smartphone & PC demand plunge