Government announces stricter immigration measures

Peter Dunne
Wellington, September 6, 2025

The government has announced plans to strengthen New Zealand’s immigration laws to make it easier to deport residents convicted of serious criminal offences.

Under the current law, permanent residents of up to ten years’ standing who have been convicted of criminal offences can be deported after release from prison. However, the term of their deportation depends on the nature and seriousness of their offence.

The government’s new plans significantly broaden the scope of the existing policy.

It is planning to increase the time frame to residents of twenty years’ standing and also to include historic crimes committed before the person came to New Zealand.

Public and political reception

These announcements will likely be welcomed, especially by those concerned about community safety and the risk they consider released offenders pose to the public. As such, the announcements, reported in the media as making it easier for the government to deport non-New Zealand criminals, will play well as part of the government’s tough law-and-order agenda.

It will also be easy for the government to portray parties opposing the moves as “soft on crime and criminals.” With an election looming next year, and law and order always being an important issue, which will be no bad thing as far as the government is concerned.

The irony of past criticism of Australia

However, there is a certain irony in these announcements.

For years, successive National and Labour-led governments have railed against the Liberal/National coalition government and now against the Labour governments in Australia for their notorious S501 Policy. Under this policy, many Australian criminals, born in New Zealand and often with the most tenuous remaining links to this country, have been deported here once released from prison in Australia.

So, as it now moves to strengthen New Zealand’s deportation rules, our government will need to be very mindful of the consistent and outspoken approaches various Prime Ministers have made over the years to their Australian counterparts about the S501 Policy and the potential risk of claims of hypocrisy it now raises.

The Thomas Sewell Case

Indeed, on the same day the Immigration Minister was announcing New Zealand’s proposed changes, the Prime Minister was attacking calls from Australia for the deportation to New Zealand of neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell because he was born here and holds dual Australian and New Zealand citizenship.

While he is undoubtedly “a pretty awful human being,” as the Prime Minister described him, Sewell has so far not been convicted of any crimes that would lead to his deportation from Australia.

He is therefore unlikely to become a victim of the S501 policy, and thereby New Zealand’s problem, despite more than 88,000 Australians having signed a petition calling for his deportation.

In the circumstances, the Prime Minister’s comments that Sewell is Australia’s problem were ill-timed, given his own government’s deportation announcements the same day.

The risk is that they will further embolden hard-line politicians on both sides of Australian politics to dig in further against any softening of the S501 policy insofar as New Zealand is concerned.

They know that, as in New Zealand, cracking down on migrants who break the law is good domestic politics.

Sovereignty and the Reasonableness Test

However, it must be acknowledged that all sovereign nations, New Zealand and Australia included, have a right to protect their citizens against the risk imposed by foreign criminals and to deport those non-citizens who seriously offend against their countries of origin.

The right to citizenship and residence in any country must always be conditional on acceptance of, and compliance with, the laws of that country. The issue around deportation is therefore less about the right of countries to deport non-citizens who have criminally offended than it is about the reasonableness of such actions.

In that context, there is a legitimate argument about the reasonableness of Australia deporting to New Zealand people who have not lived here since childhood and who no longer have any substantial family links here. However, in the same vein, it was only a few weeks ago that Immigration New Zealand was threatening to deport a teenage boy to India for being an overstayer, even though his family was legally resident in New Zealand and he would have no means of familial or other support in India. Government officials contemplating this move, and Ministers who initially supported it, failed to see the hypocritical parallel until the last minute.

Lessons for New Zealand

For this reason, many will argue that, as it moves to strengthen its deportation laws, New Zealand should be mindful of the reasonableness test and avoid getting itself into the type of S501 mess Australia has. But there will also be more cynical voices – inside and outside government – arguing precisely the opposite: that, for domestic political reasons, having a deportation policy that is criticised externally as unreasonable and excessively xenophobic will play well for the government in an election year.

With ACT and New Zealand First being the glue holding the Luxon-led coalition together, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the latter view is the more likely driver of the new policy direction.

Peter Dunne was a Minister of the Crown in the Labour and National-led governments from December 1999 to September 2017. He lives in Wellington and writes a weekly Column.