Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Does the Government's deportation plan go far enough?

So I'm going to suggest that Erica Stanford is on the right track with wanting to make it easier to deport criminals, but maybe she doesn't go far enough.

So at the moment, the rules are that we cannot deport criminals if they've been here on a residence visa and they've been residents for more than 10 years.

An example of this is the Mama Hooch brothers. These guys are not Kiwis.

You know the ones I'm talking about, down in Christchurch. They're not Kiwis, they're Aussies and they don't have citizenship here, they don't have Kiwi passports.

But even though they are two of the country's worst sexual offenders, we cannot deport them back to Australia because they've been here in New Zealand as residents for longer than 10 years.

Now, Erica Stanford is proposing to change the rules so that that gets moved out to 20 years for anyone who's committed a serious crime like murder, rape, or manslaughter.

Now I would say, scrap the time limit altogether. It doesn't matter how long you've been here - 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, 50 years.

If you decide that you want to rape or kill someone, you go home and you lose the privilege of being here.

Maybe we need to look outside of rape and murder and manslaughter as well. Perhaps we have lower time limits for other crimes - but further than 10 years, if you know what I mean. We take a line on those crimes, we push it out a little bit further.

Because the key here is that it is a privilege to be in New Zealand and not a right.

And I suppose what I'm suggesting is that we take a leaf out of Australia's book and get rid of other countries' criminals.

As much as I don't always love what what Australia is doing, what I love a lot less is looking after other countries' criminals.

So I reckon no time limit on those big crimes.

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