Mike Hosking: Australia has every right to send crims packing to New Zealand

COMMENT: In all honesty, if you were Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison would you be doing anything different? If you could rid your country of the sort of low-rent trouble they're sending our way, wouldn't you do the same?

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, when she met with Morrison on Friday made what in diplomatic circles would be regarded as a pretty bold statement as regards our attitude to the Australians repatriating a selection of our finest exports.

So good on her for at least not shying away from defending her corner, and suggesting the Australian stance on exporting expats is corroding our relationship. But it was never going to make a jot of difference.

And it might be worth noting at this point the irony that she is seemingly more than happy to have a bunch of so-called refugees park themselves here off Manus Island.

People who have jumped the queue, broken the law, trodden over the genuine contenders in refugee camps, and tried to buy their way into freedom by hiring pirates to transport them via boat to Australia.

Just why is it they're okay, but people born here aren't?

The argument, such as it is, is that these people that Morrison wants rid of, are in fact New Zealanders. And where you were born actually counts.

We somehow think that the fact you went to Australia as a four-year-old, don't know anyone here, may have never been here, and have nothing to do with the place, somehow means you can break the law and cause general mayhem in Sydney and expect it to be Australia's problem.

Well, sorry it doesn't work that way. And why we think it should work that way is baffling, it holds no logic.

Of course we don't actually want them back, who would? But when you were born here, that bit sticks.

And unless we are going to strip them of their citizenship, which of course we aren't, given it's Australia they've been to, not Syria. And they might have joined a gang, not Isis. We're unfortunately stuck with them.

A side note, by the way, is that large percentages of them seem to come back here and break the law. Thus making it an ongoing expensive problem for us, but at the same time also reinforcing Australia's decision as being the right and sensible one.

And here is why all this has come about: we have access to Australia like no other country on Earth. Our deal is unique. We can turn up, no questions asked, park ourselves at our leisure, and stay as long as we like.

They've tightened it up a bit over the years because the simple truth of the matter is that more of us have taken advantage of the shores of Coolangatta and Double Bay, than they have of our equivalents. And the famous Bondi Kiwi dole-bludger image didn't eventuate because they made it up.

So with the luxury of free access comes, surely, a little bit of reality. And that reality is that not all of our exports are of gold standard.

And when they're not, why on Earth would we find it a surprise to see them passing our problem back to us?