Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters can whinge all they like about Australia exercising its sovereign rights and deporting New Zealand-citizen crims, but legal scholar Mirko Bagaric has some very simple advice.

liar liar stop breaking the law asshole GIF by Jerology
The BFD.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern publicly has scolded Scott Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton for deporting criminals back to her country, but she’d have been better advised to tell her countrymen not to commit serious crimes in Australia.

Australia sets a really low bar for Kiwis to be able to remain here: don’t commit serious crimes while in this country. Anyone incapable of meeting this easy threshold must take complete personal responsibi­lity for their actions and stop complaining if they are deport­ed.

Personal responsibility? That phrase isn’t in the rainbows’n’hugs lexicon of ‘progressives’. When everybody’s a victim, nobody is responsible for anything.

Well it’s not my fault…Call me irresponsible and I’m really going to lose it – The Proclaimers.

To suggest that it is asking too much of non-citizens to avoid being imprisoned for a year constit­utes an intellectually barren and morally vacuous account of human responsibility and justice. The solution to the supposed problem of excessive criminal deportation rests with individual action, not discretionary expres­sions of government compassion. The expectation that people should not commit serious crime is one that nobody (citizens and non-citizens alike) can legitimately reject.

In what might have been thought to be an impossible achievement, Peters has had an even sillier whinge than Ardern, claiming that sending New Zealand criminals packing is responsible for New Zealand’s gang problems.

If New Zea­land has a gang problem, it needs to take ownership of it. More effect­ive policin­g is a good start.

theaustralian.com.au/commentary/heres-an-idea-for-jacinda-ardern-tell-kiwis-to-stop-breaking-laws-in-australia/

Unfortunately, New Zealand’s police have far more pressing problems than dealing with gang violence. After all, there might be someone, somewhere posting something “unhelpful” on social media. Even worse, law-abiding family men might be hoarding .22 bunny guns.

Priorities, people!

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Punk rock philosopher. Liberalist contrarian. Grumpy old bastard. I grew up in a generational-Labor-voting family. I kept the faith long after the political left had abandoned it. In the last decade...