Why Australia can’t just deport its problems

Illicit tobacco czar Kazem Hamad, now resident in Iraq, has apparently raised the extortion rate on Melbourne chop chop shops to $5,000 a month.

This proves that (a) you can definitely run a successful business working from home, and (b) Australia may have shot itself in the foot (and a whole lot of small retailers through the front window) by deporting him in the first place.

I mean, if he was still here, we’d at least in theory be able to ask him pointed questions or stir up some bikie gangs and let market forces take their course.

Australia really loves deporting people, though, and won’t let economic rationality, bleeding-heart humanitarianism or legal technicalities stand in the way.

In all the chaos of the last few weeks you may have missed the announcement by the Italian government that it was clamping down on applications for Italian citizenship.

The rule used to be that you were Italian if you had ancestors who were born in Italy after Vittore Emmanuel was declared King of Italy on March 17, 1861. Since March 28 the government has reduced that period from about seven generations to two – you now have to have an Italian parent or grandparent, and great-great-great-great-great-grandparents don’t cut it anymore.

And why does this matter for Australians? Well, our laws on citizenship have become increasingly entangled in these foreign political calculations. For one thing, anybody whose people came out to Australia from Italy before the Second World War has suddenly become eligible to stand for federal parliament.

Our electoral rules are subject to abrupt change by foreign parliaments because the High Court, in one of the stupidest decisions of its 120-year history, has said that nobody who’s entitled to citizenship in any other jurisdiction can run for our parliament. And that’s based on its reading of the Constitution, too, not any particular law, so while Italy can change our rules, we can’t.

The High Court ruling may also mean that one or two of these newly qualified potential candidates might decide to go in the other direction and resort to extra-parliamentary terrorism, because other High Court rulings make it harder for the government to deport people who don’t have dual citizenship.

When it comes to citizenship, Australians want to have it both ways. On the one hand migrants are welcomed as eager participants in the great national enterprise of advancing Australia fair, and on the other hand we want to retain the ability to cast them into outer darkness if they do anything we don’t like.

Australia works on the model of a gardener throwing the caterpillars from their cabbages into the neighbour’s yard. This comes out most clearly in the case of those whose parents neglected to fill out the paperwork and who consequently aren’t citizens at all. We deport thousands of people to New Zealand, for example, which pisses them off quite a bit.

Jacinta Ardern told the Morrison government, “Send back Kiwis, genuine Kiwis – do not deport your people, and your problems.” If they’d grown up in New Zealand then yes, they were New Zealanders and could fairly be deported, but those who had left New Zealand for Australia as children were surely Australian. “We will own our people. We ask that Australia stop exporting theirs.”

Morrison gave NZ the finger, but when Labor got in they saw reason and put out a ministerial declaration that having spent your life here should in fact be a consideration in deportation cases. That insight lasted two years, until Dutton and Murdoch combined to paint Albanese as personally cheering on every crime committed by a non-citizen and shouting them drinks afterward. Naturally Labor folded, and the rule now is that the only thing that counts is ‘community safety’.

Australia glories in its international reputation as deadbeat dad of the Pacific. Charles Davidson, for example, emigrated from the UK to Australia in 1955 at the age of five, and is now 74, having in the intervening years committed many serious crimes. That’s on Scotland, apparently; something in the toddler’s porridge, no doubt.

As a nation, we deny any responsibility for what our schools and our legal system and our society did – how we taught him, moulded him, twisted him. Real Australians don’t do those things, or at least not to other Australians (Afghans don’t count).

Myself, I think that we should stop trying to shove our mistakes off on to other people, or other states. We’re old enough as a country to take responsibility for our failures.

Obsessing about a handful of crimes by the deportable classes – a rounding error in our crime statistics – is not only pointless and expensive but lends weight to toxic xenophobia.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.