Leon slid up to our table outside a city center pub, gliding in on one of those electric scooters you can rent for five bucks a minute. Only, the hum of the electric motor was conspicuously absent. Leon had broken the lock and was using it like a skateboard.
Without waiting for an
invitation, he parked himself beside us, his heavily tattooed arms splayed
across the table, hidden behind wrap-around shades. He smiled, menacingly. He
started grilling us about our heritage. In New Zealand, that’s a dicey subject.
Full of implication that if you don’t have 100% Maori blood, you’re not a true
native. My companion launched into his family history, tracing it back to
ancestors on the first ship from Scotland. I kept quiet, fully aware of my
status as a guest in a colonized land.
We later learned that Leon’s
family hailed from Samoa, easing my invader guilt. Turns out, we were all
visitors here.
After the heritage interrogation,
Leon began his tale. Born in New Zealand, he left for Sydney at the tender age
of two. Fast forward twenty years, and his life was a litany of broken homes,
drug addled parents and a school system that chewed him up and spat him out
like a piece of old gum. A misstep too far landed him in the clink. Upon
serving his sentence, he expected to return to his family in Sydney, presumably
resuming to a life of crime, if statistics had any say.
But Canberra’s new right-wing
government was on a mission to deport as many brown folks as possible, using
any minor offense as justification. Kiwis were caught in the crossfire. Thanks
to a bilateral agreement, people with Australian passports, like me, could live
and work in New Zealand, and vice versa. Most didn’t bother with citizenship in
their adopted country.
This had two implications for
people at opposite ends of the social scales. The first was for those that had
children and want to get them into an Australian University. The kids don’t get
Australian citizenship automatically and are treated as overseas students when
they are old enough to go to College. That extra cost usually forces the
parents to swallow their Kiwi pride and head down to the passport office.
Australia’s new hard line on
criminals legislation also made no concessions for Kiwis, turning long-term
residents into ‘501’ deportees—named after the penal code, not the jeans. I’m
sure the Levi marketing department are not too pleased about being connected to
such a controversial policy.
Leon fell victim to this. Raised
in Sydney’s rough inner-city suburbs, he racked up tattoos and a rap sheet,
culminating in a stint at Long Bay Correctional Centre for a murder charge. I
shifted uneasily in my seat when he revealed this, noticing for the first time
the teardrop tattoo under his right eye—a symbol of regret, supposedly. Leon,
however, was brimming with rage.
He let us sit with that for a
while. The knowledge that we were sharing a table with a murderer. We must be
surrounded by bad people all the time of course, but rarely do they bowl up to
you in the street and promote their badness. But it seemed to bother us more
than it bothered him. He was much more concerned about the injustices he’d
faced, than any sense of remorse towards his victim.
Upon completing his sentence, he
was intercepted by immigration police and detained with Afghan and Iranian
refugees en-route to Christmas Island or some other gulag that Australia sends
the unfortunate folk who reach its shore looking for refuge.
While in the detention center, he
also met his first Kiwi gang members, who promised to look after him when he
got deported back to New Zealand.
When that day came, he was flown
to Auckland in handcuffs. The Aussie policemen waved good goodbye in the
Auckland arrival terminal and he was immediately greeted by two New Zealand cops who clamped
him in fresh handcuffs and treated him like dirt on their shoe. After two days
in a cell, being quizzed about his intentions and being regularly reminded
about how unwelcome he was in his new homeland, he was dumped into a boarding
hostel, a sort of half-way house for 501s, isolated from his family in
Australia and Samoa, and stuck in a limbo that has lasted four years.
He hadn't worked in that time,
the 501 stigma branding him a hardcore criminal. But it seemed his detention
buddies were keeping him afloat financially. Two states, the land of his birth
and the country he had lived in for most of his life, had abandoned him and he
found friendship and support in the criminal world. It seems so obvious that
this would happen that you wonder why the authorities don’t try to do something
about it.
But then, there are a million
things the authorities don’t deal with, climate change, income inequality,
corporate tax evasion etc. Not sure why I’m naïve enough to think they’d do
anything about hardened criminals arriving in your country with no prospect of
work and established links with the drug industry, while in detention.
The real beneficiaries of the 501
process were airlines who get the contract to fly all these over here and the
New Zealand gang industry. Gangs, who love their motorcycles and drug trade,
found a steady influx of muscle in the deportees from Oz. New Zealand
complained about Australia dumping its criminals, but we also deport Samoans,
Fijians, and Tongans by the busload. It’s a revolving door: as they leave, they're
replaced by 501s.
Leon hopped back on his scooter
and vanished into the night, leaving us to wrestle with our guilt—products of
white privilege, untouched by the tattoos we so abhor. But it also makes me
think I’d better get my Kiwi citizenship, in case I do something naughty and
get sent back to Melbourne in shame and condemned to a life with a biker gang
over there.
