The Australian terrorist who murdered 51 people in Christchurch last year could be getting deported back to Australia after being sentenced to life without parole earlier this week, and there’s a whole lot to unpack with this situation.
Brenton Tarrant, 29, was sentenced on Thursday for the white supremacy-motivated terrorist attack that killed 51 and injured a further 40 people. As of Friday, he remains behind bars in New Zealand, but it doesn’t look like he’ll serve the remainder of his sentence abroad.
New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has already called for him to be deported, and both Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton are open to the idea of him returning to Australia. Thankfully, all parties involved are determined to ensure he remains behind bars for the rest of his life, regardless of which side of the Tasman he’s on.
Although he lived in New Zealand for two years prior to the attack, Tarrant was born in Grafton, NSW and is legally an Australian citizen. So it’s understandable why New Zealand doesn’t want to be forking out their tax payer dollars to keep him locked up.
Speaking with The Today Show, Peters said that given “the cost to looking after the victims in our country who survived and their families and also the $50 million-plus [cost] downstream in real terms of providing safety for this terrorist, then the sound, reasonable, logical thing to do would be to ask Australia to step up.”
Just to remind you, the sentence (which was the first of it’s kind in New Zealand) was only handed down yesterday, so everything is very fresh and a formal request for Tarrant’s deportation hasn’t even been made yet. Although everyone is seemingly in agreement that he should serve his sentence in Australia and we should foot the bill, it’s not quite that simple.
Tarrant coming back to Australia gets extremely complicated because unlike our trans-Tasman neighbours, most Australian states don’t allow for a prison sentence without the possibility of parole. New South Wales, however, does allow this and theoretically could impose the sentence.
Peter Dutton has already commented on the situation, saying that he’d have to seek legal advice first to make sure that we’re not going to end up in a situation in which Tarrant would be eligible for parole if he came back to Australia.
“We’d have to look at what happened in terms of parole or the way in which our legal system would work here,” Dutton said.
“First priority is to keep him in jail for the rest of his life, and we’ll work very closely with New Zealand on any request that they provide.”
But the legal issues don’t stop there.
For the terrorist to be deported, both Australia and New Zealand would have to pass special laws regarding the international transfer of prisoners. This isn’t impossible, and likely will happen, but there *is* a process that needs to happen first.
The TL;DR: of it all? We’re all on the same page about the whole situation. Nobody wants to see a white supremacy-motivated terrorist walking free, whether it’s here or in New Zealand. It’ll likely just be a while before anything officially happens regarding a deportation.
