Since 2014, Australia’s 501 deportees have been arriving back in what our neighbours insist is their homeland.
They range from hardened criminals to people whose only crime was belonging to a motorbike club.
In spite of back-and-forth between leaders, Australian politicians are happy to pander to their electorates and maintain the hard line of cancelling visas for those New Zealand-born citizens who commit crimes or who just keep bad company.
A new book by TV3 news producer Angus Gillies called 501s: The Reluctant Returnees looks at how some of these people have sorted out their lives since arriving back ‘home’ – and how some others haven’t made much progress. He also details how they got into such a position in the first place.
On arrival in New Zealand “they’re resentful”, he says.
“They don’t want to be here. They don’t feel any kind of loyalty to this country. Their whole family is in Australia; their partners, their parents often, their own kids, their cousins.
“They’re set up. Then one of them is sent back.”
On The Detail today, Gillies talks about the people he met who told him their stories. He says he’s learnt through the writing that no one is irredeemable.
Gillies says we all know the criminal landscape in New Zealand changed when these 501s came back. They introduced more powerful and ambitious gangs including the Comancheros, hardened criminals who drove big drug-trading enterprises.
“But research has been done and it’s found that it’s a very small number of 501s with a huge amount of influence,” he says.
“So it might be gang leaders, gang enforcers, gang secretaries – highly ranked gang members coming back and starting Aussie-style gangs in New Zealand, and that kind of changed the landscape.
“The actual numbers of reoffending and reimprisonment of 501s is lower than the national average [of recidivist offending] for New Zealand. It’s been getting better.”
New Zealand police statistics on deportees from Australia from January 2015 to May 2026 show there have been 3748 arrivals in those 11-plus years.
Only 255 were women. There were 1534 Māori, 1096 European and 830 described as Pacific Peoples.
We hear a great deal about those who have been in Australia since they were babies, but only 98 were pre-schoolers when they went to live in Australia, and 141 were aged between five and nine. The largest cohort was the 20-29-year-olds, at 1163. One had been there between 80 and 89 years.
Around half have not reoffended in New Zealand, but 501s have been responsible for 30,327 crimes over that same time period. There were 3629 assaults, 2369 drug offences, more than 6000 thefts and 33 homicides.
The drug offences figure was recorded before the conviction of the entire Christchurch chapter of the Comancheros – 29 people – on drug and related crimes last week.
New Zealand deports around 800 people a year, a figure which includes expired visas or breach of visa conditions, and the vast majority leave voluntarily.
But we are sending increasing numbers of criminals back to Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga. In 2023 the number was 58, in 2024 it was 65.
Some of them have been in New Zealand since they were children … and without family support they are getting involved in the transnational drug trade.
“The islands particularly do it tough with us deporting people back,” says Gillies.
“Because they’re little communities and they’ve been hugely hit by mainly Australia and America sending back people into these tiny communities.
“Nothing near what Australia has done which I think, in my opinion, is like a betrayal of our relationship as two neighbouring countries.
“But we’re not completely innocent either.”
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