The grizzlies were roaring in Parliament's bear pit. Father bear David Carter was screaming "order" but creating more disorder.

Teflon John Key was feigning anger, but was in reality he was the circus master, tugging the rings in the opposition noses, working the bears into a war dance lather.

It was pure political theatre but it wasn't funny. The issue was the creation of a man who was once of the cloth, Tony Abbott, known as the mad monk.

It was a year ago that his Government decided to take a hard line with criminals who'd spent a year or more in jail - send them back from whence they came. There was one thing wrong with the crackdown, it was retrospective, meaning that people who'd been jailed years earlier and subsequently freed, could be locked up and deported.

If they didn't like it, they could be bundled off to places like the far flung Christmas Island to fight their deportation by remote.

The law's a disgrace and if Kiwis thought they had a special relationship with the Aussies, this should dispel that notion.

Assurances by the former money market trader Malcolm Turnbull to his former colleague and now counterpart Key, that detainees could climb on a plane and fight their deportation case from here, simply don't stack up.

Key's outburst in the bear pit that Labour, who's accused him of sucking up to his buddy, support child molesters, rapists and murderers was deliberate. He knows there's little sympathy for people who break the law, and rightly so, but there should be some sympathy for those who've done their time for relatively minor offences and have gone on to live a relatively decent life before they got the knock on the door.

The new, indiscriminate Australian law is not only inhumane, it's heartless. It rips families apart, sending some offenders back to a country they were simply born in but have no association with.

They learnt all their bad habits in Australia, but Australia bears no responsibility for them.

Aristotle once said you can judge a nation by the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens. They'd argue they're not their citizens they're ours which seems about as deep as the Australian political psyche goes these days!