Outright honesty is not the first quality that one associates with the criminal fraternity, so it might come as a surprise to many that disclosure of a criminal record for New Zealanders on entry to Australia, and vice versa, is voluntary.
Citizens of each country can enter the other as long as they have not been sentenced to a year or more in jail.
But if they have, and they determine to lie about it, they can evade this restriction simply by making a false declaration on their immigration entry cards. And the only way a prospective employer can check is with the permission of the prospective employee.
On that basis, any sensible employer would be well-advised to disqualify immediately any future worker who declined consent to check his or her records.
In so doing they risk, of course, losing good employees who might object in principle to such checks, but the alternative - of employing a dishonest person with a considerable criminal record - is likely to prove more costly in the long run.
This is indeed what happened when New Zealander Joel Hohepa Morehu-Barlow was recently charged with stealing more than $A16 million ($NZ20.6 million) from Queensland Health.
Morehu-Barlow failed to disclose his previous New Zealand criminal record, including the theft of $55,000 from the IRD.
Privacy considerations, it seems, may have acted as a barrier to his employers finding out about his criminal past.
He is not the only one. Subsequent investigations have shown that other New Zealanders have slipped into Australia despite having serious convictions including for offences such as kidnapping, rape, manslaughter and robbery.
If it is happening in the one direction it is inevitable that it is also happening in reverse.
The initiative to remedy such shortcomings in the immigration procedures between the two countries, as announced in Canberra over the weekend when Prime Minister John Key met his Australian counterpart, Julia Gillard, are to be welcomed.
It simply makes sense. New Zealand should not be in the business of exporting its criminals to Australia and this country has enough of its own without enticing their transtasman counterparts to come over here and commence a fresh crime-laden career.
To this end, the two countries will carry out a six-month trial in Queensland to investigate ways of disclosing the records of those concerned.
This logical move will be backed up by communication and discussions between Justice Minister Judith Collins and Australian Attorney-general Nicola Roxon.
While care has to be taken to protect the privacy of innocent individuals, it seems strikingly odd in this sophisticated era that a system cannot be devised whereby passports of offenders are flagged so as to reveal convictions that meet some mutually acceptable threshold.
As with all such systems there is the possibility for error, but the greater good requires, as has been decided by the two prime ministers, that process for sharing information for border controls and law enforcement should be accelerated.
Should this move produce concrete results, and with the appropriate political will it is difficult to imagine why not, then this most recent visit of Mr Key and several of his key ministers to Canberra will have been more than simply of symbolic value.
The rest of the visit seems largely to have fallen into this category with low key meetings and agreements mostly over defence issues.
High among these, as an exception, will have been the pressing subject of "cyber security".
The shutdown earlier this month of several leading United States websites, including that of the White House, and momentarily, at least, the FBI's, in response to the arrest of alleged large-scale copyright infringer Kim Dotcom here in this country, as well as two "anti-piracy" Bills before the US House of Representative and the Senate respectively, shows that the tools and techniques of large-scale hacking are now widely accessible.
They require only malevolent intent to be co-opted for the purposes of "cyber-terrorism" - which can grievously damage economic systems, or any of a number of civilian or military infrastructures.
Co-operation between the two governments and appropriate security agencies that enhances the capability of combating threats of this kind can only be a good thing.
