For at least some of the prisoners sent to the French penal colony of New Caledonia (right near Australia) this was true.
Though New Caledonia was otherwise a pretty brutal prison colony with prisoners loaned out to ranchers, or forced to work on infrastructure projects like the building of roads, tracks, fences, and filling in the swamps that the colonial city of Nouméa would be built upon, there was a particular group of prisoners who had a somewhat easier time of it. These were the communards; the political prisoners sent to the French penal colony of New Caledonia in 1872.
So not all of the some 3,000 communards had an easy life in New Caledonia. Some were in fact sentenced to the same hard labour as the other prisoners. New Caledonia had a relatively small labour pool and so convict labour was very important for the expansion of the colony and the clearance of land. As I mentioned earlier, convicts could be loaned out to work on the ranches and plantations that were trying to establish themselves during the first decades of colonization. And the colonial center; the port city of Nouméa was built upon convict labour; there were swamps to infill and hills to level before construction could really begin on the future colonial infrastructure. Most of the big leveling projects were completed by the time the communards arrived, but for those sentenced to hard labor, this is the sort of thing they would be doing. While New Caledonia was not a fun place to be a convict; at least it wasn't Guyana- the other French penal colony, more or less deemed too unsafe for convicts to be sent to because of the malarial, yellow fever infested jungles.
As for the communards not sentenced to hard labour; many were interned on the Isle de Pines just south of the main colony on the Grande Terre. The communards were not given a whole lot of supplies, so life was not exactly comfortable, but they were free to hunt, fish, lounge, and build up there own little colony on the island. Some even had their families come from France and join them in the penal colony. They tried to reestablish the ideals of the commune on the island and build little communities that governed themselves and engaged in political/historical discussion and debate. They started their own theatre to put on plays and even had their own newspaper. Clearly they had access to many luxuries that a normal convict in the penal colony could not have dreamed of; and a majority of them did receive amnesty in 1879 and were allowed to leave the penal colony.
Despite the fact that the life for communards on the Isle de Pines wasn't nearly as bad as those who had to do hard labour, don't think they wanted to be there. There were multiple escape attempts, at least one very successful and well publicized one. And though the French government wouldn't have minded getting some of the communards to stay on New Caledonia and help colonize/settle the island, very very few took them up on that offer.
If you want to read more about it...
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