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An Amnesty International demonstration outside the Beehive, 2015
An Amnesty International demonstration outside the Beehive, 2015

PoliticsMay 28, 2019

A short history of New Zealand’s racist refugee policy

An Amnesty International demonstration outside the Beehive, 2015
An Amnesty International demonstration outside the Beehive, 2015

PM Jacinda Ardern will soon have the chance to reverse policy that prioritises Asia-Pacific immigrants over refugees from Africa and the Middle East. But how did that policy get made in the first place?

After the attacks on Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, attention has returned to restrictions on African and Middle Eastern refugees which even our immigration minister describes as ‘discriminatory’. In the coming weeks prime minister Jacinda Ardern has the chance to reverse the policy. But doing so requires her to convince her coalition partner.

The Spinoff has previously covered this issue on at least five occasions. Now I give you the definitive timeline of how one of the most racist immigration policies of the last 30 years came to be.

1987

The Immigration Act (1987) moved the priorities for immigration away from any focus on the region and race of people to come to New Zealand. The focus was now on the skills of migrants and the match of an immigrant’s occupation to local needs, as well as a smaller family and humanitarian streams. In the same year a refugee quota was formalised at an annual intake of 800 people.

1992

Foreign affairs and trade minister Don McKinnon authorises the first Somali refugees to come to New Zealand. In previous years the refugee quota had primarily been for the last refugees of the Indochina wars. In the past the country had taken refugees from Africa, though these were ethnically South Asian people expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin. Over the coming years, New Zealand also welcomes significant numbers of refugees from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.

A South Sudan child has her arm measured to assess her malnourishment at a health centre in northern Bahr el Ghazal, South Sudan (Image: Simon Day/World Vision).

2007

Latin American refugees – almost exclusively Colombians in Ecuador – begin to be welcomed to New Zealand. Up to this point New Zealand had been resettling refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific in an even split.

2008

The election of the fifth National government sees a much publicised pivot to the Pacific for Murray McCully’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

2010

A proposal is floated to take either half or all of New Zealand’s refugee quota from Asia-Pacific. If the latter was chosen then Africans, Middle Easterners and Latin Americans would be completely excluded.

Officials are cautious and note, “these proposals go against the UNHCR’s global objective to only offer resettlement to refugees in the greatest need, the majority of which are currently in Africa and the Middle East”. The Ministry of Justice weighs in and are most opposed to the 100% focus on Asia-Pacific as it “could be seen to discriminate indirectly on the basis of ethnic or national origin”.

Sri Lankan asylum seekers hold signs and plead for assistance as they seek asylum to New Zealand onboard the MV Alicia, after refusing to leave their boat for four days on July 13, 2011 in Bintan, Sumatra, Indonesia. (Photo by Yuli Seperi/Getty Images)

2011

New Zealand will keep taking refugees from all four regions, but focus 50% of the quota on Asia-Pacific. Here’s when the policy is first announced: all refugees from Asia-Pacific and Latin America will be eligible, but African and Middle Eastern refugees must have family-links to New Zealand to be welcome.

These policies lead to a two-pronged cut to African and Middle Eastern refugee intakes. First, the total numbers are cut from around a third of the intake to 15% and 17% respectively. Second, as they will find out when they try to implement this policy, the family-link proves ‘overly restrictive’. In plain English: the places can’t be filled.

2012

Policy that had once been framed as possibly discriminatory has gone through the wash and is now presented as “opportunities for family reunification for onshore African and Middle Eastern refugee communities”.

In the first year of the family-link policy, only a quarter of African places are filled. The other places are reallocated to Asia-Pacific. Overall, three-quarters of all refugees come from Asia-Pacific (mostly from Myanmar) in the year.

2014

As New Zealand tries to get support from African countries for our UN security council bid, I publish criticism of how these restrictions may harm our international reputation. In what was a long term trend before the Christchurch mosque attacks, the issue proves too complicated for most media outlets.

2015

Campaigning around the refugee crisis leads National to allocate 750 emergency places to refugees from Syria, regardless of family links. These emergency places mean that the Middle East intake is much higher than the Africa intake. Subsequent family reunification and emergency quotas outside of the core intake mean that Middle East refugees remain around 10%-15% of total quota.

2016

This year sees the first official review of the refugee quota since 2013. While the total number of quota places grows from 750 to 1000, official advice to get rid of the family-link policy is ignored by cabinet.

2017

Trump’s Muslim ban leads to comparisons to New Zealand’s own quieter, but equally discriminatory policy. With the election approaching, Green Party co-leader James Shaw asks prime minister Bill English whether he is aware of the discrimination. English’s first reply is that we are taking Syrians. Shaw repeats the question with the focus on Muslim refugees and English says “No, I am not aware of that”.

Though the Greens campaign on removing the restrictions, the issue does not feature in coalition or confidence and supply agreements for the new government

2018

The new government is established, and while it takes almost a year for Labour to negotiate and announce their policy of a doubled quota through cabinet, the restrictions on African and Middle Eastern refugees remain.

World Vision focuses on South Sudan for their annual appeal and extend this to advocating for a fair quota. Disappointed that only 12 refugees have been resettled from South Sudan since 2011, Clench Enoka meets with the immigration minister to push for the restrictions to end.

2019

The terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch bring moments of unity and questions around other racial prejudice in New Zealand. Speaking to more than ten thousand at the Basin Reserve in Wellington, Gayaal Iddamalgoda calls “upon the government to immediately remove the restriction, the effective ban, on Middle Eastern and African refugees based on bogus security concerns.”

TODAY

Behind the scenes, sources indicate a split. The Greens actively oppose the restrictions – it was in their 2017 policy – and New Zealand First seems to support it, while Labour and Jacinda Ardern await the imminent cabinet paper on the refugee quota.

In the coming weeks Ardern has a choice to make. She can stand up for the kind of unity and inclusiveness that she spoke of so well after the mosque attacks in Christchurch. Or she can defer to the lethargic racism of a decade-long policy that considers a continent and a half to be irredeemably risky. It is a simple question, but one which troubles our age: do all people still count as human?

Murdoch Stephens is a lecturer, publisher and advocate. For a more detailed overview of the family-link debacle see his article in Policy Quarterly.

Keep going!
Simon Bridges needs a new car to chase. Photo: Kerry Marshall/Getty Images
Simon Bridges needs a new car to chase. Photo: Kerry Marshall/Getty Images

PoliticsMay 28, 2019

The National Party needs a new Big Bad

Simon Bridges needs a new car to chase. Photo: Kerry Marshall/Getty Images
Simon Bridges needs a new car to chase. Photo: Kerry Marshall/Getty Images

With a capital gains tax off the political agenda, the opposition needs to find the government’s achilles heel. Liam Hehir goes looking through the options.

This is the week of the “wellbeing” budget. Animating this bold vision for our future is an ironclad certainty that the one thing New Zealanders really need to be happy is a new framework of corporate jargon to tell them if they are happy or miserable. So instead of focusing on jobs, economic growth and taxes, the government will also communicate its priorities in terms of things like social connectedness, civic engagement and governance, cultural identity and time use.

How will National respond to this? Well, apart from the required scrutiny of the initiative during budget week, it probably won’t really continue to join battle with the concept publicly. Whether Labour expects it to or or not, an initiative built around a new set of bureaucratic measures is just not going to win votes. Consequently, there’s just not really going to be a lot of mileage gained in continuing to attack the concept.

Which leaves National at a bit of a loose end in terms of targeting its oppositional efforts.

The Capital Gains Tax was meant to be the Big Bad

For National, the capital gains tax was a bit like the Night King in Game of Thrones. Strongly supported by a horde of government ultras in the press and social media, the proposal was a menace to rally against in opposition. It was an easily understandable but unpopular policy and, from the day Jacinda Ardern became prime minister, it really did look like it was going to be the great clash of the 2020 election.

But instead of being the climax of the story, the capital gains tax was killed off halfway through. The prime minister’s decree that there would never be a CGT on her watch was like a Valyrian-steel dagger to the abdomen of the tax. And the dramatic narrative of the season (er, electoral cycle).

The gloating of National’s opponents is justified

Perspective can be an interesting thing. You’d think, for example, that Sir Michael Cullen would have little positive to remark about the Labour-led government rejecting the CGT recommendations he was lobbying for. And yet on the day the announcement was made, Cullen crowed about the manner in which Ardern’s rejection had “shot the horse out from underneath the National Party”.

Greens Co-Leader James Shaw seemed to take a similar line. He had, of course, previously suggested that the government should not be re-elected if it fails to enact a capital gains tax. Following cabinet’s decision, he told the NBR that National was left needing “another car to chase”.

It would be unsporting to deny tax enthusiasts their consolations at this difficult time. It would also be foolish to dismiss their observations of trouble for National. They are quite accurate.

By putting the unpopular CGT monster to the sword, Jacinda Ardern has denied National the chance to slay it in a general election. This has been the principal quandary facing the prime minister for some time. By making something akin to a “Shermanesque” statement on the question, it is no longer much of a vulnerability.

National’s own silver lining is that the dispositive nature of Ardern’s announcement may help the opposition in one key way. As I wrote back in February, the worst thing that could happen to National would be for Peters to become the one thing standing between voters and a CGT. By ruling it out as long as she is prime minister, Ardern may have limited that effect.

So National should tread carefully. If it casts too much doubt on the prime minister’s sincerity, it might just revivify the Winston-as-saviour notion that would be so deadly to its 2020 chances. It would be better for the party to treat as dead what is, by now, well and truly dead.

Finding a new issue soon is essential for National

Assuming that arguing about complex cobweb graphs isn’t going to be much of a rallying cry, where can National go to take the fight to the government now? What will be the Cersei Lannister to take us home?

Effective oppositions focus on issues that hit a government along its fault lines. They exploit tension between the electability and base-pleasing concerns of their opponents. And, in doing this, they also seek to heighten the internal contradictions within the coalition arrangements themselves.

Opposition to the target issue must also be genuine. The country’s interest is not served by phoney resistance. It would be a mistake and a disservice to New Zealand for National to replicate Labour’s mistakes over the TPP.

Labour reforms could be a happy hunting ground

Taking all that into account, and looking at the government’s agenda, it seems q promising target for National will be the so-called “Fair Pay Agreements” that would set national minimum pay and other conditions for employment in given sectors. The working group set up by the government to look into the matter has suggested that such agreements should be triggered if as few as 1,000 people – or 10% of the workforce – in a given field request one.

It is likely that such agreements would impact the provincial economy more than its the metropolitan counterpart. Lower wage bills (set against a background of lower living costs) are the nature of business outside the few cities swollen by the cash of mega-firms and government. If a one-size-fits-all approach to pay is taken then, since there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to price and profit, business in the provinces will suffer disproportionately.

Unions could be a useful foil for National

Moreover, Fair Pay Agreements could be characterised as a kind of de facto compulsory unionism. That’s because the process of concluding a collective requirement will inevitably involve negotiations with the representatives of organised labour. And those unions will, presumably, be paid well for their trouble in representing the interests of workers who may or may not have much interest in being their members.

In fact, the vast majority of workers have opted against union membership. There are all sorts of reasons as to why that has happened, of course. Principled conservatives who care about social cohesion should be wary about gloating too loudly over the decline of a key institution of civil society.

Nevertheless, a natural result of weaker unions is that people don’t generally have a high degree of confidence in them. UMR, which polls for the Labour Party, found unions the second least trusted institution in its “Mood of the Nation” in 2016 (this being the last year to which I could find reference online). Apparently, they lagged behind big business, churches and even banks and beat only the media in the trust stakes.

It’s worth noting here that there is no reason to assume that popular confidence ratings for such things are really fair or reflective of more than stereotypes. Nevertheless, they are a reality.

In polls around the world, “small business”, on the other hand, usually gets very good approval ratings. And New Zealand is nothing if not a country of small businesses. Thirty percent of employees work in the small and medium-sized enterprises that would be most prejudiced by central control of employment negotiations. These firms are a crucial constituency that National needs but sometimes takes for granted.

Fair Pay Agreements are an obvious wedge for the coalition

Finally, Fair Pay Agreements are likely to divide the parties in government. While Labour has a strong interest in promoting the role of unions (and some of them enjoy corporate membership of the party itself) the same cannot be said for NZ First. While that party has an interventionist orientation, it tends to be more of the Muldoonist variety. Winston Peters might not be overtly anti-union, but his overall constituency has more sympathy than Labour’s for the smaller, more provincial firms that will struggle with the reforms.

That, and not the budget, is the natural place to go

In a way, Labour has given National something of a gift. By eschewing easily-digestible, bite-sized announcements in the budget this year, the government has given the opposition some amount of room to set the agenda. And given that Fair Pay Agreements check all the right boxes (without even looking at the amount of money that can be raised in opposition to them) I’d be willing to bet that we will hear a lot from National on this front in the year to come.

 

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