New Zealand will receive 150 refugees held offshore by Australia, nine years after offer was made
New Zealand will receive up to 150 refugees a year from an Australian offshore detention facility on Nauru, more than nine years after the offer to take them was first made.
Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi and Australia Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews jointly announced that New Zealand would accept up to 150 refugees a year, for three years, on Thursday afternoon.
The deal was first struck by former prime ministers John Key and Julia Gillard in 2012, at a time when the Government wanted to contribute to Australia’s handling of the asylum seekers who travelled by boat to Australia’s shores.
“New Zealand is very pleased that Australia has taken up the offer,” Faafoi said, in a statement.
“New Zealand has a long and proud history of refugee resettlement and this arrangement is another example of how we are fulfilling our humanitarian international commitment.
“We are pleased to be able to provide resettlement outcomes for refugees who would otherwise have continued to face uncertain futures.”
9 years after making the offer, Australia wants to take us up on it do they?
The same country that continues to degrade our citizens in their country by refusing them the same rights we give their citizens here?
The same country that forces 501s back into our country to start a gang war?
The same country that continues to treat immigration as some sort of political toy and continues to dehumanise people?
We offered to take the refugees they abuse in the hope that it might change things in Australia, 10 years after the offer’s been made they want to take us up on it?
Why should we help Australia off the hook they made and sharpened?
Why allow such a racist country who treats our citizens with contempt and is currently fuelling our gang war by forced renditions of their criminals to dump their refugee problem here on us?
The offer made in good faith 9 years ago was in the hope of triggering some level of shame in the Australians so that they would stop treating people like this, to now try and use it after they’ve spent the last decade getting worse is an audacity too far.
We are mugs for caving into this!
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It’s got to said.
Is our government going to treat these people with the same cold indifference as its own, dump them into motels? Honestly, what is here for them to go to? The land of severe unaffordability?
And how damaged will they be after nearly a decade in internment camps?
You’re right. Resettlement comes with obligations.
As for the land of severe unaffordability, yes, you have to wonder where they’ll be sent. Pepper-potting I believe, spread far and wide. It’s never really worked in the past with birds of a feather eventually seeking the comfort of their own kind in the big cities. It is as much about culture (the cultures new refugees bring) as opportunity. Opportunities for accessible and quality English language and literacy education, to use the skills and knowledge they already have, to retrain , to do any kind of work, to become a contributing and productive member of society. It’s all about becoming independent. Ask the Tampa refugees. Any for that matter.
It won’t be easy. I don’t have the data but in the past it was the case that even after 10 years or so a good many UN-approved refugees were still receiving considerable social welfare. At the heart of it all, the language and literacy barrier, low skill-levels, at times less than accommodating social attitudes, and worst of all, entry-level employment that barely (if at all) pays a living wage. Maybe it’s cheaper to live in Palmy or Invercargill. But wherever no-one will be buying a house any time soon.
Damaged? Too right. Bitter? Maybe not. It’s the new start many dreamed of, for themselves for their kids. Australia turned out to be a nightmare. NZ is a fresh start.
Maybe you should read this.
http://www.immigration.govt.nz/audiences/supporting-refugees-and-asylum-seekers/experiences-of-refugees-in-new-zealand
I’m sure the refugees will be less damaged than someone who spent ten years in a New Zealand 6 sqm prision cell.
Yes. In the five years to 2020, there were 86 asylum seekers held in Corrections facilities for time periods between one to 1177 days.
The Amnesty report stated New Zealand’s policies from 2015-2020 “have put refugees and asylum seekers at risk, and in some cases constitute human rights violations”.
https://www.1news.co.nz/2021/07/22/nz-to-review-controversial-asylum-seeker-prison-policy/
“One man spent 1178 days – more than three years – in Waikeria Prison.” https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2021/05/118-asylum-seekers-have-been-locked-up-in-new-zealand-prisons-with-criminals.html
In 2014, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention made a 15-day visit to Aotearoa New Zealand. In their report presented to the Human Rights Council in 2015, they highlighted their concern that Aotearoa New Zealand “is using the prison system to detain irregular migrants and asylum seekers, including Waikeria Prison, Arohata Prison for Women and Mt. Eden Corrections Facility. These prisons, and police stations, do not provide separate facilities for immigrants in an irregular situation or asylum seekers.” https://reliefweb.int/report/new-zealand/please-take-me-safe-place-imprisonment-asylum-seekers-aotearoa-new-zealand
Alarming findings from our new report highlight that from 2015-2020, 86 people seeking asylum have been locked in police cells and prisons around the country while they await the outcome of their refugee claim, despite the United Nations warning that it should not take place. https://www.amnesty.org.nz/people-seeking-asylum-should-be-welcomed-not-imprisoned
Showcases Immigration NZ, cd. But yes, there is the will if not the funding to achieve the stated outcomes.
What is often more revealing is the lived experience. Far too little of that reported.
https://www.massey.ac.nz/about-massey/news/article.cfm?mnarticle_uuid=900747AA-4C30-45C1-AD6F-BBC1DEC31CF2
“For some, however, the moment of belonging has not come. They feel tolerated, but not accepted, and struggle with subtle racism… New Zealanders could do more to welcome newcomers simply by reaching out with respect and interest’.
Bonanza for those organisations making money off NZ’s social bonds high needs people.
Weird that in a time of crisis for our own citizens, our government is more interested in refugees from OZ who will need extreme levels of care, that NZ citizens fail to receive as there is no support.
The woke and capitalists get hundreds of millions to help people in NZ and it seems to disappear up their arses before it helps anyone. Thus millions spent and only a handful of people are often helped. The government don’t learn from it and do it again.
Governments need to investigate more “WHY’ refugees are leaving their countries and change policy to stop enabling dictators and predatory capitalists to take over their countries natural assets like water and land.
They also need to start rejecting those trying to migrate for more economic opportunities to the true refugees who flee due to war or famine/flood.
And start prosecuting people traffickers making money out of selling tickets in these rusty boats and refrigerated trucks.
Guess all too hard, so they will just go for a headline of 150 refugees coming to NZ, while increasingly they are less welcome as migration is becoming a Ponzi industry in NZ. The tale of how the woke fought to keep Samsudeen in NZ and the amount of woke care and legal help (government funded) he received is somber reading when we have NZ kids growing up in cars and motels now.
The world is full of people in need, why do the woke want to help people come and stay in NZ who seek to harm others in NZ and feel they don’t have to be accountable in NZ for those whose standard of living is falling?
Another ComCom enquiry, another get out of jail free card given to supermarkets and construction companies, wonder why it is so much cheaper to live in OZ? Our industry is so bloated it can’t even make jib and food is produced and sold by primary producers in NZ for $2 somehow costs $13 in our supermarkets.
Austere housing. or as one of Dickems’ novels Bleak House.
Because it looks good for the UN.
We took a German or Afrikaner like you didn’t we?
It should be a citizen requirement to denounce Nuremberg.NZ https://nuremberg.nz/.
Then we could deport you back to your place of origin to carry on your support for an alt-right site that threatens to execute New Zealanders, Maori and Polynesian leaders, health experts, politicians and media.
Still haven’t seen you denounce https://nuremberg.nz/ yet Sour Unkraut?
Yes or no?
Born here so your argument falls flat.
Weasel.
Just denounce the site.
RWP.
Not sure about Sour Kraut but I’m more than happy to denounce Nuremberg.NZ if that is what we are doing.
Sour Kraut won’t do it, he loves that site and has probably voted women, Maori and Polynesian leaders up the execution list. Sour Kraut won’t denounce the site because he is an alt-right shill. Keeps avoiding. Typical rwp.
Thanks for having a moral spine James, unlike Sour Kraut.
Hahaha. It will look good on the CV for the job interview in May/June
Our mental health services are so well funded and staffed , it seems the least we can do …
In defense of Australia it has one of the best resettlement programmes for refugees around. Legal UN approved refugees that is. It’s a wrap-around system inclusive of 5 years free (state funded) language and literacy education. That’s what NZ doesn’t have. Here its all ad hoc, as if good intentions were all that mattered.
But hail and brimstone for those who cross the seas on flimsy boats from Indonesia. No welcome mat for those folk.
Well that was pretty fast for Faafoi don’t you reckon?
He’s made an ackshull decision!
Although it took 9 years, not entirely his doing or on his watch.
Hold on a minute. Scratch that. It took him 4yrs to get around to it and to this stage. False Alarm!
He really, really, really, really, really doesn’t want his job as Minister of Not Making A Fucking Decision In A Timely Manner For Broadcasting and Immigration!
You are forgetting Justice as well!
Unlike the Farrer underwear sniffers above, sometimes just doing the decent thing is enough.
However I agree with Bomber in this case 100%. Australians generally are incorrigible racists and shame us all with their treatment of refugees and asylum seekers.
“Australians in general are incorrigible racists”
Just have a wee think there Tiger Mountain.
Lucky they built all those affordable houses using Thatcher and Globalist ideologies… Doh!
“The cost of emergency motels has risen from just $6 million in the final quarter of 2017 to $19 million in 2018. That grew again to $48 million the next year and $82 million in 2020.
Then, in the past three months of last year, costs rose to $109 million – an increase of about $27 million in just a year. Overall in 2021, the cost was in excess of $350 million.”
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2022/03/government-smashes-own-record-for-amount-spent-on-emergency-housing-as-it-opens-hub-to-help-rotorua-s-homeless.html
Are they putting the refugees in emergency housing motels, or do refugees from OZ get a new 3 bed warm dry house at great expense from a ‘social provider; and go to the front of the housing queue?
Won’t there be oodles of housing? Freed up by the tens of thousands leaving because this is the worst country in the world with the worst government in the world with the least freedom in the world.
150 more NZ kids living in a motel again this year thanks to the worldwide woke agenda. This makes me sick.
how does ‘woke’ put families in motels? if you mean the utter failure of the neo-lib capitalist free market to provide housing then you have something ex
When I think of the various refugee groups(European Jews,Poles, Hungarians, Vietnamese,Cambodians, Yugoslavs) that have settled here and whose children are now honest citizens I believe these people will be more use( long term) than the ‘investors’ who come to buy land, water and houses and exploit us.
They will certainly be better than the retired Afrikaaner couple I met yesterday who asked me where in the train they could get better seats(‘ away from those people’).
Two wrongs do not make one right. We should do the decent thing.
stevie I think you are quoting particular examples while talking about a general problem. That doesn’t mean that it is irrelevant it just does not assess the whole problem which will be ongoing ans it the transfer too late really – the Oz should have taken us up when we originally suggested it but they are too busy doing other things while life passes them by. Actually that’s very similar to our pollies’ usual direction – they probably get on quite well.
Of course it is cynical but ….. did the someone yank the chain and tell the Aussies to tidy the patch, then take in blue eyed Ukrainian refugees to so as to look like a benevolent Russian kicking supportive state?
a list of actual street adresses where the minister proposes to house them, if he hasn’t got one he’s incompetent or a liar….I’m personally not against refugees I’m against not housing them…build up excess capacity FIRST as usual NZ virtue signalling is an arse about face policy.
also small point are we talking a 150 individuals with families who will join them? or 150 actual individual refugees with no dependants….makes a big difference in housing options.
Yes we are. Australia treats NZer’s like crap … yet when they come here we ‘bend over’ to accommodate them. Why do we continue to do this? Are we afraid of what they might do if we showed any spine?
Kiwi’s in Australia are second class citizens (e.g. not eligible for any welfare or various other supports open to Australians and other immigrants, just not Kiwi’s) – we need to impose exactly the same rules on them as they do us – then watch the squealing!
They might have been our mates back in a number of wars last century, but we need to wake up.
We need to start deporting Australians for their ‘character flaws’ as soon as possible. They need to understand how their policy impacts others.
I feel sorry for the people on Manus Island, but from NZs point of view it is foolish.
The Australians will think we are mugs. The cost to house one of their citizens in max security for his atrocities (we have no choice), and then the 501’s…….Australia laughing all the way to the bank
There must be more to this on the Australian side. Wasn’t the Australian reluctance that these refugees come here, become citizens, and then pop off back to Australia? A sort of back door way of ultimately getting into Australia.
I’m glad that the refugees are getting out of where they’re at. And I dont mean to come across as callous as these people desperately need help.
But sending them here, at this time. NZ cant feed, house and tend to the mental health of its own citizens and we are going to let people who have been locked up for 9 years and suffered ongoing abuse to come. 450 of them but I guess its more virtue signalling to take the least culturally cohesive and most abused so we cant be criticised for not letting in any Ukraineans?
Aussies get the relatively trauma free ‘people like us’ and we get the too hard basket.
As Martyn would say, Jesus wept.
I agree Pippi we cannot house the unhoused in NZ right now with waiting lists out the whazoo. Also our mentally unwell citizens cannot get the wrap around care they need and have their own lack of accommodation at crisis point too. Where on earth are these refugees going to be housed, as much as the poor sods deserve some compassion they are in for some cold comfort here. As you and Martyn would, Jesus wept.
@ MB.
You ask;
“Why are we allowing Australia off the hook for their own racist refugee policy?”
We’re allowing the Australians off with far more than that. We’re allowing the Australian banks to steal $6 billion in net profits from AO/NZ annually when we have mounting debts, diminishing social health and welfare and the Australians our primary industry competitors to boot. The *Australians have us over a barrel and they’re fucking us without the kissing and it’s because our Good Ol’ Boys sold us out to them via CER. Aye boys?
While we believe CER was all about trade and commercial opportunities for the betterment of us all, they, instead choked us down and keep us there. Gee thanks pig muldoon, you dead fucker.
CER.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closer_Economic_Relations
“We are mugs for caving into this!”
Yes. Yes, we are.
Solution.
Rescind the ability for Australian owned banks to trade here then return that $6 billion dollars back into our communities starting with trickle-up at impoverished ground zero.
A royal commission of inquiry into behind the scenes deals struck during that implementation of CER and arrest then imprison as necessary. Fuck it! I don’t care if we have to dig the crooked dead bastards up, lets just do it!?
* Australians. I love you guys. It’s not your fault that, like us, you’re bullied into acquiescing to a shit neoliberal-capitalist doctrine of subservience and slavery. It’s those riche little political fleas who are the scum on the pond water who need the bleaching.
We try to put on a good front as the good guys hard done by but the Australians know we are on-legged and wobbly at that. I’m thinking that we might pick up some ideas from the Harry Potter movies. He was the smaller boy looking owlishly through his glasses. There are some lessons in how to cope with larger bullies like Australia. He managed to win with various devices and an owl to help. We should be so fleet-footed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWwUgAkkAVQ
3 Hidden Messages About Standing Up To Bullies In Harry Potter