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Last week, Wellingtonian Murdoch Stephens launched the Doing Our Bit Campaign, aimed at convincing New Zealanders of the need to double our refugee quota from the current 750 to 1500.
“Despite being a small country in the middle of the South Pacific, New Zealand prides itself on being hospitable. We are friendly to overseas visitors and we see ourselves as punching above our weight in international affairs,” says Stephens.
“However, in terms of accepting refugees New Zealand is clearly not doing our share.”
Australia’s refugee quota for the coming year is 20,000 while New Zealand’s is 750. Australia takes more than five times as many resettlement refugees as New Zealand per capita. Most other countries also exceed New Zealand, but accept their refugees as asylum seekers rather than through the UNHCR resettlement programme.
Murdoch told Chris Laidlaw on National Radio about how stumbling across a stash of 1000 photos of Afghan refugees in an abandoned detention centre in Iran led him to the conclusion that New Zealand wasn’t doing its bit.
The photographs are part of a forthcoming exhibition at Pataka in Porirua.
The New Zealand Catholic Bishops nominated last Sunday as A Day of Prayer for Refugees and Migrants.
Caritas Aotearoa/New Zealand took the opportunity to remind Catholics that “more than 10 million people are refugees worldwide.”
“More than twice as many – 27.5 million people – live as Internally Displaced People. Many fled homes for similar reasons to refugees, but have not crossed an international border.”
“New Zealand accepts 750 refugees each year for resettlement from the places where they first sought asylum. We also accept a very small number of asylum seekers each year. Both quota refugees and asylum seekers are refugees under the Refugee Convention.”
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News category: New Zealand.
