What will we do when boat people reach NZ?

Tuesday, June 16th, 2015

Last week 65 boat people from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were intercepted by the Australian navy off eastern Indonesia.

They were heading For New Zealand.

In reply to their request for asylum in New Zealand, they have been advised to contact United Nations officials in Australia.

Since at least 2010 the Prime Minister John Key has been warning that the risk of refugees arriving by boat in his country is increasing.

What will happen when boat people actually reach New Zealand?

This week Key refused to say categoricallymthat New Zealand would not pay people traffickers to take asylum seekers back to another country.

One columnist in the New Zealand Herald says Key had little choice but to put some distance between himself and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s handling of the question of whether Australian authorities paid crew members to return boat people to Indonesia.

Pope Francis has expressed serious concern about the plight of the boat people in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman sea in Southeast Asia.

Last year Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand made a submission about legislation aimed at the possible arrival of boat people in New Zealand when it was at the select committee stage.

In its submission Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand said, “mandatory detention of refugees in Australia has been an extremely expensive way to ruin human lives.”

“It should not be even considered for New Zealand.”

“Australia tries to send boats of asylum seekers back from where they came and when it can’t, puts their occupants in detention camps.”

Key says New Zealand doesn’t have a hard-and-fast policy concerning boat migrants.

“There’s no guarantee we’d bring them ashore, though.”

“That’s not absolute guarantee, it’s a bit like a decision tree,” says Key.

“At varying different points we have decisions ministers have to make.”

Immigration minister Michael Woodhouse said should a vessel reach New Zealand they would collect and process asylum seekers at the Mangere refugee centre.

But he said he was not ruling out other options.

Labour Party leader Andrew Little believes the chance of boat people getting to New Zealand is “so remote as to be negligible.”

Green Party immigration spokesperson Denise Roche agreed that the Government was inventing a bogeyman.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters also thought the arrival of asylum seekers improbable.

Peters said New Zealand could look at increasing its refugee quota from 750 people a year to 1000, but said that could not be done while immigration was at its current level.

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