by Michael Bassett (author of 15 history books and cabinet minister in the 4th Labour government)
It was Prime Minister Helen Clark who started the practice of making apologies to groups who could be nursing grievances and who might think more kindly of her government if she apologized for past government actions. The Chinese settlers who stayed on after the Gold Rushes in the 1860s received an apology for the clear insults visited upon them in the late Nineteenth Century when immigration rules prevented family from joining them. Then Clark apologized for New Zealand’s role in the suppression of the Mau in December 1929 when, as the League of Nations mandated country to oversee Samoa, our police force helped to suppress an uprising in which several Samoans, and one Kiwi police officer were killed.
Jacinda Ardern, as we all know, does symbolic gestures very well and her hugely over-staffed office is always on the lookout for some possibility where their boss can be seen to “be kind”.
Someone has fed them a twisted version of the dawn raids that saw many Pacific Islanders overstay their visas and get rounded up in the mid 1970s and sent home. Those islanders most affected were Samoans, Tongans and Fijians. Cook Islanders, Niueans and Tokelauans had been New Zealand citizens since Dick Seddon’s day. They needed no visas and consequently were never overstayers. None was deported.
During the 1960s the number of Pacific Islanders coming to New Zealand gathered speed because there was abundant seasonal work and employment opportunities in factories. Visas were granted with time limits, but until 1974 when the New Zealand economy turned downwards, the Immigration authorities were slow to police them. As local unemployment rose, Fraser Colman, Norman Kirk’s Minister of Immigration and his officers started checking visas. By this time there was a considerable number of overstayers. Many had come from Europe as well. Pacific Islanders were more easily found: they were concentrated in Ponsonby, Grey Lynn, Newton, Arch Hill and Parnell where they stayed with friends and relatives. European and North American overstayers were dispersed across the city and around the country, and consequently much harder to track down. Immigration officers, not surprisingly, directed their initial efforts where they were likely to find multiple overstayers. Officers began turning up at dawn to check visas. They detained overstayers, sending them back to the islands, to Europe or North America. Samoans and Tongans with time-limited visas, were the ones who felt the brunt of the raids. The whole exercise was nothing more than overdue enforcement of the immigration rules. The process picked up speed under Robert Muldoon’s government after 1975. By the end of the decade, most people on temporary visas knew to keep a careful eye on their expiry dates.
At the time of the Dawn Raids as they became known, many people were critical of the suddenness of the crackdown, and some argued that Pasifika seemed to be being unfairly targeted. Interestingly, when searching for opportunities to apologise, Helen Clark’s government didn’t identify the Dawn Raids. But is the story as credible as Jacinda and her associate, Aupito William Sio, claim? Is a formal and unreserved apology warranted? Now the Dawn Raids are portrayed as examples of “racism” for which the present Prime Minister, who hadn’t been born at the time, should apologise.
Pasifika in general were not deported. Those who were New Zealand citizens were always entitled to stay. And they did. Those who came as immigrants and became New Zealand citizens also stayed. What the Prime Minister and most of the media overlook is that all the people who were deported from New Zealand as a result of the Dawn Raids had broken the rules under which they had been admitted to New Zealand. All of them, Pacific Islanders and Europeans, who overstayed their visa entitlement, knew they were breaking the law and risked some kind of enforcement action. Unfortunately, Jacinda’s government is always reluctant to preach personal responsibility for breaking the law. If something goes wrong, someone else, or a system of some kind, is at fault. Even when the law was being enforced by an earlier Labour government led by Norman Kirk whom the Prime Minister has told us she admires.
Raids are still going on against overstayers including Samoans. More than 200 raids this year. This is all absolute BS.
Distraction, photo op and virtue signalling all for the cause of trying to make herself more popular. Well it’s not working is it Jack!
https://odysee.com/@crackerwv:0/Y2Mate.is—Tranny-Get-Your-Gun-Kek-jg_USno-720p-1624045473180:0?
Suppose if people overstay they are really just trying to get into NZ through the back door. They need to be returned at their own expense and join the queue and be vetted accordingly. They are, like it or not, illegal migrants.
Meanwhile Cindys own dawn raids are ripping the country apart and there isnt any slow down. Eventually most of the population will wake up to what she has done and she will be gone by lunchtime.
Nobody is arguing that overstayers should not be deported, but as Michael says some people argued that Pasifika seemed to be unfairly targeted. What evidence supports or refutes that they were targeted over the majority of overstayers who were mostly from Europe or North America?
Michael offers the reason – that those from the Pacific islands were “more easily found” so it was not surprising that this is where immigration officers directed their initial efforts. I suspect that this was not their initial efforts but their only efforts and very few Americans or Europeans overstayers experienced dawn raids personally. If the Immigration department claimed that they were unable to trace American or European overstayers, I have yet to see that evidence.
That is what the apology is for.
It’s interesting that I have met 3 Europeans that were kicked out due to expired visas and none of them know each other. But I am from Europe and not the Pacific. I also don’t know any people of the Pacific kicked out for expired visas.
Ironic and cynical how she used an apology for the reaction to law breakers right before she mandates to these very islands an experimental medical procedure that is demonstrably unsafe and of dubious effectiveness. Mandates with house arrest and threats of 6 months imprisonment. Makes any dawn raid look like a celebratory party