If, as still seems to be on the cards, Bill Shorten’s Labor slide into government in just over a weeks’ time, New Zealanders will need to brace themselves for the fallout. Not least, Jacinda Ardern is going to have to start worrying about what she’s going to do when she’s asked to actually make good her high-falutin’ rhetoric on refugees. Quote:
Launching the government’s current suite of border protection policies in the marginal seat of Herbert, [Home Affairs Minister Peter] Dutton…questioned which third-country deals a future Shorten government would broker to resettle refugees on Manus Island and Nauru.
“We have been able to broker an arrangement with the United States. The US was very clear, both President (Barack) Obama and President (Donald) Trump made it very clear to us that that deal would only apply to those people currently on Manus and Nauru,” Mr Dutton said.
“So the first boat with 40 or 50 people, half of whom will be children, the first boat that arrives under Labor, not one of those people will be eligible to go to the United States. Now the US deal was for up to 1200 people but there are some people that the United States has said that they will not accept.” End of quote.
A decade after the last Labor government threw open Australia’s borders to a wave of people-smuggled illegal arrivals, the Coalition has almost succeeded in emptying out the full-to-bursting camps that Labor left behind. The few remaining dregs, unwanted by either Australia or the US, will almost certainly have plenty of new company, should Labor be elected.
The question is: where will they all go? Quote:
“Under Mr Shorten’s plan those people will come to Australia or they go to New Zealand. It will be very interesting to see under a Shorten government whether or not (NZ prime minister) Jacinda Ardern will take people with questionable backgrounds. Will the New Zealand government take people referred to them by the Australian government and will they reject anyone?”
Mr Dutton warned against people assuming the people smuggling trade had been solved.Mr Dutton warned against people assuming the people smuggling trade had been solved…“This is an enduring problem. It is an enduring threat,” he said. End of quote.
Jacinda Ardern might have made a few excitable journalists swoon with her right-on posturing about refugees, but the fact remains that New Zealand does bugger-all, in the grand scheme of the refugee issue. Its per-capita intake of registered refugees is a meagre one-fifth of Australia’s. Its intake of asylum seekers is even more miniscule, despite Ardern’s frequent-flyer photo-ops.
But if Shorten is elected and the boats start chugging across the Timor Sea again (which is a when, not an if), Ardern is almost certainly going to be asked to put New Zealand’s money where her mouth is. Quote:
“People smugglers are marketing New Zealand at this point and the Labor Party refuses to accept that,” he said.
“Bill Shorten doesn’t even understand … that as a New Zealand citizen you have the ability to come to Australia and get a visa on arrival. No other country in the world has that. So, if you want a backdoor way to get to Australia, you go to New Zealand.” End of quote.
theaustralian
New Zealanders face the prospect of not only having to ramp up their own refugee intake, but the high likelihood of clampdowns on the current relative ease of access between our two countries, in order to stop country-shopping illegals using New Zealand as a jumping-off point.