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Poll finds kiwis have the most positive attitude towards refugees in the world [not The Guardian's headline]
(www.theguardian.com)
"An international survey of almost 22,000 adults across 29 countries found British people had the third-most enthusiastic outlook towards refugees, just behind Spain and New Zealand."
Edit: Just found the actual report by Ipsos. We are #1, not #2. Fixed the title.
Edit 2: We're also the most likely to agree that refugees make a positive contribution to our country (70%). And here's the breakdown on the central question:
It's a complicated issue. I'm not at all in favour of punishing refugees and it's very unlikely a boat will make it here, but we really do want to discourage them from trying. The Coral and Tasman Seas are no joke. They would probably die.
Ah so rather than aligning with Australia, as they get more heavy handed on refugees we need to discourage them from seeing us as an option - not because we don't want them, but because they would die before they get here?
That's assuming they've got the best interests of the refugees at heart. I'm really not sure what their motivation is. It could be that they thought the previous maximum of four days was simply impractical for dealing with a situation like that. That seems to be their official line. It could just be Labour stoking fear to get some votes. Or they could have found out the opposition was going to stoke fear and decided to get ahead of the issue.
Migrants have had a few unsuccessful attempts at coming on a boat to NZ, with one disappearing in 2019 without a trace. Until one actually makes it here, the laws are just a combination of sending a message and virtue signalling.
This kind of political posturing over "boat people" has been happening for decades, but it's usually the National Party taking the anti-refugee stance. Back in 2011, John Key was saying that it was "inevitable" that a ship of asylum seekers will reach New Zealand, while Helen Clark was saying she never worried about boats reaching NZ while she was PM - “In essence, boats which are basically trafficking asylum seekers don’t tend to be particularly seaworthy. Just the sheer logistics make it unlikely”. Clark took on 150 refugees from the Tampa in 2001 and National pushed back against that pretty hard. Can't find anything to back that up from back then, except this quote from then-Immigration Minister Lianne Dalziel:
I don't pretend to know what the best course of action is. If you accept refugees with open arms, you may well find more and more boats making the trip (and more and more in distress).
But when the boats inevitably come, what do you do? It would surely be unpopular to send them back to their possible death. But accepting them may encourage more to come.
I honestly don't know the answer, but trying to navigate something like that while also trying to please your voter base (which won't even know the whole story or may make a snap judgement based on a headline) does not sound like fun to me.