Closing door on forlorn line of asylum-seekers

Is New Zealand a soft touch for refugees and people smugglers? ANDREW LAXON'S investigations show that times are changing.

When the Australian Government turned away 460 boat people huddled on board the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa last year, the chorus of disapproval was heard around the world.

Australia - already a victim of international criticism for keeping asylum-seekers in remote detention centres - was threatened with United Nations action by an outraged Norway.

Media coverage throughout most of Europe and North America condemned the hardline decision and Asian countries hinted at racism and a return to the infamous "White Australia" policy of early last century.

New Zealand's offer to take 131 Tampa refugees last August was generally regarded as a public relations victory, both domestically and on the international stage.

The gesture appeared humane and generous. It also seemed to reveal a sharp contrast between Australia's fortress approach to refugees and New Zealand's more tolerant attitudes.

One Australian woman, Sally Cooper, summed up the mood of many liberals, here and across the Tasman. "I used to be proud to be an Australian," she wrote in a letter to the Herald. "Now I am ashamed and embarrassed. Thank you, New Zealand, for showing the compassion that our Government does not seem to have."

But there were many dissenting voices. Australian Prime Minister John Howard saved the election through his tough stance on the Tampa, which his Labor rivals did not dare to challenge directly.

In New Zealand, National and Act warned that this country would now look like a soft target for would-be refugees.

Other Herald letter writers sympathised with the Australian Government, attacked the Tampa boat people for breaking the rules and marvelled at New Zealand's relaxed policies towards refugees.

One United States immigration consultant warned he had been approached by many new immigrants planning to seek refugee status in New Zealand because of what they described as the free medical care, excellent education and no pressure to work.

"It may be difficult for your Government to see, but all New Zealanders will pay dearly for your liberal policies in the future years; count on more and more immigrants flocking there to abuse the system, more tax dollars flowing to support them and decreased services for your citizens."

Nine months on from the Tampa row, this image of New Zealand as a kinder, gentler - and possibly more naive - home to the world's refugees than its transtasman neighbour lies shattered.

And the Government, still under pressure to clamp down on manipulation of the refugee system, has changed tack so abruptly that it faces accusations of copying Australia's policies by stealth.

Definitions are important in the refugee debate. To be judged a genuine refugee, a person has to fit United Nations rules. He must have a well-founded fear for his life or fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality or membership of a particular social group or for having a political opinion.

Refugees fall into two main categories. There are pre-approved cases through the United Nations. New Zealand takes 750 of these a year - the Tampa refugees were taken as part of this annual quota.

Then there are asylum-seekers, who arrive without passports or visas and seek refugee status, either at the border or once they have settled. They may or may not end up as approved refugees.

The Weekend Herald revealed last December that only one in five asylum-seekers turned out to be genuine refugees in fear of persecution.

The 1700 people who claimed asylum in 2000 cost taxpayers more than $50 million - about $30,000 each, including welfare assistance.

Immigration Minister Lianne Dalziel said then that abuse of the system was partly driven by long processing delays that had seen a three-year wait before an immigration officer even interviewed an applicant in the 1990s.

Four months later it emerged that 1786 of those rejected asylum-seekers were still in the country despite being refused residence.

National, Act and NZ First blamed the Government's "loose" refugee policy for allowing asylum-seekers in too easily in the first place.

Pressure was also coming from across the Tasman again. In January the Government tried to shrug off criticism from Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, who said he had been told that "a lot" of people smugglers were now talking about going to New Zealand rather than Australia, because of this country's more lenient policies.

Then last Saturday the Weekend Herald revealed that an organised people-smuggling ring had been working in New Zealand. Documents seized in the investigation showed the smugglers compared the merits of some countries over others. New Zealand was spoken of as having "free money" - apparently a reference to the welfare benefits available here (asylum-seekers can claim benefits if they can get a work permit).

In the face of all this criticism, the Government has been toughening up.

Until now the maximum penalty for people-smuggling has been three months' jail and a $5000 fine.

A new law, due to be passed within weeks, will make people-smuggling an offence punishable by 20 years in jail or up to $500,000 in fines. Employers who hire people without work permits will no longer be able to claim they did not know about their illegal status and could be fined up to $10,000. Fines for businesses that "knowingly" hire illegal migrants will jump from $5000 to $50,000.

Last week's Budget provided money to fingerprint all asylum-seekers who come forward to seek refugee status - not just those who claim immediately at the border. The move is intended to stop people claiming more than once under different names.

The Budget also paid for an advance passenger processing system already used in Australia. It allows immigration officials here to see the travel documents of all passengers before they board planes to New Zealand.

Officials can either have suspect passengers removed from a flight or be ready to interview them as soon as they arrive.

Dalziel regards this as the front-line defence New Zealand has been looking for. She also predicts it will speed up processing times for other passengers.

Predictably, Dalziel blames the asylum-seeker problem on the last National-led Government, which she says allowed the waiting times to blow out.

As a result, asylum-seekers were often well settled in the community, sometimes with New Zealand-born children, by the time their claims were finally decided. By that stage, it became very hard - and possibly unfair - to remove them.

Dalziel says this Government has halved the backlog of applications and aims to clear it by the end of the year.

It has cut the waiting time for an initial interview from three years to three months. However, applications still take about two years to process. Dalziel wants to reduce this to nine months but progress has been delayed by work on an even more urgent problem.

On September 19 last year, in the wake of the World Trade Centre attacks, New Zealand's relaxed approach to refugees went out the window.

Before then only about 5 per cent of asylum-seekers were detained on arrival and held until their claims could be considered. The rest were allowed to start normal lives here - in sharp contrast to Australia.

But Government instructions issued to immigration officials eight days after the atrocities in the US suddenly meant that 94 per cent of refugee claimants were detained on arrival, either in jail or at the Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre.

The order affected 221 people, including 131 from the Tampa. Thirteen were granted a temporary permit immediately, meaning they were not detained, and 19 were released before the determination of their refugee status claim.

Refugee groups were stunned at first, then furious at the implications. South Auckland lawyer Catriona MacLennan wrote in the Herald that the Immigration Service's original decisions to detain asylum-seekers were effectively rubber-stamped by court registrars.

Officially, district court judges had to approve each extra week's detention after the first month.

But in practice, she said, the judges decided the law left them no power to intervene once the original decision had been made.

This month the Refugee Council of New Zealand and the Human Rights Foundation of Aotearoa challenged the policy u-turn in court.

If they win and the detentions are declared unlawful, dozens of compensation claims for millions of dollars are expected.

One refugee, who has name suppression, has already filed a $150,000 damages claim for compensation for false imprisonment.

The groups claim the new policy breaches the Immigration Act, the Bill of Rights and the United Nations Convention on Refugees.

Their lawyer, Dr Rodney Harrison, accused the Government of secretly operating the same detention regime as Australia.

Dalziel acknowledged it was a dramatic and permanent change in policy but said she could not comment further while both sides waited for the judge's reserved decision.

However, the Government made its thinking clear before the case began. In February, New Zealand took part in an international conference in Bali, which agreed that people-smuggling posed a growing threat to Governments, from organised crime as well as terrorism.

"In a post-September 11 environment," declared one background paper, "it has become critically important to know who is in one's country and why."

Auckland Refugee Council executive secretary Bill Smith replies that he still cannot understand why refugees have to be targeted, when terrorists could just as easily come into the country as regular visitors.

He says the Government's new detention policy will also be expensive, as Australia spends $550 million a year locking up would-be refugees.

Smith rejects claims that New Zealand is a soft touch for asylum-seekers, especially since the September 19 decision.

As for the people-smugglers, he asks what else people escaping from dangerous countries are supposed to do.

Feature: Immigration