Winston Peters: Naive little country with a 'soft touch' reputation

Winston Peters

New Zealanders heard the most extraordinary concession when Immigration Minister Paul Swain said the former cabinet minister in Saddam Hussein's regime would never have been found had it not been for the information I had provided.

The most frightening aspect of this was that I had given him five days' warning that this man and his wife were here, and yet his incompetent department found a former diplomat, not the man I warned about.

There are others and I will ensure they are sent out of New Zealand.

Given these outrageous circumstances, we must ask the serious question - how could this happen and, more importantly, what is going to be done about it?

The Government sent a clear signal to terrorist and rogue regimes with the Ahmed Zaoui case, highlighting that we are truly a soft touch.

Here was a man with convictions from European nations being turned into a folk hero at a cost of more than $2 million of taxpayer money.

New Zealand First offered the Government support to urgently pass legislation late last year to ensure that Zaoui and others of his ilk were on the next plane out. It turned us down.

We had consistently called for a tightening of the processing of visa and immigration documentation, both here and in foreign posts. We were called racist and xenophobic.

The Government now claims that because we have named these undesirable people, we are frustrating the system. These are bad people who were part of one of the world's most inhumane regimes, and New Zealanders should be warned about them.

You didn't get to be part of Saddam's Government and represent him overseas unless you shared his views. He killed those who opposed him - not promote them to high office.

How incredible all this must have seemed to those who were part of terrorist and dangerous regimes seeking sanctuary. Here is a developed nation hidden away on the edge of the Pacific that naively takes in everybody, no matter the risk to its people, and then ensures they get a benefit, a place to stay and all their legal costs paid.

Imagine how these same terrorists and suspect minions of dangerous regimes must have felt when they went to fill out the appropriate forms to come here, only to discover that instead of dealing with New Zealand officials, they were dealing with Chinese or Thai nationals.

More amazing still, these people didn't have to use false documents because you could be honest about your dubious background and still be granted a visa.

Now the Government has the audacity to say this is the way things have always been done, and it even happened when New Zealand First was last in government.
But we live now in a post-September 11 climate.

Almost all developed nations have changed the way they process and issue visa applications, but the Government failed to heed these warning signs and was clearly to slow to change.

We know this because senior immigration officials now tell us they are going to create an "undesirables" category for these type of people. This category has been in place in countries like Australia, Canada and Britain for some time.

New Zealand First has for some time warned the Government that it needed to change.

We challenged the previous minister of immigration over the practices of foreign nationals in overseas posts issuing all types of visas.

The Government never took the security threat seriously, and continued to promote the concept that we lived in a "benign strategic reality". The chickens are now coming home to roost.

For many years, we have warned that New Zealand is portrayed internationally as a soft touch.

This followed the huge waves of immigration from Asia, Africa and the Middle East allowed by successive National and Labour governments.

Australia altered its side of the social security agreement with New Zealand, because many of these immigrants were using us as a means of backdoor entry to Australia.

These negligent policies led to more than 20,000 overstayers living here by about 2000. Many of them have yet to be found. It was a serious issue then, but most of these overstayers were from Pacific and Asian nations, not the seditious regimes of those individuals now seeking to hide here.

What is also clear is that New Zealand is not part of the high-level intelligence-sharing networks that it once was. Our traditional allies who would have historically passed on names and information regarding potential security threats are no longer doing so.

Our officials are now reduced to Google searches on the internet to verify information that the rest of the Western World is not prepared to share with us.

The results are plain to see - every terrorist regime and undesirable ratbag now knows that New Zealand is a Pacific haven, with the amenities of the first world and little risk of detection.

The consequences will be quite devastating. It is highly conceivable that countries like Australia will begin to question our visa-free access because our borders are no longer considered secure. We will again be perceived as the backdoor entry point, but this time the intent won't be access to the Australian benefit system but a threat to Australian security.

* Winston Peters is leader of the New Zealand First party