Brian Rudman: Saving these kids is a $2m bargain

As a South Korean schoolboy begins an 18-month sentence for stabbing his Avondale College teacher after a "culturally insensitive taunt", Ministry of Education officials are planning new ways to expand the $2.36 billion business sustained by international students.

The education bureaucrats' latest money-making brainwave is to let foreign kids as young as 9 study at our primary schools, without the support of either a parent or legal guardian.

Overseas students now have to be at least 13 to live in New Zealand without a parent. Salivating at the thought of fresh meat is Belmont Primary School principal Bruce Cunningham, who told the Herald that relaxing the guardianship rules would be helpful in these tough economic times.

The $10,000 each foreign student paid in school fees was "an economic lifeline" to a school like his, which had to raise $266,000 to balance the books.

It might be an economic lifeline to schools like Belmont Primary, but at what cost to the well-being of the poor youngsters? Under the proposal, children will be allowed to be shipped off to New Zealand to live with a "close family member" or a "quality-assured" provider.

For once I agree with Family First national director Bob McCoskrie, who says: "The welfare of children is playing second fiddle to the financial needs of cash-strapped schools who see foreign students as a cash cow."

He added that the Government should be upping funding to schools so foreign kids did not have to be used in this way.

Education union NZEI Te Riu Roa similarly attacks the "exploitation of young children for commercial gain". President Frances Nelson said: "I think most people would find the idea of young children, particularly primary-aged students, being dropped into a different country and culture and being separated from their parents for weeks at a time difficult to comprehend."

In July last year, there were 9815 foreign fee-paying students in schools throughout the country - half of them in Auckland and mostly Asian. Almost 3000 were in primary schools.

Even 13 sounds a cruelly young age to throw a child out of the family nest and into a plane to face an alien language and culture all alone. The wonder is that meltdowns like the Avondale College stabbing are not more common.

That Education Minister Anne Tolley and her officials are even contemplating dropping the threshold to the age of 9 or 10 is inhumane. Almost as inhumane as the treatment of the Afghan refugee children, aged from 3 upwards, reportedly spread out in a caravan of despair stretching from their homeland across Iran and Turkey to the English Channel.

I did the same journey myself many years ago, but in the relative comfort of assorted public transport, a battered Kombi van - and with money in my pocket. I also had a passport that got me into Britain. The United Nations' refugee agency says thousands of these unaccompanied youngsters - almost all boys - are fleeing the hell of their war-torn homeland.

They seek a refuge, but wherever they turn, the borders are closed to them. They made the television news again a few days ago when French police bulldozed the infamous "Jungle" squatter camp near Calais, where they wait before trying to smuggle themselves on trucks across the Channel.

Thirteen-year-old Ahmed told a Guardian reporter: "I can't go back to Afghanistan because my life will be full of danger. I can't leave here. If I spend 10 more days here I become mad. There is no solution for me."

The story broke as Prime Minister John Key was telling the United Nations General Assembly he was the lucky child of refugees who had fled the hell of Hitler's Europe and found a haven in friendly New Zealand. The parallels between the Key family plight and that of Ahmed and his mates cry out.

And having sent the SAS back to the battlefield to endanger the lives of more young Afghanis, Mr Key now has to bear some responsibility for the collateral damage the Western invasion is causing. Offering a home to some of these children, as Helen Clark did with the Tampa refugees, seems such an obvious response on all sorts of levels.

Small countries have limited opportunities to make a difference on the international stage. Our nuclear-free stand shows it can be done. So did Helen Clark's instinctive move to do what was right in 2001, by offering a home to, in the end, 209 of the 433 shipwrecked mainly Afghani boat people rescued by the Norwegian freighter Tampa and refused entry into Australia.

Amongst the refugees were 40 lone youngsters aged between 14 and 18. The successful integration of these desperate people, and the family reunifications that followed, was the feel-good story of the decade. The refugees obviously felt better, but so did the rest of us.

Only the odd curmudgeon like National's then-immigration spokesman, Tony Ryall, who argued the $2 million spent on the young refugees should have gone to needy New Zealand kids, failed to feel the warmth.

We have the blueprint now, and the Tampa graduate class, to help out. The children now all alone and hounded in Europe are every bit as needy and deserving as the Tampa boys - and the young Mrs Key was. They need a home.

We have the room and the support services for at least some of them. The Government has already committed $41.5 million to keep the army reconstruction team in Bamiyan Province for another year and $40 million to sending the SAS back.

Alongside that, $2 million on rescuing some of the abandoned Calais youngsters seems like the bargain of the century.