Few options for the desperate

Grant Bayldon

Dominion Post

July 31, 2013

As Australia closes the door on desperate boat arrivals, Amnesty International New Zealand head Grant Bayldon thinks it's time for New Zealand to increase the number of refugees it takes. 

I'm not told the name of the well-dressed, 30-something-year-old man I'm introduced to in Bangkok, and I know not to ask. 

He shows me the outside of his red Myanmar passport. It wouldn't seem worth much to me - there's not many countries a Myanmar passport will get you into - but he holds it like gold dust. 

It's hard to place a value on belonging to a country - any country - until you meet people who don't. The fact that this man even has a passport is surprising, for he is Rohingya, an ethnic minority group in Myanmar that has been described by the United Nations as one of the most persecuted in the world. 

Over the centuries, Myanmar - also known as Burma - has repeatedly turned on the Rohingya like a body whose immune system attacks itself. 

Denied equal access to citizenship in their own country, the catalogue of abuses against this Muslim minority also includes restrictions on freedom of movement, property ownership, marriage, number of children, work and religious practice. And if that weren't bad enough, since last year murderous rampages between Buddhist and Muslim communities have caused many Rohingya to flee for their lives. 

This man is one of the lucky ones. He had a successful business until death threats forced him to abandon it. So he has some choices - unlike all those who have fled by boat hoping to make it to Thailand or Bangladesh. Many never did. 

He can overstay his visitor visa to Thailand, but he could not legally work and he and his family would spend the rest of their lives in fear of arrest or deportation back to Myanmar. 

He can return to Myanmar from where he fled just a week before and risk the lives of his family. 

Or he can go to Indonesia as a visitor and risk getting on a boat to Australia. 

So I'm not really surprised that he is planning on taking the Australia boat option. 

I try to warn him of the dangers of the crossing - that many people drown and that even if his family makes it, they would face years of offshore detention before the Australian Government would even begin to process their asylum claim. Not much of a choice really. He shrugs his shoulders and both our eyes mist up. 

This was a few weeks ago. If I met this man now, I would need to tell him that choice has also been taken away. 

If he decides to risk the dangerous boat journey he won't ever find himself one day resettled in Australia. Because the Australian Government has now announced that it will refuse to resettle asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Instead, they will be permanently deported to Papua New Guinea, a country where people already face significant human rights issues. 

I think the guilt I felt at being able to jump on a plane back to New Zealand a couple of days later - or to pretty much anywhere really - probably showed. I wanted to tell him New Zealand was a choice, because it is a country where he wouldn't face death and persecution simply for the ethnic group he was born into. That his young children would learn English quickly and that he would be free to set up his business here again. 

But I didn't say it, because his chances of ever getting accepted into New Zealand on our refugee programme are slim. 

We like to think we're doing our bit, but the sad fact is that while the quality of our refugee resettlement programme is very good, our total intake of refugees and asylum seekers each year is small - tiny really - by world standards. 

Each year New Zealand takes 750 people from the United Nations refugee programme, as well as accepting on average 150 asylum seekers who claim protection once they arrive here. 

While the Government has made the welcome announcement that it will refurbish its resettlement centre, it has also said it won't be increasing the quota. In comparison, Australia accepts a total of 20,000 refugees each year and is seeking to increase it to 27,000. 

That's already five times as many per capita as New Zealand. And even the Australian intake is small compared to the hundreds of thousands who continue to flee to Syria's neighbouring countries, or the 2 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan. 

When we think of our small effort on the world stage, the recent calls to double our refugee quota are modest to say the least. 

We don't want the issue to become a political football in New Zealand like it has in Australia and yes, we'd need a corresponding increase in the support required to resettle refugees well. 

But right now we're punching well below our weight. 

New Zealand should be stepping up and making a genuine commitment to participating in a regional solution - part of which is increasing the New Zealand quota and the resources that go along with that. And if ever there were a time for this to happen, it is now. Worldwide the number of people who have fled their homes as a result of conflict and persecution, according to the United Nations, is the highest since the mid-1990s.