Thursday, September 10, 2015



Laggards

In justifying its foot dragging on refugees, National likes to talk up New Zealand's record, saying we're "sixth or seventh" best in the world at taking them. The reality is very different:

Although New Zealand has promised to take an extra 600 refugees over the next three years, the country still lags well behind other developed countries.

[...]

New Zealand's total refugee population in 2014 was 1349, equivalent to about 0.3 refugees per 1000 people. That is five times fewer refugees per head of population than Australia and about 47 times fewer than Sweden. This places New Zealand 87th in the world for refugees per head of population.


We're laggards at this. For fucks sake, we're worse than Australia! And that ought to fill every New Zealander with shame. National's one-off, backloaded PR stunt isn't enough - we need to double the quota immediately, and increase it from there.