Samoa bill highlights untold history

Expect the unexpected. When Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono started promoting a member’s bill that could lead to the reversal of a decades-old law many regard as a historic wrong against Samoans, people expected it to fall at the first hurdle — the first reading in Parliament.

Instead, in the two years that Tuiono has been busy promoting his bill — Restoring Citizenship Removed by Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 — many within the Samoan and Pacific communities have been inspired to learn about the past.

It has also prompted many non-Samoan Kiwis to look up this history — centred around a young Samoan woman’s determination to fight for her right to stay in New Zealand.

In the 1970s, Falema’i Lesā was among the scores of Pacific Islanders who moved to Aotearoa — considered the land of milk and honey — for better opportunities.

It was also the period of the infamous Dawn Raids: police officers raiding homes in the early hours of the morning to find and deport people who had overstayed their temporary visas.

Lesā was taken by police and ordered to be deported back to Samoa. But what authorities did not expect was her bid to stay — finding a lawyer and taking her case to court. She argued that she was, in fact, a New Zealand citizen by birth.

Lesā was born during a time when Samoa was under New Zealand administration. Before NZ citizenship was established on January 1, 1949, people living in New Zealand were not considered New Zealanders, but British subjects.

The young woman’s case made it to the Privy Council, who agreed with Lesā and in July 1982 ruled that she and all then Western Samoans born between 1924 and 1948 were also British subjects — and they and their descendants had also become Kiwi citizens when everyone else did in 1949.

Prime Minister Robert Muldoon and the National Party, helped by the Labour Party, would go on to quickly pass a law overruling that Privy Council decision — and in September that same year, the Citizenship [Western Samoa] Act came into effect.

It meant that only those Samoans who were in New Zealand on that day, including Lesā , were granted New Zealand citizenship — a new law many regarded as unfair and even racist.

That history is not something we learn about at school — yet it is very much a part of our history.

When Tuiono’s bill was read out in Parliament on Wednesday night, the National Party indicated it would not be supporting it.

But there was rapturous applause — and later a Samoan hymn — when the Act Party and then NZ First revealed they would be supporting the bill through to the select committee process for further consideration.

It was an unexpected turn of events.

But, as acknowledged by those parties who chose to side with the Opposition this time, there seems to be a genuine want to understand this part of our history and whether or not it is still worth fighting for.

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