Key shames NZ

Grant Bayldon, executive director of Amnesty International NZ, likes to ask what Albert Einstein and the Dalai Lama have in common with Prime Minister John Key’s mother. His answer: They all fled for their lives from their countries and became refugees. He could have added many more names, including that of Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science who fled from Nazism and took up a post at Canterbury University.

Bayldon’s overriding point is that New Zealand should take more refugees. Australia takes five times more on a per-capita basis.

Helping the world’s most vulnerable people through a strong sense of humanity is one consideration. Another is to reaffirm that we punch above our weight on the world stage (a key part of the Government’s pitch when it was lobbying for a seat on the United Nations Security Council). Economic benefits are likely, too, although these should be a fortuitous consequence of doing the right thing, not a precondition.

Labour leader Andrew Little notes there are now 9 million refugees from Syria alone and every country in the world needs to do its share. ‘‘We can do more and we must,’’ he insists.

Prime Minister John Key disagrees, apparently unpersuaded by sickening pictures of refugee-police clashes on the Greek border, a corpse-packed truck found parked in Austria or migrants drowning almost daily in the Mediterranean in their desperate attempts to find a better life.

Before increasing New Zealand’s meagre quota of 750 refugees a year or invoking emergency measures, Key wants to be satisfied that adequate services are available. ‘‘I think you do a disservice to people if you just bring them in and literally just half-dump them on the street,’’ he argues.

Ironically, this is a damning indictment of the country he has helped to shape. He believes wretched people would be more comfortable on the streets of Aleppo than on the streets of our cities or would rather be condemned to overcrowded refugee camps with no power or running water. When justifying the despatch of Kiwi troops to Iraq earlier this year, Key declared: ‘‘I’m not going to turn the other way when people are being persecuted and say as a leader that it’s other people’s problem’’.

When confronted by a humanitarian crisis, however, that’s exactly what he is saying.