New Zealand to apologise over 1970s Dawn Raids on Pacific island people

NEW Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern has announced that the government will formally apologise for an infamous part of the country’s history, known as the Dawn Raids.

This event saw Pacific Island people targeted for deportation in the mid-1970s during aggressive home raids by authorities to find, convict and deport overstayers.

The raids often took place very early in the morning or late at night.

During a press conference to announce the apology, New Zealand’s minister for the Pacific peoples, Aupito William Sio, recalled the terrifying day during his childhood when police holding German shepherd dogs turned up at his family home before dawn and shone torches into their faces, while his father stood there helpless.

Mr Sio became emotional as he and Ms Ardern discussed the apology at the conference.

“We felt as a community that we were invited to come to New Zealand. We responded to the call to fill the labour workforce that was needed, in the same way we responded to the call for soldiers in 1914,” Mr Sio said.

But he said the government then turned on the Pasifika community when it felt those workers were no longer needed.

Ms Ardern said that, at the time, people who did not look like white New Zealanders were told they should carry identification to prove they were not overstayers and were often stopped in the street, or even at schools or churches.

She said Pacific people were often dragged before the courts in their pyjamas and without proper representation.

“Not only were they targeted, they were targeted using a process and a practice that was really dehumanising, that really terrorised people in their homes,” Ms Ardern said.

She said when computerised immigration records were introduced in 1977, they showed that 40 per cent of overstayers were either British or American – groups never targeted for deportation.

“The raids, and what they represented, created deep wounds,”

Ms Ardern said.“and while we cannot change our history, we can acknowledge it, and we can seek to right a wrong.”

Mr Sio said his family were legal residents who owned the home but a couple of his father’s nephews from Samoa were staying with them and were taken away by the police without their clothes or belongings and later deported.

The formal apology will be held at a commemoration event on June 26 in Auckland. The apology does not come with any financial compensation or legal changes.