The last waltz

Western Samoa

By Karen Mangnall

FOR more than 40 years, New Zea land’s Pacific Island communities and the Labour Party have waltzed serenely together across the parquet dance floor of politics. Between dances, the Island voters may flirt a little with National or newcomer New Labour, but they’re always sitting by the wall ready for whenever Labour has a space in its dance card. Lately, however, there’ve been signs the 130,000-strong Island electorate is less than impressed with some of Labour’s fancy footwork.

The faux pas came, as it often does for Labour, over immigration.

In late April, Employment Minister Phil Goff announced the Government might scrap Western Samoa’s special im migration quota. Goff claimed the 1100 Samoans who came each year to New Zealand under the quota were contribut ing to the country’s record unemploy ment (estimated at 170,000 up to one-in ten of the workforce). Goff said prefer ence for jobs should go to those already in New Zealand and, anyway, demand had dropped for unskilled Samoan labour.

It caught Western Samoa completely

by surprise. Prime Minister Tofilau Eti Alesana, in Auckland for heart surgery, admitted later he’d felt “humiliated” by the lack of prior consultation. The quota was part of the bilateral Treaty of Friendship and had been part of West ern Samoa’s trade-off for letting New Zealand legislate to overturn a 1982 Privy Council decision giving 100,000 Sa moans citizenship of New Zealand.

Consul-general in Auckland, Afamasa ga Toleafoa, pointed out that to get in under the quota, Samoans first had to

prove they’d jobs waiting and guaran

teed financial support. They generally took menial jobs shunned by New Zealanders in remote locations where no one else wanted to live.

Geoffrey Palmer, Deputy Prime Minis ter at the time, chimed in that the worry was actually about overstayers: Samoans apparently comprised 6000 of the esti mated 17,000 overstayers. And Palmer diverted from a Pacific tour to Apia to explain it all.

Then Pacific Island Affairs Minister Russell Marshall released figures to show the problem was actually the increase in Samoan permanent residents outside the quota. Overall, a threefold rise in im migration in the past seven years, with 4000 permanent residencies granted last year. Critics countered that nearly 800 of them were Samoans who’d voluntarily regularised their citizenship under a one-off amnesty and a large proportion

of the rest were allowed in under recently relaxed criteria for family reunificat,on - By now Labour was offside not only with Samoans but also the Tongans, who’d been campaigning against unfair targeting of Pacific Islanders as over-

stayers. The public and political Opposi-

tion were ridiculing unemployment as a reason for axing the quota. And several of Labour’s Pacific Island branches held meetings condemning the quota issue as “racist ’ and a political football designed to garner marginal votes.

With the South Pacific Forum looming in July, David Lange, Prime Minister at the time, made a last minute decision to go to Apia, ostensibly for the June independence celebrations but really to save some face. There he tried to lock in the parameters for the quota debate: a bilateral approach to overstayers and clamping down on adoption rules which allowed New Zealand Samoans to adopt teenage relatives as infants.

If the Western Samoan Government was quietly skeptical, the local press was

less inhibited. Lange was visibly disgrun-

tied at an unusually stroppy press conference. The independent Samoa Observer summed it up on the front page:

Desperate Lange Tries Again.

Lange waited until after the Forum to make the final announcement; the quota remained; adoption laws would be tightened; there’d be “greater invigilation” of

intending migrants’ claims of jobs and accommodation; and New Zealand would take up a long-standing Samoan offer of two immigration attaches to sort

out overstaying.

Some Samoans already in New Zea land who got permanent residency under the family reunification scheme would be deducted from the quota.

Lange conceded the Western Samoan argument that immigration would fall off to about 2000 a year anyway.

Consul-general Toleafoa says the whole debate shows the gradual “water mg down” of the bilateral special rela tionship at the same time as the New Zealand-based Samoan community strengthens its political influence. 7 “If any good’s come out of it it’s given a reason to go back over the rela ion hip with New Zealand,” Toleafoa says "p J ticularly younger Cabinet Ministers have no background and maybe not even an interest in any relationship with Samoa.

It’s a sad thing in a way. Their own orientation is far more regional and they don’t appreciate why there was a quota in the first place.”

But Toleafoa says the Western Sa moans do feel they were unfairly singled out, particularly over the unemployment argument. “We’ve since had a look at the figures which show a comparable jump in permanent residencies from other countries during the period that caused New Zealand to look at us.”

The latest immigration statistics show that last year Western Samoa recorded only the tenth biggest jump in perma nent residence to New Zealand, behind such countries as Taiwan, Tonga Japan Malaysia and China. All these countries benefitted from expanded immigration criteria introduced in the past year, Toleafoa says the New Zealand Gov ernment has done a lot of “media man ipulation” for reasons Western Samoa accepts.

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He believes this time the bash-a-Pacific

Islander immigration campaign didn’t

win the public support expected, “It’s been said to us by a lot of people that ‘it’s the bogeyman again’, that the

immigration issue’s being brought out

again because it’s that time of the year,”

Toleafoa says. “But that’s not what we’re

saying.” □