Loose Lips and Pollyanna

It's a Bright, Bright Sunshiny Day

Spare a thought for lil' old New Zealand.  It has been afflicted with a novice for a Prime Minister.  Her loose lips launches ships.  Australia has confirmed it has intercepted three "refugee" boats, bound for New Zealand.  Our novice PM was warned that if she postured as the leader of a country which was going to welcome illegitimate migrants the dirty business of people smuggling would explode.  

To be clear, we believe policies of managed immigration and managed refugee intake are both ethically and economically sound in principle.  We strongly support New Zealand's managed refugee policies, where some of the wretched of the earth are flown to this country to enter our refugee programme.  Once here they begin a reasonably lengthy period of education, assimilation, and induction.  Community volunteer groups put their hands up to sponsor refugee families and take responsibility to assist the task of integration in to a new life.

Many of the refugees come from war zones; their extended families have been decimated; they are in a long lasting state of shock.  They come knowing no-one, unable to speak our language, cut off, isolated, and desperate.
  New Zealand voluntary groups, once the initial training and indoctrination has been completed, work with these families, helping them integrate into our society.  The government is very careful not to encourage ghettos of refugee people groups to develop. 

But our loose lips Prime Minister ignored all this.  She had publicly stated that New Zealand should take in not refugees, but economic migrants who had been refused entry to Australia.

The Labour-led Government's offer to take 150 asylum seekers is being blamed for an escalation in people-smuggling operations with New Zealand being marketed as a "back door" into Australia.   The Australian is reporting fears the latest Manus Island resettlement offer has sparked an increase in "chatter" in recent months with New Zealand mentioned as the final destination.

Last month an Australian naval patrol intercepted a boatload of 29 Sri Lankans off the coast of Western Australia. Those on board told Australian authorities they were bound for New Zealand.  The Australian said Sri Lankan authorities disrupted two people-smuggling ventures in their waters late last year in which the asylum seekers were also headed for New Zealand.  [NZ Herald]

Words like naive, dumb, and stupid spring to mind when we think of our, garrulous Prime Minister.

What our naive Prime Minister has not figured out yet is that people smuggling is a business, a commercial operation.  The smugglers sell "passage" on boats to New Zealand.  Whether the economic migrants end up dead or in a hell-hole somewhere in the South Pacific is of no concern to them.  The smugglers have taken their money under false pretenses and have long since scarpered.  Their commercial operations are sophisticated, clever, and pray upon people who will believe almost anything, such is their desperation.  Jacinda Ardern has little to no idea of such grim, brute realities.  In her world, human nature is intrinsically and naturally good.  She is naive and relentlessly positive.  She is our very own Pollyanna.

The newspaper quoted a source saying there was evidence the recent spike in people-smuggling activity marketing New Zealand had followed the Ardern government's offer to take asylum-seekers from the Australian offshore detention centres.  The source within the new Department of Home Affairs said there had been recent "high level" chatter from countries such as Sri Lanka and Indonesia in which New Zealand was being pushed as a destination for asylum-seekers.  "It confirms what our intelligence has been telling us: people-smuggling syndicates remain active in our region and continue to market their services using false promises of settlement in Australia or New Zealand," said the source.

"Whether or not people-smugglers genuinely intend for their boats to reach New Zealand, it is clear that they are using publicity around New Zealand's resettlement offer to market their services to vulnerable people in Sri Lanka and elsewhere."  However it appeared there was little likelihood any boat would reach New Zealand, leaving Australian authorities to deal with boatloads of refugees.

It is sad that our naive Prime Minister fails some of the most basic characteristics of wisdom.  When it results in harm to the vulnerable it rapidly becomes way beyond a joke.