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New Zealand apologises for 1970s deportation raids on Pacific islanders

NEW ZEALAND’S Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Pacific Peoples Minister Aupito William Sio announced today that the government would formally apologise for an infamous part of the nation’s history known as the Dawn Raids.

Pacific Islanders were targeted for deportation in the mid-1970s during aggressive home raids by the authorities to find, convict and expel people who had overstayed their visa. The raids often took place very early in the morning or late at night.

“We felt as a community that we were invited to come to New Zealand,” Mr Sio said at a news conference on the apology.

“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.”

But the government turned on the Pacific Islander community when it felt that its workers were no longer needed, he said.

Ms Ardern said that at the time, people who didn’t look like white New Zealanders were told that they should carry identification to prove that they weren't overstayers, adding that they were often  stopped in the street or even in 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 that when computerised immigration records were introduced in 1977, they showed that 40 per cent of overstayers were either British or US citizens, but those groups were 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.”

The formal apology will be given at a commemoration event in Auckland on June 26.

Ms Ardern said it was just the third time that the New Zealand government has offered such an apology.

The previous ones were for imposing an entry tax on Chinese immigrants in the 1880s and for introducing the 1918 influenza pandemic to Samoa, where it killed more than 20 per cent of the population.

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