The Green Party has presented a bill aimed at striking down a discriminatory law targeting Pacific Islanders from the country’s statutes.
The party believes a significant step has been taken to address historical injustices in New Zealand. Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson says, “it is a racist law and it is time to strike it off the books.”
Green MP Teanau Tuiono’s ‘Restoring Citizenship Removed By Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act 1982 Bill’, was drawn from the ballot today. The bill aims to restore the right to citizenship for people from Samoa (formerly known as Western Samoa) who were born between 1924 and 1949, as had been promised to them.
In 1982, the Government enacted the Citizenship (Western Samoa) Act, which stripped people from Western Samoa of their automatic right to New Zealand citizenship.
“Earlier that year, the Privy Council found that because those born in Western Samoa were treated by New Zealand law as “natural-born British subjects”, they were entitled to New Zealand citizenship when it was first created in 1948. But the Muldoon Government took that right away – choosing racism over the rule of law,” Davidson says.
“There are people alive today who were not just entitled to become New Zealand citizens, but who were New Zealand citizens – but whom the government stopped being citizens because it didn’t like where they were born.”
Davidson says it is possible to trace a direct line from the inequities that Pacific peoples face today, to the widespread anti-Pacific racism of the Dawn Raids.
“Aotearoa is a Pacific nation. The interconnectedness of our whakapapa and history across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa is as extensive and deep as the moana itself,” she says.
“Supporting this bill is the bare minimum we can do to acknowledge the mistakes of the past and for us to move forward.”
