For aboriginal people everywhere a new day is dawning as governments relied the injustice they have been doing to their own people. It was the start when New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has issued a formal apology for historic racist policing of Pacific people and offered scholarships to Pacific students.
Hundreds of people packed Auckland town hall on Sunday to hear the apology for the “dawn raids” of the 1970s during which authorities hunted for visa over stayers.
This was a practice that took place under both of New Zealand’s major political parties, beginning with Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk and continuing under the National’s Robert Muldoon. Research have since shown Pacific peoples were no more likely to overstay their visas than migrants from the US and UK, but were much more likely to be prosecuted.
The state-backed discrimination and subsequent deportations separated families and devastated communities.
Aupito William Sio, the Pacific peoples minister, who lived through the raids made the comment that…
