Murdoch Stephens

The BWB series of books have the tagline 'short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers'. This one is written by the man who led the grass roots campaign from 2013 - 2017 to double New Zealand's refugee quota, with most success coming in late 2016/17 with the deteriorating situation in Syria and an upcoming national election.

Doing Our Bit lays out why Stephens set up this campaign and explains the phases and strategy used in this kind of activism. Highlighted throughout is the use of social media and the cooperation between different agencies and people, in this case Members of Parliament, the Red Cross, Amnesty International and journalists as well as regional groups involved in the support of refugees once they've arrived.

The only piece of discussion that I thought was missing was how our resettlement process handles the increased load. New Zealand is noted for having a particularly strong resettlement programme during the first 6 weeks once refugees arrive in Auckland, and part of the public debate centered on whether this programme would be overwhelmed or weakened under an increased quota.

While there was less information here on the refugee experience of the New Zealand system than I expected, this was still an interesting behind the scenes view of a campaign that was all over our media at the time. The campaign was ultimately successful with our quota now at 1,500 places, but the point is well made that this is still well below what other countries offer and we could be doing much more.… (más)