Looking back and glancing sideways: refugee policy and multicultural nation-building in New Zealand

Abstract

This chapter examines, first, how New Zealand governments have used the past to represent refugee settlement and multicultural nation-building policies. Second, it examines New Zealand′s longstanding humanitarian record of refugee settlement, highlighting how politicians have consistently relied on an idealised version of this record for political purposes, and it discusses aspects of the representation of New Zealand′s immigration history after the 1986 review of immigration policy, especially in relation to multicultural policies.: The popular myth of New Zealand as an ideal society has contributed to commonplace representations of its response to refugees as outstandingly humanitarian. The myth has also contributed