In 1999, the then NZ PM Helen Clark asked me for my thoughts about coming to Samoa to apologize for two unfortunate events that happened under her country’s administration of Samoa.
First was the shooting of Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III in 1929 and second was the NZ administration’s negligence in relation to the influenza epidemic of 1919 that resulted in some 8,500 deaths or 22% of our population.
I was taken by surprise by this idea, especially as it was coming some 80 years after the fact. But of course, I understood the politics and optics behind what PM Clark and her advisers were seeking.
I assured her that such an apology was unnecessary and that, in Samoan custom, “whatever you did, we forgave before the sundown of that very day.”
In 2002, she came anyway and graciously apologized at Samoa’s 40th Independence Day celebrations, for the misdeeds of the NZ administration toward the people of Samoa.
In 2022, NZ PM Jacinta Adern, humbly performed a Samoan ifoga to the people of the Pacific for the horrors of the Dawn Raids that were inflicted on our people in one of the darkest times of New Zealand’s history.
Those dawn raids led to a court action against the New Zealand Government by one of the victims – a Samoan lady, and an appeal decision by the Privy Council confirming the rights of Samoans who were born between 1924 and 1949 to New Zealand Citizenship.
In response, the Muldoon Government quickly moved to establish a protocol for 1,100 Samoans to apply to enter NZ every year with unrealistic conditions which ensures that the annual quota is unachievable.
Worst still, Samoan’s applications for visitors’ entry permits into New Zealand take months to process.
Therefore, this week’s news on the successful first reading in the NZ parliament of a bill that would correct the injustice of the Muldoon-era law, depriving Samoans born between 1924 and 1949 of their right to New Zealand citizenship, is warmly welcomed.
It is a significant first step to correcting a wrong within the lifetime of those Samoans whose lives have been negatively impacted by an abuse of the rule of law.
After all, there aren’t many of them remaining.
It will also save another New Zealand Prime Minister the burden of having to apologize for this mistake at a future Samoa Independence Day celebration.
Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi
Leader of HRPP and an eyewitness and victim of these racist attacks in New Zealand in 1976 – 1977