Kiwis can finally return home – but are we even welcome?

Last week, Charlotte Bellis wrote an article for the NZ Herald outlining her experience with New Zealand’s system of managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ). The former Al Jazeera journalist, who received global recognition last year for her stern questioning of the Taliban about their treatment of women and girls, was now, ironically, turning to Afghanistan for refuge when her homeland wouldn’t let her in.

Bellis is pregnant. She is also not married to her partner. This means she had to resign from Al Jazeera and leave Qatar where it is illegal to be unmarried and pregnant. With her home country effectively closed and facing imprisonment in her country of work, Bellis turned to Afghanistan. She reached out to Taliban contacts to explain her situation; she was pregnant and unmarried, would that be a problem if she entered the country? Their response: “No, we’re happy for you.”

By contrast, Bellis’s application for an emergency spot in MIQ – one that featured 59 supporting documents – was swiftly denied. Her story is not unique, nor is it uncommon, but it is important for the noise it has created, and the attention it has drawn to an issue Kiwis have been yelling about for the better part of 18 months: New Zealand is closed. The human rights of Kiwi citizens like me living abroad are being directly contravened. We are essentially stateless. And, arguably most importantly, our government does not seem to care.

That noise obviously worked. Last night, for the second time in three months, I cried tears of relief. Once again the government announced a loosening of the border policy – notably, the implementation of 10 days of home isolation, rather than the enforced hotel stay that has been in place until now. As of 13 March, I will no longer have to enter a lottery to go home.

I’m approaching it all with a large dose of scepticism, aware that the rug could be pulled out from under us again. The gratitude at the possibility of being able to return home is overwhelming, but I won’t be forgetting the past two years anytime soon. I am worried about the division this has caused at home and the toxic nationalism that has been allowed to take hold as the country has remained isolated and cut off from the world for the better part of 24 months.

I have always been so proud to be a Kiwi. Living away from home sometimes physically hurts, but I also love my life overseas. It’s like being in the middle of a tug of war, the rope growing more taut with each month that I don’t go home.

New Zealand is a haven. It is small, beautiful and blissfully removed from the rest of the world – both literally and figuratively. I could have had a very easy life there, but that isn’t what I wanted for myself. And so, like many Kiwis, I spread my wings and travelled far, far away, all the while knowing that eventually I’ll come ricocheting back home.

I spent much of the pandemic looking back at my country with pride, grateful to know I had made the right choice in voting for Jacinda Adern’s Labour Party as they managed the pandemic with caution and compassion. As time ticked on, however, and the borders failed to reopen, I realised that this “success” was occurring at the expense of almost a million citizens. A million people just like me. Apparently that compassion didn’t extend to us.

I have written a few articles for this paper on the topic of MIQ and a few more for the NZ Herald. I have tried to tell the stories of people in situations like Bellis’s – or worse. People who weren’t able to reunite with their family after the death of a loved one; who were facing illegally remaining in a country without a job, without support or a roof over their heads, and still refused entry to their home country. I’ve tried to talk about my own distress and the pain MIQ has caused. I’ve tried to interact with naysayers on Twitter, despite knowing it’s a losing battle.

The original purpose of the MIQ system was to allow New Zealand the time to prepare for the inevitable arrival of Covid-19. Two years on, ICU capacity is still extraordinarily low at just four beds per 100,000 people. I am thankful the government has realised it is no longer acceptable to keep families apart, but I’m worried about how tenuous my citizenship feels. I’ve been told by many people in NZ that citizenship is something that needs to be earned; by staying put, paying taxes and not turning your back on the “team”. But isn’t it true that citizenship is one of our few, basic human rights?

There are still a large number of Kiwis who aggressively support the MIQ system, allowing negative discourse to thrive in an environment where the population has been continuously fed this idea of “zero Covid”. Will I encounter any of them when I eventually make it home? Will they be standing with pitchforks outside my house, as they have done virtually for so long?

Watching Ardern give her speech on Wednesday evening, I found myself feeling increasingly disenfranchised. She read a letter from a Kiwi who had spent the past two years stuck in Japan, separated from their family, but who was thankful to the prime minister for the MIQ system. I thought of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of letters outlining the pain of the system that she could have chosen to read instead.

To Kiwis overseas she said: “Welcome home, you are safe now.” I couldn’t help but laugh. So she apparently cares about my safety now, after two years of evidently not giving a toss about any of us – including dozens of women in situations like Charlotte Bellis’s?

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As Bellis herself put it: “When the Taliban offers you safe haven, you know your situation is messed up.” I thought about something I wrote in December that felt notably similar: “[This system] somehow makes cancer seem like something to be appreciated. How messed up is that?”

This parallel in statements drives home how broken the New Zealand border system is. How it continues to be governed by a process completely lacking in empathy. Not every person fits a prescribed set of rules, and not every emergency case can be tidily sorted into a box. Babies were being born, people were dying, life was going on, days were ticking by, and yet New Zealanders were still unable to get home.

Bellis asks in her letter: if her case isn’t deemed emergency enough, then whose will be? Her situation makes it strikingly clear that the government has been content to continuously send the message to Kiwis overseas: your life doesn’t matter. I’m worried about what that means now that we can finally get back.