Defenders of the Australian government’s offshore detention of asylum seekers have long justified their policies by pointing to the scale of their annual Humanitarian Programme. At the most direct, these defenses accuse countries like New Zealand of being hypocrites by claiming to care for refugees but taking very few through humanitarian channels. In the last year, however, the balance has changed, as Australia’s Humanitarian Programme has been cut while New Zealand’s projected intake has substantially grown. The need to revisit these relative intakes is to attend to a perception of a massive disparity between these countries that lingers, as well as to consider the moral claims behind these comparisons.

Let’s just return to, and dwell upon, the comparison of refugee acceptance figures for a moment: Australia accepts 3.2 times as many refugees per capita as New Zealand. What does it mean? Does it mean that every Australian is 3.2 times more hospitable than New Zealanders? Is the average Australian 3.2 times more caring? These are the kind of questions with which those of us working to push the New Zealand government to increase our refugee resettlement quota make hay. Since 2013 I’ve been running the Doing Our Bit campaign, which aims to double New Zealand’s refugee resettlement quota and funding.