What was also not reported by our media was the fact that under normal circumstances, every asylum seeker has access to accommodation, utilities, food and a fortnightly allowance.
They are free to visit nearby villages to shop, to go to the beach and to mix with locals. They are able to apply for permanent resettlement in PNG at any time.
Australia's position is understandable. The Australian Government has always refused New Zealand's offers to take boat refugees for the very good reason that we could be used as a backdoor route into that country, unless visas are re-introduced for transtasman travel.
The concern is that if any of the refugees did end up in Australia, it could trigger a resumption of the disastrous people-smuggling trade that led to the deaths of over 1200 asylum seekers before the hard-line approach was adopted.
Australia now has a strict policy of turning back asylum seekers' boats in order to discourage them from even trying to reach Australia. Any asylum seekers who do manage to arrive by boat are banned from ever being settled in Australia.
Instead they are held in detention camps, from where any genuine refugees are given the option of being resettled, but not in Australia. Alternatively, they can opt to be returned to their home country.
Our Prime Minister should stop meddling in Australian affairs. An offer has been made, and that's where it should lie. And the media should provide balanced reporting, not try to exert influence through PR campaigns masquerading as news.
Meanwhile, the climate series on TV One's news bulletins earlier this month was so unbalanced in the opinion of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition that it has lodged a formal complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority.
In particular, the first programme claimed that a village in Fiji had to be relocated because of rising sea levels due to man-made global warming. What the story didn't explain was that the first calls to move that small coastal settlement had come 70 years ago.
At the time, the village elders had become concerned at the continual erosion of the foreshore, the widening of the river's mouth and the salinisation of the soil as surges swept seawater through their fields during king tides.
The problems became so acute that they began discussing the relocation of the village to another site, but back then no money was available for such a project.
A detailed scientific analysis of sea level rise in Fiji has recently been published by Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, of Stockholm University, the leader of the Fiji New Sea Level Project. He found that the sea level has remained virtually the same over the last 200 years, and perfectly stable over the last 50-70 years.
He explains that the critical depth for coral growth is 40cm below the low tide level. If sea levels are not rising, corals are forced to grow laterally. Radiocarbon dating studies at several different sites in Fiji show that the corals have stopped growing vertically, and have been forced to grow laterally in the micro-atolls, indicating that the sea levels have not been rising.
It's a similar story in Tuvalu, where claims about rising tides caused by global warming inundating the islands have been discredited.
In 2008, Professor Chris de Freitas, of Auckland University, explained that historical records show no acceleration in sea level rise in the 20th and 21st centuries.
He outlined how instrumentation was installed on Tuvalu's main island, Funafuti, in 1993, and that the sea level had shown no discernible trend. While some inundation was evident on the islands, the cause was found to be erosion, sand mining and construction projects that had caused an inflow of sea water, not global warming.
Other factors that were contributing to the problem included the excessive use of freshwater for irrigation, which was causing the destruction of underground freshwater reservoirs, leading to seawater encroachment into vegetable-growing pits.
The excessive paving of roads and the airport runway had exacerbated the problem. With around a quarter of the island now paved, rainwater is increasingly unable to soak into the ground to replenish groundwater supplies, and instead runs off in such a way that, when combined with high tides, flooding along the coast looks like sea levels are rising.
Over the years, overstayers from Tuvalu and other Pacific Islands have used climate change to plead to New Zealand authorities for refugee status in order to avoid deportation.
The problem is that to qualify for refugee status, an asylum-seeker must be able to point to persecution on one of five grounds — race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion — and the Courts have generally determined that climate change is unlikely to cause harm.
However, all that might be about to change as our new government considers promoting New Zealand as the world's first safe haven for 'climate refugees.'
The Minister of Climate Change, Green Party leader James Shaw, says that because refugee conventions don't recognise climate change 'victims', he's looking at a possible new visa category for people displaced by climate change.
