Immigration Minister, Tuariki Delamere has been asked what happened to a ship supposedly carrying 100 Chinese citizens onboard.

Mt Roskill based New Zealand First MP, Gilbert Myles, has accused Mr Delamere of wasting almost $83,000 of taxpayers' money searching for a shipload of boat people that was never found.

Mr Myles says the ship is a ghost ship and does not believe the ship ever existed.

Mr Myles has revealed the cost to the Air Force and the Immigration Service of trying to locate the ship amounted to over $80,000. The costings are based on two surveillance flights by an Orion, and Immigration officials spending an estimated $4,000 on work preparing urgent legislation.

Parliament raced through hard hitting legislation which was designed to hold the boat people indefinitely and to prevent them gaining refugee status. Napier Prison was said by Labour to be cleared, cleaned, and ready to house the boatpeople. Men and women were to be separated on arrival in New Zealand and detained.

Mr Delamere had warned that a vessel carrying 102 people had left the Solomon Islands, intending to land in New Zealand within days. But inspite of an Airforce search for the ship nothing was ever found.

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>