I wonder if it winds up Peter Dutton to know that Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist, award-winning author and former Manus Island detainee, is a free man in the continent’s orbit. Boochani, the best-known witness, critic and victim of Australia’s offshore “processing centres”, remains in New Zealand after his 30-day visa came to an end. No one quite knows what the No Friend But the Mountains author is planning next, but it seems safe to assume that sooner or later he’ll lodge an application for asylum in New Zealand. A permanent reminder to Dutton, his predecessors and the country’s immigration detention system that they are not as close to vanishing the “boat people” problem as they might have thought.

For their part New Zealand’s policymakers fear as much with headlines suggesting if Boochani’s hypothetical asylum application is successful it could “fuel tensions with Australia”. The problem is Behrouz Boochani, New Zealander, would enjoy free movement between his new home and his old incarcerators, unless Dutton and the gang insert new exceptions in the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement. This is the “back door” the Coalition government in Canberra is so afraid of, and the political problem preventing Scott Morrison from taking up Jacinda Ardern’s invitation to resettle the last remaining detainees on Manus.

For my part: damn the “tensions”. The moral and ethical case for New Zealand accepting Boochani’s application, assuming he’s planning on making it, is as simple as “asylum is a human right”. You can argue the moral and ethical case further, but it seems enough to state a journalist fleeing the threat of death in Iran, and a seemingly permanent incarceration in Papua New Guinea, is entitled to freedom in New Zealand. Or anywhere he should go. There is nothing more human than the right to go about your life in safety and security. As New Zealanders we could feel proud, and even a little radical, if we did our bit to restore that right to Boochani.

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Geography is responsible for nurturing remarkably different political cultures in Australia and New Zealand. Continental Australia – vast, arid, and uncomfortably close to a populous Asia – seems to maintain a sort of frontier culture. Extractive companies are continually testing the land’s ecological limits, like the investors and prospectors of old, and politicians still vigorously enforce arbitrary social categories treating refugees and asylum seekers differently on no more than their mode of arrival. It’s a system every bit as savage as the US-Mexico “border wall”.

Yet island New Zealand – small, temperate and distant from the wider world’s conflict and carnage – is closer to northern Europe in its political character. Nearly every politician orbits the liberal centre. Our working class, middle class and major industries bank their prosperity (or not) on a moderately redistributive state. In policy terms, this makes for only minor differences in refugee and asylum policies. Our “boat people” laws are largely in line with Australia’s. But in political terms the differences are stark. Under the last Labour government, New Zealand took more than 100 refugees from the Tampa, as one example.

But across the ditch, or at least in Canberra, Boochani is a bogeyman. In Wellington a good number of politicians are privately happy he’s here, and on the streets of Christchurch, ordinary New Zealanders welcome him with hugs and hongi, a Māori greeting where you gently press your noses together, exchanging breath and life. It’s quite likely if the last detainees on Manus Island ever make it south, the local iwi will accord them the honour of a pōwhiri, the highest welcome to this land.

Play Video 4:28 Behrouz Boochani: how I got out of my Manus Island hell – video

Of course none of this is meant to suggest New Zealanders are somehow better people than Australians. On a trip to Melbourne last month the people I spoke to in blue-ribbon Sandringham and Hampton were almost uniformly against what their government is doing on Manus Island. The difference, I think, is in our respective institutions and cultures. New Zealand’s hard borders are, in truth, the continent to our west (Australia) and the ocean blue to our east (the Pacific). That means we can afford a more generous political culture in these individual cases because the imaginary boats people like Boochani are meant to represent, are so distant.

It all reinforces, I think, what a monstrosity hard borders really are. To function they invent categories. The worthy and unworthy, even going as far as to assign dehumanising “points” to prospective migrants. Perhaps the only thing worse than the hard border itself is the in-between places it breeds: Australia’s offshore detention centres; the Mexican borders towns where refugees and asylum seekers are sent to await their application’s fate; the Greek holding camps where Africa and the Middle East’s desperate and hungry hang their hopes on the remote promise of a future in northern or western Europe.

The best New Zealand can do right now is reject these in-between places and accept Boochani and all his former Manus comrades who wish to come.