KEY POINTS:
New Zealanders' anxieties about race relations appear to have settled down after a "bubble" sparked by the foreshore and seabed issue and former National leader Don Brash's speech at Orewa, says Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres.
His report on race relations says complaints to him about racial discrimination dropped by 18 per cent from 597 in 2005 to 496 last year.
Complaints about race-based measures favouring Maori and Pacific people dropped from 10 in 2004, when Dr Brash spoke out against such measures at Orewa, to just two in 2005 and three last year.
"There was a bit of a bubble of that. I think that has passed - possibly partly as a result of the Government review so there are now less of those measures in place," Mr de Bres said.
The Government's nationalisation of the foreshore and seabed to forestall claims of Maori ownership has also largely dropped off the political agenda since 20,000 Maori marched on Parliament against it in May 2004, sparking the formation of the Maori Party before the 2005 election.
In his report, Mr de Bres said: "After the sometimes bitter race relations debate in 2004 and the political divide over race relations in the election campaign in 2005, the public mood appeared to settle in 2006."
He cited UMR Research polls showing that New Zealanders saw "race relations/Maori issues" as by far the most important problem facing the country through 2003 and 2004, peaking at 40 per cent of those polled in February 2004 just after Dr Brash's Orewa speech.
In 2006 the issue dropped away to average just 5.1 per cent, in sixth place after the economy, health, crime, education and welfare to its lowest level since the polls began in 2001.
Slightly more people (35 per cent) expect race relations to improve over the next 10 years than those who expect them to worsen (27 per cent), with 35 per cent picking no change. Those figures have changed little through 2004 up to the present.
Mr de Bres' report lists a continuing series of racial incidents such as eggs and stones being thrown at a Korean couple in Hamilton last May and Somali-born Hamilton athlete Shafat Salad, 20, saying he had suffered frequent racial abuse.
In Auckland, an Indian-born worker for the migrant women's group Shakti, Philomena Nazareth, was beaten in her car by two women driving behind her last August after she gave way to a car coming from a side road. The women got out when she stopped at a traffic light and punched her through her car window.
"I was easy prey ... if I was a Maori or Pakeha I don't think I would have been attacked," she said.
A reporter at Auckland's Chinese-language World TV, Ling Ling Liang, said she had also been given the fingers and told to "go back to your country" two or three times while driving, and received complaints from Chinese viewers about similar incidents every week.
"We tell them to lay a complaint but they don't because of the language barrier."
Mr de Bres said most complaints to his office were about discrimination at work - not employing people of minority races, not promoting them, and harassment from other workers.
Several complaints were about employers requiring staff to speak only English at work.
A fast-food chain that sacked a Chinese woman for instructing other Chinese staff in Mandarin within earshot of customers is now working with Mr de Bres' office to develop new guidelines.
A blanket ban on speaking languages other than English was probably a breach of human rights, said Mr de Bres. "But if there are good reasons for a requirement to speak English ... then that's fine - for example to do with health and safety."
