IT'S unusual for me to hit the same editorial subject twice in a row, but I found New Zealand First leader Winston Peters' Masterton visit and speech a bit disturbing, and more should be said about it.
Perhaps the lowest point in his speech was holding up a real estate magazine for an Auckland market. It was printed entirely in Chinese. I suspect it was to illustrate two points: that we have people in this country whose mother tongue is not English, and those people buy houses.
That was my first real experience of a Winston Peters rally, and I say the word "rally" because it had that air about it - enhanced by his attempts to stir up an aged audience with the concept of too many immigrants coming to New Zealand.
What worries me is that, for a moment, it seemed like people in that audience forgot we live in a country where people speak other languages, and even read literature in other languages. We live in a country where it is pretty difficult to immigrate to. We live in a country where people don't arrive here by a leaky boat, but go through a rigorous process. I remember one of my journalists in Wellington, who was French with perfect English, getting hassled by Immigration for wanting to live here. I got hassled for hiring her. Why didn't I hire a New Zealander, I was asked? Because she had a driver's licence and these other young idiots didn't, I said.
New Zealand is not thousands of years of pure breeding - if there is such a thing. We are what we are, a country that celebrates new generations of motivated, successful, intelligent people who make our country healthy. We've been doing it for 150 years.
