Jonathan Milne: Foreigners are not all terrorists

At the British High Commission in Wellington they blew up balloons; at the British consulate in New York they blew up bombs. Security from terrorism and crime was already a key issue in the United Kingdom elections, but it exploded to the fore on election day last week.

As British Prime Minister Tony Blair strolled across the football field in Sedgefield to his nearest polling booth, two crude bombs detonated outside his Government's office on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Still cruder is the manner in which campaigning politicians there - and here - have tied security fears to the immigration debate. Terrorists, Arabs, Muslims, immigrants: in a post-September 11 election campaign, the terms can become synonymous.

So it is that in Britain, where Blair has become the first Labour Prime Minister to win a third four-year term, despite left-wing concerns about his war on Iraq, the Conservatives warned darkly that immigration was out of control.

Blair has promised to help weed out terrorists by introducing compulsory identity cards, but the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats responded with promises of thousands more police officers on the streets.

None of this should bear any relevance to New Zealand, as Labour's Helen Clark seeks her third term as Prime Minister in a few months.

New Zealand opposed the war on Iraq. New Zealand is a collection of remote islands, as far from Mecca as it is possible to be. There are more fundamentalist whale-huggers here than there are fundamentalist Muslims. Yet, Winston Peters has again polished the magic lamp containing the immigration genie. Out it popped, wearing a Saddam Hussein moustache and the uniform of his Palace Guard.

When the Immigration Service last week admitted that a former minister and a former diplomat in Saddam Hussein's cruel regime were in New Zealand, it exposed failings in handling immigration applicants with dubious records. These men had more or less stapled their curriculum vitae to their applications for visitor's permits, but the paper-shufflers at New Zealand's Bangkok immigration office had no guidelines as to what sort of employment history should elicit a "declined" stamp.

Immigration Minister Paul Swain has acknowledged Peters' role in exposing this. And the public has rightly blamed the Immigration Service, with today's Herald on Sunday-Digipoll showing rock-bottom public confidence in the service. But it is a step too far, on evidence to date, to turn this into a national security issue. These men are on none of America's "most wanted" lists, and the Security Intelligence Service has not assessed them as security risks. They are, as one Beehive adviser noted, "doddering old men".

Yesterday, Tony Blair was again able to celebrate his birthday at 10 Downing St, London. The Conservative Party's attempts to portray immigrants as potential suicide bombers had failed to convince the voters.

The Brits - living in a country that might credibly be an al Qaeda target - refused to let fear of immigrants dictate their vote.

New Zealanders have still less reason to be scared of a couple of doddering old men.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY