Brian Rudman: Playing Chinese card makes ape out of Peters

Talk about being cute. Here we have Winston Peters spending the whole election campaign beating up on Asian immigrants, then standing up before a hall full of them at the Auckland Showgrounds and saying there was no way he could be a racist because, as a Maori, he had Chinese blood coursing through his veins.

What will he come up with next? That he's an animal lover because he's descended - as we all are - from the apes? Or that he's going to assist his new-found Chinese cuzzies to file a claim, as ancestral tangata whenua, with the Waitangi Tribunal?

Sure, Mr Peters is correct in his general thesis that descendants of the original Polynesians emerged out of Asia some 5000 years ago. But I couldn't find an expert to back his claim that the original Maori came from a mainland China high-mountain tribe called Gao Shan Zhu.

When it comes to pre-history, such details are just not available. There's no royal palace of Gao Shan Zhu, for example, with records showing that in 4005BC, on a warm and sunny day, Admiral Gao Shan Win Poo Peters and a brave band of warriors, provisioned with cages of takeaway on-the-hoof kiore, set out to populate Aotearoa.

Nor are there any travellers' letters home describing the fun they had in their stopovers with the local people at the notorious fleshpots of Bali and the Bismarck Archipelago.

Instead, archaeologists and anthropologists have had to make do with digging up bits of bone and pottery shards and trying to make links. Also involved have been the linguists, who say the ancestral language of Polynesia came from in or near Taiwan.

The most recent participants in the hunt have been the geneticists who have been following the DNA trail backwards. They've got back as far as Southeast Asia but after that the picture gets rather blurred. Certainly nothing as definite as Mr Peters would have us believe.

What the combined knowledge does show is that by about 3500 years ago, Mr Peters' ancestors seem to have reached the islands of Melanesia, north of Australia. There they rested up, picking up some genes and culture from the local inhabitants who had lived there for 30,000 to 40,000 years. Then they sailed out into the Pacific and, eventually, some arrived in New Zealand.

It was a journey, all in, of 5000 or 6000 years, and the sailors who eventually arrived here looked nothing like the ones who set off many thousands of years before.

As Auckland University anthropology professor Geoff Irwin points out: "They changed and adapted as they came. So they weren't Polynesians until they were in Polynesia a while and then they came down here and adapted to this place and adapted it to them."

The China connection, he says, "is very shadowy and vague and a long time ago, and there was nobody looking like Winston living in south China 5000 years ago".

Fascinating as this little cul de sac in history is, Mr Peters' attempt to use his genetic history to absolve himself of accusations of playing the race card in the now and present does not hold up. It's as absurd as arguing that because all of humankind is descended, according to the latest theory, from an African "Eve", no one can be a racist.

Mr Peters, in his speech to Auckland's Asian community, typically enough blamed the media for misreporting his call for "a coherent immigration policy" as anti-Asian.

How then does he describe his aside to Southland Times editor Fred Tullet during a leaders' debate on Sky TV? Mr Peters had done his standard attack on floods of immigrants into the country - "seven out of 10 unskilled and a burden on the taxpayer" - when Mr Tullet responded that Southland was desperately short of workers.

Mr Peters responded: "So you want a bunch of people from Bangladesh and India to come down there? I don't think so. Ask your people on the streets of Southland." Earlier he had singled out African migrants with Aids.

This is not reasoned debate. It's using a person's race or nationality to score cheap debating points and to garner favour with those voters who still frighten themselves to sleep with thoughts of the big black bogeyman or the yellow peril coming to get them in the night.

Try to wriggle out of allegations of playing the race card by revealing some shared genetic link going back 6000 years with the people he is taking potshots at is just not going to work for Mr Peters.

Full news coverage:
nzherald.co.nz/election

Election links:
The parties, policies, voting information, and more

Ask a politician:
Send us a question, on any topic, addressed to any party leader. We'll choose the best questions to put to the leaders, and publish the answers in our election coverage.