Dialogue: Throw open door to all and sundry

A rather prolonged, pained yowl of protest went up at lunch not long ago when yours truly suggested that New Zealand ought to drop-kick the rule-book and throw open the door to all South Asian immigrants - you know, let in absolutely everyone who wants to live here, including the hookers, pimps and prospectors ...

But, alas, nobody at my table warmed to my point. Even the guy who had brought in leftover Thai takeout for his lunch couldn't quite get his head around the idea of Asian infiltration.

Admittedly, I was suggesting bringing in some three or four million people - you know, bringing some fairly intense characters into the country in bulk, swelling the population to a witty, seething, multicoloured, world-rating six or seven million - and really shaking old whitey up.

White New Zealand needs a wake-up call, I feel, an arrogance to pit its own against. There's been nothing much doing in this department since Bastion Pt. (I don't really count the Moutua Gardens thing: it had potential to force one to take a good look at oneself and one's views on the way that New Zealand should look, but, alas, in the end simply took place too far south to really register).

Where was I? Yes. I was going to say that I'm often amazed at the limits people have when it comes to imagining ways in which their little nation might be saved (from the brain-drain, economic ruin, world indifference, and so on and on). People have some vague notion that all we need to do to regain world notice is to pick up the pace in e-commerce. People can't (or won't) think more adventurously than that. There is certainly no sense that New Zealand ought radically to alter its shape.

Quite the reverse. Even intelligent people harbour romantic, if antiquated, visions of New Zealand as a sort of clean, green, sparsely populated, untainted one-off; you find people will defend this image, even if they've never really experienced it.

We can go back to my lunch-table for a take on this. Faced with the proposition of doubling the population with South-east Asians, people sprang to the defence of the New Zealand bush. You'll know (I hope) what I'm getting at here - people came up with lines like, "If the population gets out of control, it'll bugger our wonderful natural environment. The pollution will get out of control and that'll be the end of our clean, green image and New Zealand as we know it." Yap, yap, yap.

Which may be true, but the point I'm trying to make is that none of the speakers (and indeed, no one in my acquaintance) really knew what he or she was talking about. Put simply, they never experience New Zealand's wonderful natural environment. Ever. They all live in cities, all of the time. They never go bush, ever. They don't even go south of Market Rd.

The vision they have of our wonderful natural environment is entirely romantic. It is never tried for real. At best, Getting Away From It All these days means pouring into someone's Beamer, driving up to a place like Leigh and regrouping, safe and sound, at a Ponsonby home-away-from-home such as the Sawmill Cafe.

And that's it. That is where the adventure ends. The upshot is that it's odd to find New Zealanders - especially New Zealanders of one's own age - fighting against major cosmopolitan population expansion on the grounds that urban sprawl will narrow their choice of locations for wilderness weekends. Strange times.

I like the thought of a New Zealand that looks different from the New Zealand people imagine we have - a New Zealand that looks, say, like Hong Kong. Okay, okay, so I'm in cloud-cuckoo land on that one. Still, I like the thought of the noise and the size and the pace. I like the thought of filling our place up with millions of hard-core punters who hail from lands where every second person is killed in the rush, where people, understandably, have a sense of urgency.

Bit of poetry for you on this point, people. "Every race is here," Dylan Thomas once wrote of a famous, cosmopolitan American city. I must say that I rather admire this insight from Dylan (and I'm quite sure he'd be delighted, too, so let's not do the tall-poppy thing, please, and laugh at Kate for presuming to quote the greats).

Mr Thomas was pissed for half of his visit and comatose for the rest, but he still managed to come up with a line that pegged the best aspect of urban America. It is a line that suggests that a real city is one where every ethnic race is present and, perhaps more to the point, busy racing and competing with the others.

At the very least, the word "race" in this context suggests a certain forward motion and useful impetus. I wish New Zealanders could see that. Makes perfect sense to me. To look like the rest of the world, we need to double (at least) in size, colour ourselves in, finally consider ourselves urban and learn how to teem.