Rudman's city: Contrition is good for the soul - and it makes us remember

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Wander down Queen St any lunchtime and the footpaths are something of a multicultural kaleidoscope. Prime Minister Helen Clark's apology for past injustices to early Chinese immigrants is a reminder of how drastically things have changed.

What is easy to forget is how recent our retreat from racial insularity has been. I can recall, for example, the National Party candidate in Onehunga during the 1969 election campaign playing the Yellow Peril card with her little chant from the platform that "Asia is closer by plane than Wellington is by train".

Today's focus is on how, beginning in the late 19th century we, with Australian states and Canada, adopted a Californian law imposing an entry fee on alien immigrants.

In New Zealand, populist and rabid anti-Chinese politician Richard John Seddon upped the poll tax on Chinese to £100. It wasn't abolished until 1944.

However, New Zealanders' fear of Chinese immigrants was no aberrant blind spot. It's not so long ago that we were highly suspicious of all foreigners.

On my bookshelf is a copy of the parliamentary report of the Dominion Population Committee dated 1946. By then, the Chinese poll tax had been abolished for two years, Finance Minister Walter Nash declaring that "the Chinese are as good as any other race". Despite these modern ideas, strange attitudes still lingered.

The committee saw the population as divided into three categories: Europeans, Maori and race aliens.

Of a total population of 1,573,810 listed in the 1936 census, race aliens were 6976.

Of these, Chinese made up 2943 (all but 511 of them male), Indians 1200 and Syrians 1261. Obviously, treacherous foreigners were hardly about to swamp the country.

This was thanks to devices such as the post-First World War Undesirable Aliens Exclusion Act, which was designed to prevent "ex-enemy aliens and other disaffected and disloyal persons" from reaching our shores.

In case that was not enough, there was back-up protection. All non-British subjects and "people of some coloured races" had to get an entry permit from the Minister of Customs.

The 1946 committee contemplated the need for new immigrants, but agonised on the matter of "racial absorption". Of course "British stock" was most desirable, but unfortunately they were in great demand elsewhere.

It was decided that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish would be suitable substitutes, "practically no problems" having, in the past, "risen with these types". Them and the Dutch.

Southern European types, on the other hand, were a worry. They tended to be "itinerant settlers" and "in many cases retains his roots in the country of origin".

For some of them "naturalisation has been obtained for purely selfish reasons without any real feeling of allegiance to this country". For these reasons, if Poms were not available, blue-eyed, blond-haired Viking types were seen as the next best thing.

Of other race aliens - Asiatics, for example - there is no mention. Apart, that is, for the Jews, who get a rather shameful shove sideways.

Local Jews had pressed the committee to allow settlement of close relatives who had survived the Holocaust. They offered to provide homes and to support them financially.

The committee, while expressing "considerable sympathy" for "the trials of the Jewish race over the past decade", refused because of "the housing situation" and the demand for "special types of workers" to recommend "any preferential treatment to any particular type of immigrant".

With this background, why, you might ask, has the Government singled out the Chinese for special treatment? The easy answer, I guess, is that they asked for it and had a good case, so why not?

Where such apologies might end, well that's a more difficult one.

Former Treaty Negotiations Minister Doug Graham seems to have started this fashion back in November 1995 when he persuaded the Queen to sign a statement offering her "profound regrets" and unreserved apologies for past wrongs to the Tainui people.

Other treaty settlements, complete with crown apology, followed. Sir Douglas noted at the time how unusual the move was.

The habit caught on. In May 1999 the British Government apologised to children that had been shipped off to overseas orphanages after the war.

Last December the Canadians apologised for executing First World War deserters.

Even the Pope joined in, apologising for missionary excesses to indigenous peoples.

But sometimes apologies are not forthcoming. Afrikaners used the Tainui apology as precedent to try to screw an apology from the British over the Boer War. They failed.

And in the Irish Parliament, Bertie Ahern once suggested that the Government use the Tainui apology as precedent to extract an apology from the British Queen for the awful effects of the great potato famine.

A Government spokesman said Ireland had "too much self-respect and dignity" to demand any such thing.

Closer to home, Australian leader John Howard has adamantly refused to apologise to the "stolen generation" of Aborigines removed from their mothers and placed in white foster homes.

He is apparently concerned about the precedent he might be setting in apologising for the sins of past governments. In theory, perhaps, he has a point. If things got out of hand, we might have Helen Clark apologising for Rogernomics, for the Vietnam War - you name it.

But the reality is that the apology to the Chinese, like that to the Tainui and others beforehand, has brought pleasure to those seeking it, and to those giving it.

It has also got the rest of us reflecting, for a brief moment, on our past. Which is surely no bad thing.