KEY POINTS:
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters says the country's flawed immigration system is responsible for an Auckland crime wave with racial and ethnic undertones.
Speaking to the New Zealand First party convention yesterday, he said his party had warned against the danger of seeing the world through "multiculturalism spectacles".
And he railed against gangs as a visible breakdown of law and order.
Mr Peters pointed to the inner-city deaths in Auckland on Saturday - over which an Iraqi faces charges - and also referred to kidnapping crime in the wake of last week's abduction of 5-year old Xin Xin Ma.
"The crime wave in Auckland is all too real - as are its racial and ethnic undertones.
"There is nothing so antiseptic as the words 'I told you so' but we damned well did and we will go on doing it."
He said the message of the recent anti-crime march of the Asian community in Auckland was that it was not going to be "culturally intimidated" even if others were.
Mr Peters said it was an honest response of the Asian community "but if anyone missed the ethnic dimension of the protest, they are wilfully blind".
He denounced "multiculturalism" as actively promoting every culture "and therein lie the seeds of ethnic strife".
"If we are to all head in a different direction, based on 50 different cultures for our ship of state, no wind will be the right wind.
"Did we come here to build a new country with its own culture, or a resettlement of 50 different cultures from somewhere else?
"[We must] make up our mind. If we are to have a destiny and shared values and a New Zealand way, it is one or the other but it can't be both."
He said his party remained vigilant about the rate of immigration and where New Zealand's future citizens came from.
Mr Peters said NZ gangs had "fused the LA-style gangster culture of drugs and violence with disenfranchised urban Maori and in doing so have bastardised Maori culture". The gangs were the most visible and blatant manifestation of the breakdown in law and order, he said.
"Brazen and cocky, the patched gang members strut and preen themselves in our streets and outside social welfare offices where they pick up their dole."
