KEY POINTS:
It is a sign of the maturing of New Zealand political debate that Peter Brown's racist rant this week did not spark mass hysteria.
The New Zealand First deputy leader's stance on immigration did not lead the TV news after he issued his provocative press release on Wednesday. It was dismissed as statistically incorrect on current affairs shows, which were scathing about Brown's knowledge of immigration. Even the plethora of political blogs all but ignored his stunt.
There is only one politician in New Zealand capable of the kind of hypocrisy that uses an English immigrant to front a campaign vilifying Asian immigrants and their effect on Kiwi life. That Winston Peters is also Minister of Foreign Affairs and, as Brown admitted in a Campbell Live interview, approved of Brown's anti-Asian press release, matters to him not a jot.
Seven months out from an election is, for Peters at least, time to test the public's appetite for racial stereotyping and blatantly bigoted vote buying. The public didn't warm to it. The media didn't bite. One radio talkback host even warned callers off raising the issue on his show.
Brown's contention, that a projected increase of 3.4 per cent of the ethnic Asian population in New Zealand would lead to "a real danger we will be inundated with people who have no intention of integrating into our society" missed its mark entirely. New Zealand society has itself integrated, evolving with our increasingly diverse population. The Pasifika Festival, which attracts more than 100,000 people in Auckland each year, is a Kiwi festival, just as the Chinese Lantern festival is a Kiwi festival and Waipu's eccentric Highland Games are a celebration of New Zealand life.
Every aspect of our culture - the way we eat, speak, dress and socialise - has merged and grown with the immigrants who make up our nation. Even Maori - the group that has lost the most from immigration over the past 250 years - paid little heed to Brown this week, despite his laughable assertion that "the original inhabitants get shoved further down the pile because successive governments keep throwing the doors open to New Zealand".
This presumably means that Brown, a native of England, rails against colonisation as well.
As for the "mini societies" or "enclaves" that Brown says Asian immigrants set up in New Zealand causing "division, friction and resentment", all communities are made up of "mini societies". In Auckland's bush-clad Waitakere ranges, many of those enclaves are British. In Ponsonby there are sizeable enclaves of homosexuals and on the North Shore there are South African mini societies that have even seen fit to open up their own food stores.
The divisions and frictions in our society are about many things - economic status, sense of entitlement, envy, social differences. Racism can be a front for those resentments, but is rarely the reason.
New Zealand First may well be a party in its death throes, desperately casting about for the remnants of support that the often charismatic Peters once seemed to garner effortlessly from the nation's elderly.
What Brown and Peters may not have realised is that New Zealand in 2008 is a society far less nervous about our newest members. If not at ease with our differences - both those that are visible and those that are not - we are at least more tolerant. Middle New Zealand has more to worry about - mortgages, food prices and Robbie Deans' move across the Tasman - than where our neighbours' parents were born.
In 2026 there may be 790,000 ethnic Asian Kiwis, but that number is still less than a quarter of the European population and fewer than Maori. The number of those who care about what those figures mean will have declined even further.
New Zealand can be proud of its muted reaction to such overtly manipulative prodding this week. The days of archaic rantings such as Peter Brown's signalling a collective anxiety about who we are and how we relate are, finally, beginning to disappear.
