Editorial: Focus on real issues

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters. Photo / Dean Purcell

Crikey. New Zealand's politicians are doing their best to make the election race a race election.

Hardly a day goes by without a candidate saying something offensive or calling out others' policies or comments as racist - whether they are or not.

If it's not conservatives like Act deriding the concept of racial privilege for Maori, or Winston Peters and Colin Craig railing against land sales to the Chinese, it's the strange but disturbing sight of what could be anti-Semitism creeping in, intentional or not.

Just this week Labour candidate Steven Gibson's use of the racially loaded term "Shylock" in relation to Prime Minister John Key came as Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy was drawn into a three-way spat with NZ First leader Winston Peters and Act leader Jamie Whyte over Mr Peters' off-colour joke about Chinese investors at the weekend.

You don't have to have read The Merchant of Venice to be an MP, but it pays to think and think again before uttering (or posting on Facebook) any racially charged words as a term of abuse.

It wasn't New Zealand's first glimpse of anti-Semitism this year. An Israeli flag emblazoned with a Nazi swastika was seen at a demonstration last month against the Israeli offensive in Gaza. Mana Party members were present at the protest and party activist John Minto has defended the burning and defacing of the Israeli flag.

Way to blunt an argument folks. Righteous anger at the killing of civilians it may have been, but the message was spoilt by such blatant acts.

As for that joke from Winston Peters - no, no, no.

I would repeat it, but two wrongs definitely don't make a right.

And once again a sideshow spoils any chance of a decent policy argument.