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.
