State racism

Winston Peters launched NZFirst's immigration policy at a Grey Power meeting on Friday - and it has already attracted strong condemnation. An idea of the content can be gained by looking at the audience - as Scoop noted, there wasn't a brown (or yellow) face among them, and obviously no-one under 60. These people represented New Zealand's past, not its future.

The central theme of the policy is "protecting NZ's borders" - but what do they want to be protected against? Not criminals or people who are actually dangerous - despite their well-publicised failures, the NZ Immigration Service does a good enough job of that now. They want to protect against difference. They want to protect against a New Zealand that looks and sounds different from the little whites-only homeland they grew up in in the 40's and 50's.

This is an explicitly racist project, and Winston isn't too afraid about saying so, highlighting the projected increase in the asian population over the next 15 years and saying "we actually have a choice" - that is, a choice over the average skin colour of New Zealand, which is, apparantly, "a matter of national security". Frankly, this is the sort of shit you'd expect from the losers in the National Front, not from the leader of a supposedly "mainstream" political party.

Winston's response to this "threat" is outright state racism - closing the doors on people of one skin colour while opening them for others, setting up "flying squads" staffed by "patriots" to target those who are different and double-check whether they "belong" (on the basis that not being white is a sign of fraud), and fingerprinting, retina-scanning and DNA-testing newcomers to make sure they know they are unwelcome. Others have already noted the parallels with Nazi Germany, and they are apt. It's not genocide, but there's more than a whiff of "racial purity" about it, built on an idea of "New Zealander" which excludes anyone whose ancestors didn't arrive from Britain. And "New Zealand is for New Zealanders" sounds an awful lot like "Germany for the Germans". Unfortunately, judging from the enthusiastic response, it seems that an awful lot of our pensioners would be quite happy with that. Somehow, I think that its not our immigrants, but our elderly who do not share our core values...