Comment: It was a wonderfully interesting bunch of people at the council-owned Lynfield Youth and Leisure Centre in Auckland on Thursday night. I popped along with my 11-year-old son after his hockey training; I met other parents I knew who’d done the same. People were forced to park hundreds of metres away, and dribbled into the 300-capacity gymnasium late.
Smiling police, thumbs hooked in their tactical suspenders, stood at the doors and dotted the perimeter. A couple of young women were there in their flannel check pyjama pants.
National Party campaign workers in their bright blue party-branded fleeces collected email addresses under the pretence of event management. One woman brought Daisy, her well-behaved black spoodle, clad in a yellow knitted jacket. Daisy wasn’t required to sign in.
Wearing her silver tiara and sash, Miss New Zealand 2026 Chloe Robinson was teetering around the foyer on perilously high heels to raise concerns about the Government’s Summary Offences (Move-on Orders) Amendment Bill. “There’s not a clear enough distinction between people who are just rough sleepers needing a home, and people who are causing a disturbance,” she told me.
Stats NZ says the communities around Mt Roskill are the country’s most ethnically diverse, and that was evident in the crowd who turned out to hear the Prime Minister speak. Most were Asian – predominantly Chinese or Indian – and many were first-generation migrants, judging by my conversations.
Christopher Luxon appealed to the challenges of families trying to give their kids the best possible chance at life, speaking at length about schooling.
“Education is quite personal for me, because I’m a kid whose parents left school at 15 and 16. I’m the oldest of three boys. They had us young. I have amazing parents, and they were determined that I would get a great education.
“And I went through the New Zealand education system, and I managed to get us from a set of circumstances to a better set of circumstances because of education. I know my story is not uncommon. It’s probably common to many of you here in this room as well.”
‘While Mr Peters looks like a throwback, his protectionist and anti-immigrant politics are now in fashion around the world.’
The Economist
Some of the loudest applause was saved for the National Party leader’s exhortations to fiscal prudence, and his claims to have cracked down on crime. “Let’s not make lots of promises and boil the ocean and lots of bumper stickers and platitudes. Let’s get ruthlessly clear on the problem. Common sense plan. Get the results, and now people feel safer.”
But the loudest cheer?
That wasn’t for Luxon at all. That was for a woman in the back corner of the room, Andie Niu, who challenged him on his response to Foreign Minister Winston Peters’ racist attack on Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan.
Peters has shown he can hand out the slurs. Now he must surely be learning to take the epithets as well. Other politicians are calling him racist and xenophobic.
Overnight, The Economist, one of the world’s most serious and respected publications, called Peters’ attack on Xu-Nan “detestable” – in its headline, no less. It said neither his boxy suits nor his politics had changed much since the 1990s. “But while Mr Peters looks like a throwback, his protectionist and anti-immigrant politics are now in fashion around the world.”
Luxon, too, reiterated his unhappiness with the NZ First leader’s comments, saying he was pretending to be Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage.
“When someone tells an immigrant to go home and they’re not from here, that is unacceptable,” Luxon told Niu. “And I found those comments pretty offensive.”
He’d spent a lot of time in the Chinese, Indian and Filipino immigrant communities. “They’ve left everything behind – their friends, their family, their language and culture. They come to New Zealand because they think they can make a better future for themselves and their families.
“They work incredibly hard. They take one job, two jobs, three jobs. You see them get their kids to school on time. They don’t go on welfare. They work really hard for a deposit for their house, for their business. They have made New Zealand an infinitely better place.”
He accused unnamed political leaders of trying to whip up fake race and migration issues.
“Some politicians are talking about a problem that they wish existed in New Zealand, but doesn’t exist. Trump in America has 13 to 15 million illegal immigrants. The UK has probably, by any count, up to a million illegal immigrants. We saw a huge influx of refugees into Germany – those countries have challenges with illegal immigration.
“We have legal immigration in this country. People come here because we manage the system in a smart, dynamic, targeted kind of way. We very much link it back to our economic agenda – where we have job shortages and skills that we need to apply – and to our infrastructure development. I think New Zealanders are really proud of that.”
The audience welcomed Luxon’s words – but for some I spoke to, they didn’t go far enough.
Certainly not for Andie Niu, who told me afterwards that Peters should be sacked. “His words, they were definitely racist, so not acceptable for our community. Definitely not – especially when he’s in charge of the foreign affairs ministry. He is not representing New Zealand well.”
She could no longer support a National Party that was willing to go into government with NZ First again, she added. “If you or I do a job, you make a mistake, the boss will fire you. This is the same thing. The Prime Minister should get Winston to stand down from his position right now.”
