Professor Mohan Dutta: “Name racism here, and you will be told you are divisive, that you are importing someone else’s culture war, that you are ungrateful, that this is not who we are.” (Photo supplied)
When Winston Peters racially abused an elected MP from one of this country’s highest offices, not one member of the cabinet was prepared to call it racism, writes Mohan Dutta.
The question that set it off was four words long. During a debate on New Zealand’s Covid response last Wednesday, a Green MP asked Winston Peters whether he was vaccinated.
Peters turned on him. “I know you just came here five minutes ago. Go back to your own country.” Then: “That’s where they lie like a flatfish, but they don’t lie like that here, all right? This is called democracy. This is called democracy, unlike what you’re used to.”
The MP is Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan. He was born in Tianjin, China, and has lived here since the mid-1990s. He holds a doctorate from the University of Auckland. Outside the House, Peters called him an arrogant twit who “can’t even speak the language properly”.
Peters is New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. He is the person who carries this country’s face to the world, and the country he speaks for has spent decades selling that world a story about its own decency. That story is now the main thing standing between New Zealanders and an honest conversation about racism.
Watch what happened next. Shane Jones, New Zealand First’s deputy leader, said Xu-Nan should know his place, described himself and Peters as the “historical foundation New Zealanders”, and announced his party would campaign on requiring migrants to be citizens and to have been here a long time before standing for office.
The speaker, Gerry Brownlee, called Peters’ remark inappropriate and took no further action, noting that no member had raised a point of order at the time. The prime minister called it attention-seeking, and issued that rebuke in a statement attributed to the leader of the National Party rather than to the prime minister of New Zealand. The ACT leader, who is the deputy prime minister, advised giving it no attention.
Not one of them used the word racism. Finally, on Friday, the prime minister was asked if he thought Peters’ comments were racist. He replied: “Yes, I do.”
By then, China’s embassy had lodged formal representations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the ministry Peters runs, over negative remarks made in our parliament. Ambassador Wang Xiaolong had already posted that Beijing has no interest in being dragged into another country’s domestic politics, and that such a statement sometimes says more about the person making it than about anyone else. Peters replied by decrying pearl-clutching and faux outrage.
A foreign embassy had to raise the rights of Chinese New Zealanders because our own head of government would not. Whatever one thinks of Beijing’s record on ethnic minorities, and I have written critically about it, the sequence is damning. China is our largest trading partner, worth more than $41 billion a year, and our largest source of international students.
New Zealand also has obligations it undertook. We ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination on November 22, 1972, without reservations. Article 4 requires the state not to permit its public authorities to promote or incite racial discrimination.
A cabinet minister is a public authority. There is no reading of that clause under which Winston’s Wednesday outburst was a private opinion.
New Zealand has never accepted Article 14, the provision that lets individuals bring complaints to the United Nations committee. So the nurse who is told to go home, the student whose flat application dies when the landlord hears her name, the MP told to know his place, have no road to Geneva. Only governments do.
The committee has already told us what it sees here. On December 5, it delivered New Zealand its longest and most detailed assessment ever, 14 pages. It recorded grave concern at the Christchurch mosque attacks and the limited progress on the Royal Commission’s recommendations. It named the persistence of racist hate speech by politicians and public figures. It warned that this country is at risk of systemic discrimination.
That was eight months ago. Our foreign minister has now demonstrated the accuracy of those findings from the floor of the House.
The pattern is not new. Last year, Shane Jones bellowed “send the Mexicans home” across the chamber at a Green MP, drawing a diplomatic protest from Mexico. Peters followed up by telling two overseas-born MPs, including Xu-Nan, to “show some gratitude” for being in New Zealand.
In February, Peters demanded to know why a minister was answering a question from someone “who comes from Rarotonga.” He meant Teanau Tuiono, who was born in Auckland and has Aotearoa Māori as well as Cook Islands Māori whakapapa. Brownlee ruled the question highly disorderly, then declined to make Peters withdraw it. In April, Jones warned of “a butter chicken tsunami” arriving with the India trade deal. The prime minister called that “unhelpful”. He would not call it racist.
I know where this language lands, because it lands on my phone. I am a professor at Massey University, and I write about racism in this country. Every time I publish, the same machinery kicks in on X. I’m told to go home. Told that a man from India should shut up about New Zealand’s affairs. There are calls for my deportation. Slurs about where I was born. Complaints demanding that my university fire me.
The volume rises in the days after a senior politician says the quiet thing out loud in parliament.
Peters will say he spoke as a party leader rather than as a minister. Others will add that he is a showman, that outrage is the product, and that the mature response is to starve him of it. There is something to that. He has run this play since the 1990s, and it has kept him in office.
But the strategy of ignoring him has been tested for 30 years and has failed. Ignoring him did not make him marginal. It made him foreign minister. Nobody at the supermarket checks which hat he’s wearing when he chooses to be racist.
Which brings me to the story New Zealand tells about itself.
We like to think we are the country of “they are us”, of the prime ministerial embrace after Christchurch, of a small nation punching above its weight in compassion. The reality is closer to the opposite, cloaked in white fragility.
Name racism here, and you will be told you are divisive, that you are importing someone else’s culture war, that you are ungrateful, that this is not who we are. The person describing the violence often becomes the source of the discomfort. The violence itself becomes an eccentric act, an attention-seeking moment — anything except a structure.
So let us be precise about who breached the peace. It is not impolite to name racism, to document it, or to organise against it. What is impolite is telling a New Zealander of 30 years to go home. What is indecent is a cabinet that shelters the person saying it. What is uncivil is a country that recruits migrants to staff its hospitals and milk its cows, and recruits students to keep its universities solvent, then allows politicians to campaign on their vilification.
A society that treats naming racism as the greater offence has confused the mirror with the wound.
The same reflex is used to discipline Māori. The word Aotearoa is heavily policed, the Treaty is called divisive, and two centuries of dispossession are filed under grievance. Anyone who is serious about anti-racism has to start here.
Xu-Nan answered his abuser with more grace than the moment deserved, calling the remarks a distraction tactic by a government which is presiding over hard times.
His grace should not be the entry fee. A genuinely kind country would not need the people it humiliates to be gracious about it. It would take the portfolio off the man doing the humiliating in our name.
Then it might finally have the conversation it has been avoiding since 1840.
Mohan Dutta is Dean’s Chair in Communication, Massey University, and director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE).
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Racism doesn’t happen. It’s not an event. It’s a historical process. It is, in essence, always happening wherever the impact of European imperialism has touched. New Zealand’s very existence as a settler state is racism “happening”, it’s name is racism “happening”, it’s use of the English language is racism “happening”, the legal system in NZ is racism happening, private property in NZ is racism happening, the police existing in NZ is racism happening.
It’s not enough to name racism when it’s happening, a deliberate and explicit process of anti-racist and decolonization is what is needed.
Peters turned on him. “I know you just came here five minutes ago. Go back to your own country.” Then: “That’s where they lie like a flatfish, but they don’t lie like that here, all right? This is called democracy. This is called democracy, unlike what you’re used to.”
So much of the racism is rooted in this eugenics tier understanding of Western political institutions.
Democracy (really, republicanism) is an inherently a feature of wealthy white college educated males. Any success garnered by people outside that cohort is defined as illegitimate. A consequence of trickery, corruption, or outside interference.
