Racism in Aotearoa/NZ

by Byron Clark

On March 23^rd Christchurch witnessed the spectacle of a white pride demonstration. In a Saint Albans park, with plans to march down Papanui road, approximately thirty people gathered. Mostly young men, they wore military style garb, many of them adorned with swastikas. Organisers of the demonstration advertised it as a family friendly outing, advocating “white rights” and pride in one’s ethnicity, but the rank-and-file of the white nationalist movement didn’t want to leave their neo-Nazi regalia at home, and couldn’t resist the temptation to make sieg heil salutes.

The local community was out in force to oppose racism, around a hundred people gathered in a counter demonstration. Many of them residents of St Albans who wanted to make it clear that racism is not welcome in their community and the white pride demonstrators did not represent their views. In a fact that should embarrass most of this city’s residents, Christchurch is only city in Aotearoa with an active white supremacist movement. The Te Ara encyclopaedia entry on the city notes that a white supremacist subculture emerged here in the 1990s, and members of it would periodically attack ethnic minorities.

Although many of the people on the demonstration would have been just children at that time, white supremacy is still a violent movement today. In 2010 white supremacist Shannon Brent Flewellen was sentenced to life imprisonment in a Christchurch court for the brutal murder of South Korean student Kim Jae-Hyeon. The judge noted that Flewellen “regarded [the victim] as not deserving of the same dignity and respect as a white person.”

There was no outright violence at the recent white pride rally, although one of the demonstrators was arrested at the beginning of the demonstration for a prior incident, and near the end a carload of white supremacists grabbed a sign from one of the counter-protesters as they drove past yelling “white pride!” injuring the woman’s arm. It’s no surprise that few people from ethnic minority groups joined the counter protest. While they would have agreed with its aims they would have been putting themselves at a greater risk than the Pakeha protesters.

Counter protestors successfully cut the white pride march short, blocking the footpath making the white supremacists change direction and return to the park. The action has solidified a core group of anti-racist activists, who have since held meetings to plan further anti-racist activities. It’s a big  task, opposing racism means more than just opposing  the Right Wing Resistance, the group behind March’s white supremacist rally.

No one is born racist. We need to be asking ourselves what it is about our society that has allowed a white-supremacist movement to grow in this Christchurch. Part of it is demographics. While in other cities the working class is made up largely of Maori and Polynesians, Christchurch still has a predominantly white working class. With unemployment high, and the state of many poorer suburbs following the earthquakes, it’s unsurprising that working class Pakeha are feeling abandoned, looking for something to join and someone to blame.

Understanding Racism

Groups like the Right Wing Resistance, and its forerunner the National Front, take racism to its most horrific extremes. But the road to white supremacy is paved with a softer racism that is more tolerated.  No working class Pakeha would consider joining a neo-Nazi organisation if they had not already been indoctrinated with the myth of “Maori privilege” and a fear of outsiders.

The idea that Maori are privileged, at the expense of Pakeha, is perpetuated by many of the opinion makers in this country. The Late Paul Holmes wrote that Maori “seem to exist in a perfect world of benefit provision…no one has to have a job and the Treaty is all that matters.” Adding that “we’ll end up paying the usual millions into the hands of the Maori aristocracy”

In reality, while Maori are particularly dispossessed by capitalism and colonisation, the average beneficiary is Pakeha. Dispossessed of land and resources, most Maori have not benefited from Treaty settlements, which make up a tiny percentage of government expenditure. Yet the meme of the privileged Maori has spread though talkback radio and the comment threads on Stuff.co.nz and no doubt reaches the ears of future white supremacists.

Racism in parliament

Anti-immigration views are aired in mainstream. For all Right Wing Resistance’s talk of “white rights”, white people actually have more rights in New Zealand than immigrants from predominantly non-white countries. Yet xenophobic rhetoric around immigration would have us believe otherwise. When NZ First Richard Prosser called for Muslim men to be banned from planes, his party leader would not endorse his views, yet as recently as 2005 Winston Peters was whipping up fear against Muslim immigration. In a speech titled ‘The end of Tolerance’ he said;

“In New Zealand the Muslim community has been quick to show us their more moderate face, but there is a militant underbelly here as well…Underneath it all the agenda is to promote fundamentalist Islam – indeed these groups are like the mythical Hydra, a serpent underbelly with multiple heads, capable of striking at any time and in any direction,”

At election time, the white supremacists have in the past endorsed New Zealand First. While they are not responsible for what groups endorse them, it says something about New Zealand First that white supremacists can comfortably call for a vote for them. While Right Wing Resistance is a fringe group, New Zealand First is supported by 1 in 20 New Zealanders, and promotes policies that RWR supports. Those voters need to think about the impact giving a platform to xenophobia is having.

When New Zealand First was in government we witnessed the bizarre spectacle of a Minister of Foreign Affairs who had built his political career on a hatred of foreigners. But the two major parties in parliament are not without blame. In the 1970’s the Labour government led by Norman Kirk began the “dawn raids” where Polynesians who had overstayed their work visas were rounded up at dawn and deported. These policies were continued and escalated significantly under the following National government led by Rob Muldoon. At the time, the majority of overstayers were not Polynesian, but British.

In more recent times we have seen the imprisonment without trail of Algerian political refugee Ahmed Zaoui under the last Labour government. The current government has made a deal with Australia to take 150 asylum seekers per year; on the surface a progressive policy, though that 150 will come out of the quota of refugees New Zealand takes anyway, and those people will still have to wait for years in Australia or in an offshore centre under the “no advantage policy”. By making this deal, New Zealand has given an endorsement to Australia’s brutal policies toward refugees.

ACT should also receive a mention, while their sole MP arguably has less influence than the other parties mentioned, John Banks told The Nation that “If we continue the bankrupt response of just paying young Polynesian, young Maori men in South Auckland, the dole to sit in front of TV, smoke marijuana, watch pornography and plan more drug offending and more burglaries, then we’re going to have them coming through our window”

ACT’s largest donor last election was the multi-millionaire Southland property developer Louis Crimp who gave the party $125,520 to do something about Maori, who were, in his words “either in jail or on welfare”. Crimps attitude shows that racism is hardly a working class phenomenon.

The recent appointment of Susan Devoy as Race Relations Commissioner, a woman who has previously argued for scrapping Waitangi Day and criticised boycotts on apartheid South Africa, also shows that racism has mainstream ruling-class approval.

Racism in the media

Of course no discussion of mainstream racism is complete without addressing the role of the media. Paul Henry, The ‘controversial’ broadcaster once asked John Key if then Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand (born in Auckland to Indian-Fijian parents) was a New Zealander or not, then asking “Are you going to choose a New Zealander who looks and sounds like a New Zealander this time?”

What Henry was saying, was that real New Zealanders are white people, and we shouldn’t have someone who doesn’t look and sound like a white person in one of the country’s highest political offices.  Henry always presented himself as an anti-establishment figure, flying the flag of the white male who had lost power to women and ethnic minorities. While actually a conservative, he appears as a rebel. Michael Laws with his talkback show fills a similar role.

Imagine now the unemployed Pakeha man in East Christchurch. He has learned that Maori are living the high life at the expense of the tax payer, too many immigrants are coming here and some of them might be terrorists and the country is now being run by people who don’t even look and sound like real New Zealanders. RWR leader Kyle Chapman didn’t tell him those things; he learned them from people in parliament and the mainstream media.

Everyone has a right to free speech, but the right to free speech is not the same as the right to a platform for that speech. There is good reason that Kyle Chapman doesn’t write a column in The Press, yet ideas not dissimilar from his own are given a huge audience. If we want to end racism, we need to start at the roots, and that means no longer giving space to racist views in the media, and opposing the racism of government and others in parliament.