The Kindness That Silences: Naming the Racism of New Zealand First
Three times. In the House of Representatives, the elected heart of this country's democracy, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs told a sitting Member of Parliament to go back to his own country. Three times. Dr Lawrence Xu-Nan was born in Tianjin and has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand since the mid-1990s. He has spent more of his life here than many of the people who cheered the remark online. Winston Peters looked at him across the chamber and said, "I know you just came here five minutes ago. Go back to your own country," and then, warming to it, told the House that where Xu-Nan comes from they lie like a flatfish, that this thing we have here is called democracy, unlike what you are used to. When Xu-Nan and Ricardo Menéndez March objected, Peters told them to show some gratitude for being in New Zealand. Shane Jones, his deputy, added that Xu-Nan should know his place, and announced that the party would campaign on requiring migrants to have been citizens here for a long time before standing for office, describing himself and Peters as foundation New Zealanders. The Speaker called the original remark inappropriate and took no further action, noting that nobody had raised a point of order at the time, and adding that this should not be read as approval.
I have heard these words before. I did not hear them first in Parliament. I heard them in the interviews my colleagues and I have carried out at the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation, in the accounts of migrant workers in the Manawatū, of international students, of nurses recruited from Kerala and Manila to hold up a health system that would collapse without them, of dairy workers, of aged care workers, of taxi drivers in Palmerston North on a Friday night. Go back to your own country. Go home. Show some gratitude. The words arrive at bus stops, in supermarket carparks, in staff rooms, in the comments sections of local news pages. They arrive with a shove, with a laugh, with a manager's shrug. What Winston Peters performed in the House is the everyday speech of racism in this country, spoken now from the highest platform of the state, by the man who carries New Zealand's face to the world.
I also hear these words in my own inbox. I want to be concrete about this, because the abstraction of "public discourse" hides what it actually does to people. Every time I write about racism in this country, a familiar machinery starts up in the far right ecosystem on X. I am told to go home. I am told that as someone born in India I have no standing to speak about New Zealand's affairs, that I should be grateful, that I should shut up. There are calls for my deportation, sometimes tagged to the immigration minister, sometimes tagged to my university. There are slurs about where I was born, about my name, about my accent, about the country my parents raised me in. There are demands that Massey sack me for saying out loud what my research finds. None of this is spontaneous. It swells and recedes with the political weather, and it swells hardest in the days after a senior politician says the quiet thing at the despatch box. The Minister speaks, the ecosystem amplifies, and the message lands in the phones of brown and Asian New Zealanders who never asked to be in politics at all. This is the communicative circuitry of racism in the digital age, and a parliamentary chamber is one of its most powerful transmitters.
That circuitry runs in both directions, which is the part the national conversation keeps missing. The distance between foreign policy and the footpath is far shorter than the New Zealand story admits. Peters is not simply a party leader who said something ugly. He is the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He is the person who signs this country's statements on human rights in the Pacific, who speaks for Aotearoa at the United Nations, who represents us in rooms where New Zealand has spent decades trading on a reputation for decency it did not always earn. When that man tells a Chinese New Zealander that democracy is unlike what he is used to, he is not making a domestic gaffe. He is conducting public diplomacy. He is telling every country in the region what kind of state this is and what kind of welcome its citizens can expect here.
The response made that plain within hours. China's ambassador, Wang Xiaolong, posted on X that they had no interest in being dragged into another country's domestic politics, and observed that a statement can say more about the person making it than about anybody else. Peters answered on Facebook, claiming the ambassador had proved his point, inviting New Zealanders to compare our Parliament with communist and dictatorship countries, and dismissing his critics as pearl clutchers and shills. The embassy then lodged formal representations with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the very ministry Peters heads, over what it called negative China-related remarks by a politician in our Parliament. It noted that the great majority of Chinese people in New Zealand live within our laws and have contributed to this country's economic and social life, and it asked New Zealand to protect their legitimate rights and to provide an open, inclusive and non-discriminatory environment for them to live, study and work. Two-way trade with China runs beyond forty billion dollars a year.
Sit with the shape of that exchange. It took a foreign embassy to say out loud, in the language of rights and inclusion, what this country's own Prime Minister would not say. Whatever one thinks of Beijing's own record on ethnic minorities, and I have written at length and critically about that record, the diplomatic fact stands. New Zealand's Foreign Minister racialised a New Zealand MP on the floor of the House, the state he insulted responded with a formal protest, and the head of our government offered the word attention-seeking. This is what racism in public diplomacy looks like. It is not only that our representative abroad holds these views. It is that the government has decided the views are survivable, that the cost of hosting them is lower than the cost of removing them, and that the people who absorb the damage are the ones with the least power to refuse it. Chinese New Zealanders, Indian New Zealanders, Pasifika communities, Muslim communities, all of us now carry a foreign policy that has been made partly out of contempt for us.
There is a legal frame for this, and it is worth naming precisely, because the kindness story survives largely by keeping the law out of the conversation. New Zealand ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination on 22 November 1972, and did so without a single reservation. That Convention, adopted by the General Assembly in 1965 and in force since 1969, defines racial discrimination to include distinctions based on national or ethnic origin. Article 2 commits the state to engage in no act or practice of racial discrimination and to ensure that all public authorities and public institutions, national and local, act in conformity with that obligation. Article 4 requires the state not to permit its public authorities or public institutions to promote or incite racial discrimination. Read those clauses and then read the transcript of Question Time. A Cabinet minister used the chamber of the legislature to tell an elected representative that he belonged elsewhere on the basis of where he was born. There is no reading of Articles 2 and 4 under which that is a private opinion. The obligation binds the state through the conduct of the people who hold its offices, and the Foreign Minister is as public an authority as this country possesses. The Prime Minister who declines to act on it is not staying out of a spat. He is placing the state in breach.
The Convention also tells us something about who gets to complain. New Zealand has never made the declaration under Article 14 that would let individuals and groups bring their own cases to the Committee. So the nurse in Palmerston North who is told to go home, the student whose flat application vanishes when the landlord hears her name, the MP told to know his place, have no direct road to Geneva. They have the domestic route, and the domestic route runs through Te Kāhui Tika Tangata, the Human Rights Commission, which monitors this country's compliance with the Convention, consults with communities who experience racism, and files its own report alongside the government's. In 2025 the Commission went out to migrant, ethnic and faith minority communities, to Pacific and disabled and Rainbow people carrying more than one form of discrimination, and to tangata whenua as Indigenous peoples, and it asked them what stands between them and their rights. That work exists. It is public. It is the closest thing this country has to an official record of what people like me experience, and most New Zealanders have never heard of it.
The Committee itself has already delivered its verdict, and the timing makes the last few days almost unbearable to watch. In late November 2025, New Zealand sat before the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva for the first time since 2017. The concluding observations issued on 5 December ran to fourteen pages, the longest and most detailed assessment of this country the Committee has produced. It recorded grave concern about the terrorist attack on two Christchurch mosques and the limited progress on the Royal Commission's recommendations. It recorded concern about the removal of Māori wards across two dozen councils, about the repeal of Treaty provisions in education legislation, about the hollowing out of the agencies serving Māori, Pacific and ethnic communities, and it warned that these changes put New Zealand at risk of systemic discrimination. And it singled out, in language the Committee does not use lightly, the persistence of racist hate speech by politicians and public figures, alongside rhetoric that recasts Māori rights as racial privilege. During the review the Committee heard that global anti-migrant discourse is being imported into this country, through online spaces and through public and political rhetoric alike.
Eight months later the Minister of Foreign Affairs stood in Parliament and demonstrated the finding. This is not a country being ambushed by an unforeseen problem. This is a country that was told, in writing, by the treaty body it has answered to since 1972, that its politicians are producing racist speech and that the machinery meant to counter racism is being dismantled. The Committee's report was received the way such reports are always received here. A day of coverage, a ministerial line about not accepting the characterisation, and then the silence that is this country's most reliable public institution.
None of this is new in New Zealand First, and that is precisely why it must be named as a pattern instead of an outburst. In February this year Peters went after Green MP Teanau Tuiono for his Rarotongan heritage, questioning why a Pacific man dared to say the word Aotearoa, and the Leader of the Opposition called it what it was, pure racism. Last year Jones shouted at Menéndez March, who was born in Mexico, to send the Mexicans home. In April Jones described the free trade agreement with India as a butter chicken tsunami, conjuring a brown wave that would drown wages, clog the roads and overwhelm the hospitals, and the Prime Minister found the word unhelpful and could not find the word racist. Three decades of political life have been built on the figure of the migrant as threat, refined into a communicative strategy that harvests the anxieties produced by neoliberal restructuring, by underfunded hospitals, by unaffordable housing, by the precarity that successive governments engineered, and delivers those anxieties to a racialised target. The migrant did not produce this precarity. The migrant is made to carry it.
Attend closely to how the political establishment responded this week, because the response is its own lesson in how whiteness works. The Prime Minister called the remarks attention-seeking, a continuation of a long track record of it, and issued his condemnation in a statement attributed to the leader of the National Party rather than to the Prime Minister of New Zealand, as though the office could be quarantined from the coalition it leads. The ACT leader said it was best not to give the comments oxygen. Peters called the accusation of racism drivel and recast his slur as a defence of democracy. Notice the vocabulary. Attention-seeking. Unhelpful. Inappropriate. Oxygen. The word racism is handled like a live wire, touched briefly by the opposition and dropped entirely by the men who share a Cabinet table with its author. The structure that keeps a racist in charge of foreign affairs is left undisturbed, and the language of political management does the work of protecting it. This is the communicative labour of whiteness, to absorb the racist act, translate it into a question of style or tactics, and move the country briskly along.
And here the deeper silencing begins, the one this essay is really about. Aotearoa New Zealand tells itself a story of kindness. We are the country of they are us, of the prime ministerial embrace, of the world's most decent small nation punching above its weight in compassion. I came here in 2017 drawn by the radical promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and I have watched the kindness story do a very particular kind of work. It functions as a national brand, and like all brands it disciplines. To name racism in this country is to be told that you are being divisive, that you are importing American culture wars, that you are ungrateful, that this is not who we are, that you are making things unpleasant. The migrant who describes the racism she lives with is heard as the one who has breached the social contract of niceness. The kindness discourse converts the person who names violence into the source of discomfort, and converts the violence itself into an aberration, an individual eccentric, an attention-seeker, never a structure.
Let me say this as plainly as I can. It is neither impolite nor uncivil to talk about racism. It is neither impolite nor uncivil to name it, to document it, to organise against it. What is impolite is telling a New Zealander of thirty years to go back to his own country. What is uncivil is a Cabinet that shelters the man who said it. What is indecent is a political economy that recruits migrant labour to staff its hospitals and milk its cows and care for its elderly, then builds electoral campaigns on the vilification of those same workers. What is uncivil is a treaty obligation signed in 1972 and quietly ignored in 2026. The breach of civility is the racism. The breach of decency is the racism. A society that treats the naming of racism as a greater offence than racism itself has confused the mirror with the wound.
The kindness story silences in another direction too, and tangata whenua have known this far longer than tauiwi of colour like me. The same whiteness that tells the Chinese New Zealander to be grateful tells Māori to stop relitigating history, polices the word Aotearoa in the mouths of Pacific MPs, strips Māori wards from councils, and treats Te Tiriti as an inconvenience to be legislated away. The Committee in Geneva saw these as one phenomenon, and it was right to. The settler colonial state secures itself by erasing Indigenous sovereignty at one end and disciplining migrant belonging at the other, and it wraps both operations in the language of one people, one law, one nation of decent folk. Any honest anti-racism in this country begins with Te Tiriti, with the recognition that the ground on which migrants like me stand was guaranteed first in a covenant with tangata whenua, and that our struggle against racism is bound to the struggle for that covenant to be honoured.
So what does resistance look like? In the culture-centered work we do at CARE, the answer communities give again and again is voice. Racism thrives where the infrastructures for naming it do not exist, where the migrant worker has no safe channel to report the slur on the factory floor, where the international student swallows the abuse because her visa depends on her silence, where the news cycle grants the racist a megaphone and his targets a soundbite, where a fourteen-page finding from a United Nations treaty body disappears in a day. Building anti-racist futures means building voice infrastructures. It means community-owned spaces where people at the margins theorise their own experiences of racism and set the terms of the response. It means unions, tenant organisations, ethnic community networks and Māori-led movements finding each other. It means universities willing to host these conversations rather than manage them into strategic silence. It means a Human Rights Commission resourced and mandated to make its monitoring bite. It means New Zealand finally making the Article 14 declaration so that ordinary people, and not only governments, can put this state's conduct before the Committee. And it means saying the word racism in Parliament, in the staff room, at the dinner table, and refusing the choreography of embarrassment that follows.
Xu-Nan responded to his abuser with more composure than the moment deserved, naming the remarks as the scapegoating of migrant communities and a distraction from the harms of a government presiding over hard times, and speaking of the aroha New Zealanders have for one another. He is right, and his composure should not be the price of admission. A country that was genuinely kind would not need its racialised members to be endlessly gracious about their own humiliation. It would tear the racism out at the root, beginning with the man who speaks for New Zealand to the world, and it would understand that the conversation about whiteness it has avoided for nearly two centuries is the most decent conversation it could possibly have.
The kindest thing this country can do now is stop performing kindness and start naming the violence.
References
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/international-convention-elimination-all-forms-racial
Monitoring the Convention on Racial Discrimination, Te Kāhui Tika Tangata Human Rights Commission: https://tikatangata.org.nz/our-work/monitoring-the-convention-on-racial-discrimination
"China lodges protest over Peters' 'go back to your own country' remark", 1News, 30 July 2026: https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/07/30/china-lodges-protest-over-peters-go-back-to-your-own-country-remark/
"Call for Peters to be sacked as Foreign Minister over 'racist' remark", 1News, 30 July 2026: https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/07/30/call-for-winston-peters-to-be-sacked-over-go-back-to-your-country-remark/
UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, concluding observations on the combined twenty-third and twenty-fourth periodic reports of New Zealand, 5 December 2025 (CERD/C/NZL/CO/23-24).