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If We Cared About Our Dignity
At a school gate in Palmerston North, a mother tells her son to let it go. He has been called a curry muncher again, the third time this term, and she gives him the words her own mother gave her, the words mothers in our communities have been handing down like heirlooms for three generations in this country. Keep your head down. Work hard. Let your marks speak for you. She says it softly, smoothing his collar, and in her voice you can hear every ocean her family ever crossed to get him to this gate, and every insult she swallowed so that he would never have to, and now he is swallowing them anyway, and she is teaching him how.
That boy will grow up in a country where the Deputy Prime Minister told a New Zealander of Chinese heritage to go back to his own country, and nothing happened. No resignation, no censure, barely a news cycle. He will grow up under governments that a certain party keeps entering and exiting like a landlord who owns the building, a party whose entire electoral machinery runs on the fuel of his family's foreignness, on decades of speeches about Asian invasion, about migrants who will not assimilate, about two Wongs and a white. Winston Peters has made a fifty-year career out of people who look like that boy's mother, and both of our major parties have decided, more than once, that her humiliation is a reasonable price for the ninth floor of the Beehive.
The ecosystem around New Zealand First is darker than most of our aunties and uncles allow themselves to see. Far-right formations such as Remigration New Zealand trade in the fantasy of removal, of a nation cleansed of migrants of colour, and the same accounts on X that circulate this poison, that recite the great replacement conspiracy theory, also post their loyalty to New Zealand First. Sit with what that conspiracy theory has already done here. It was the ideological architecture of the Christchurch terror attack. Fifty-one Muslims were murdered at prayer by a man convinced that people like us were replacing the white nation, and the rhetorical world that built him now overlaps, account by account, with the online base of a party inside our government, a party that has had a member linked to neo-Nazis. Our political class steps around all of this the way one steps around a puddle on Lambton Quay, careful not to wet the hem of the coalition agreement.
Labour walked into government with New Zealand First in 2017. National governs with New Zealand First now. When Jacinda Ardern wrapped herself in a scarf and held the grieving mothers of Christchurch, the world wept, and I do not doubt for a moment that her grief was real. But her government existed because her party had handed the balance of power to Winston Peters, and so the embrace and the enablement lived in the same building, on different floors, and no one in that building seemed to find the arrangement unbearable. That is the truth our communities carry in our bodies even when we cannot say it aloud, that in this country the compassion arrives after the funeral, while the coalition arrives before it.
And what do we do with this knowledge, we Indians, we Chinese, we who now make our lives on this land. Too often we fold it away. We have perfected the good migrant the way our mothers perfected pleats in a sari, the way our fathers perfected silence at the dinner tables of their employers. We counsel our children through the racist bullying, urging them to absorb it, to not complain, to not stick out, as though a childhood can hold that much swallowed grief without the seams giving way. In our offices we lower our eyes and laugh at the jokes made at our expense, treating the racism like weather, something you dress for. We keep faith that our work will one day be seen, that excellence is armour, and the country takes our labour, our fees, our taxes, our doctors and nurses and engineers working the night shifts no one else wants, and it hands us back Winston Peters as Foreign Minister, the face of New Zealand to the world, including to the ancestral homelands we left.
There is an uglier fold still, and it shames me to write it, because I have heard it at tables laid with food from home. In our aspiration toward the whiteness of Pākehā culture, we absorb its contempt for Māori. The recycled lines about handouts and grievance, the settler script recited in accents from Guangzhou and Gujarat, the colonizer's racism rehearsed by people who are begging the colonizer to stop aiming it at them. The white supremacy that took the whenua from Māori is the same white supremacy that tells our children to go home. Te Tiriti o Waitangi, honoured, is the only ground on which any of us stand in this land with our heads up. Our dignity in Aotearoa runs through solidarity with tangata whenua, or it does not exist at all.
Now count us. Asian communities are roughly one in six New Zealanders and growing, concentrated in the very seats where elections are won and lost. Under MMP that is not merely a constituency, it is a veto, waiting quietly in the party vote for someone to pick it up. If Indian and Chinese communities, first generation, second, third, decided together that anti-racism is a voting issue, that no party carrying New Zealand First into government will ever carry our vote, we would redraw the electoral map in a single cycle. The major parties understand this arithmetic perfectly, which is why they spend so lavishly on our compliance, the candles lit at Diwali, the lion dances at Lunar New Year, the beaming photographs that cost them nothing while the coalition agreements cost us everything we came here to build.
So we say it to Labour and we say it to National, in advance, in public, in the plainest language we own. Enter partnership with New Zealand First and you forfeit us. Not shouted in anger, but stated with the stillness of people who have finally stopped negotiating the terms of their own diminishment. Our vote is the one instrument this system genuinely respects, and we have been spending it like an apology.
I know the voices in our kitchens, because they are the voices of people I love. Politics is dirty, stay out of it. Think of the residency, the promotion, the mortgage. At least Peters says it to our faces. Every one of those sentences was learned somewhere, in a queue at immigration, in a meeting where the idea was taken only after a Pākehā colleague repeated it, at a school gate where a mother smoothed a collar and taught her son to shrink. Our parents did not cross oceans so that shrinking could become our inheritance. They crossed so that some child, someday, could stand at that gate unafraid.
The mother in Palmerston North loves her son, and her advice is love, love shaped under pressure into the only armour she was ever offered. But there is something else she could say to him, and we could say it to one another this election and every election after. You did not come here to earn your dignity. You arrived carrying it. The only question left is whether we will vote like we believe that.