Xenophobia

Be careful what you wish for

There can be nothing so appalling to witness in the twenty-first century than an old man standing in our parliamentary chamber shouting at another member to “go back where you came from” as a response to being heckled by a younger person born in another country, but non-the-less elected to parliament under the same proportional system that he was.

Add to this that the said person is a senior member of the current government and Foreign Minister and all sense of propriety and civil behaviour vanishes in a sea of incomprehensible manosphere machismo!

Winston Peters, aided and abetted by his deputy Shane Jones and by the house speaker Gerry Brownlee, has doubled down on his outburst in a defiance that beggars belief.

What is entirely clear is that Peters has chosen the political pathway of Trump, Farage, Le Penn, and Pauline Hanson in a deliberate and provocative attempt to court the inherent and extreme conservatism of knee-jerk xenophobia.

Understanding that Peters and NZF is intending to court this demographic with a vengeance and for the first time since the introduction of MMP both major parties of National and Labour need to come together in a common cause to exclude this xenaphobe from ever being a ‘king maker’ again.

It is not possible to change the vitriol that a small minority of New Zealanders direct at foreigners and/or Māori, it is part of their DNA and largely based on ignorance and prejudice. I have tried on a number of occasions to argue reason and fact against such commentary and it’s always to no avail.

As a nation we have a duty to snuff the oxygen from such insufferable people like Winston Peters and Shane Jones by the simple act of ignoring them.

So when all the ballots are counted and the next would be Prime Minister is looking to create the numbers for a majority government, New Zealand First must be excluded from their equations because if not then we will all be stuck with (at the last election) Mr 6.3% calling the shots on the who, the why, and the where-for of another three year tenure!

I am sick to death of listening to this bully of a man strutting around behaving like a petulant child demanding this, that, and the other with both major parties cow towing to him. ENOUGH!!!! Get rid of this festering corpustle once and for all, and take the bloated eel and self proclaimed Matua Shane Jones with him!