Imagine if 81 million New Zealanders upped stakes and moved to Mumbai and Delhi, and then started issuing ultimatums to the Indian government. Imagine if 78 million Kiwis landed in Beijing and Shanghai and started demanding special laws from the Chinese government – or else. How do you think the Indians or Chinese would react? There’d be a non-stop string of flights to Auckland International, repatriating those uppity Kiwis right back where they came from. That’s if they were lucky enough to not end up in a concentration camp in Xinjiang.
Ignore the fact that, of course, there aren’t 78 or 81 million New Zealanders: the point of this hypothetical is to put into relative terms the sheer, overwhelming scale of the twin butter-chicken-and-fried-rice tsunamis which have swamped New Zealand in recent years.
And the sheer, arrogant chutzpah of those who’ve barged into Kiwis’ home.
New Zealand’s Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh and Islamic councils have issued an ‘election ultimatum’ demanding every party promise hate speech policies, highlighting the ethnic voting bloc as a significant 18.4 per cent of the population.
Welcome to your future, New Zealand.
Over the next decade, as these migrant groups surge, as they will, to be the majority of the ‘New Zealand’ population, do you really think they will ease back on making demands? Or go even harder?
The push followed a video from Destiny Church leader Brian Tamaki urging New Zealand to ‘purge’ Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims and burn mosques and temples ‘tit for tat,’ which he cast as reciprocity for Christians’ persecution in India.
Clutch their pearls in Grey Lynn and Ponsonby all they like, Tamaki is well within his rights to say what he said.
Human rights barrister Scott Sheeran said Tamaki’s remarks broke no New Zealand law. Tamaki called it a “power grab,” insisting free speech “must remain protected”.
Whether you agree or not on “tit for tat”, the fact is that Christians are heavily persecuted in India, in Islamic countries and in China. Do you think the migrants will leave those attitudes behind as they flood New Zealand? If you’re inclined to Pollyanna optimism, I would merely point to the wave of church burnings and desecrations in Europe following the Merkel migrant wave. New York has barely elected a Muslim mayor and already churches are burning.
No doubt some will read of the supplanting of the New Zealand population by migrants and snigger, ‘Now you know how the Māori felt’. Which, even the whataboutism if it was comparable, does nothing to actually rebut the argument. In fact, it reinforces it. It’s literally admitting that mass migration is an existential threat to the host population. Two wrongs, as the saying goes, don’t make a right. Nor can any of us do anything to erase the wrongs of the past – but we can try to prevent the foreseeable wrongs of the future.
Bringing up the Māori raises another important point: while around a third of New Zealanders overall are self-professed Christians, more than half of the Māori population are regular churchgoers. The migrant tsunami will affect Māori grossly disproportionately.
In many ways: despite the undeniable history of dispossession, the very fact that the Treaty of Waitangi exists at all shows that the British at least had some concern for the rights of the Māori. The ongoing disputes over the Treaty/Tiriti show that that concern has, if anything, grown stronger. It’s part of the history of the Kiwi population.
But the migrants supplanting the Kiwi population don’t share that history. Does anyone think they’ll seriously give a rat’s arse about the rights of the Māori – who will be a minority within a minority – when they become the dominant population of New Zealand? As they will, on current demographic trends, within a decade?
As in Australia and Europe, political elites are fundamentally altering the nature of their societies, and the homegrown populations get no say in it. If they dare speak up, they are simply told to shut up. By no one more forcefully, as we see, than by the migrants who are claiming New Zealand for their own. The same migrants who, in their home countries, wouldn’t tolerate for a second anyone else telling them what they feel so entitled to tell New Zealanders.
The Māori, for all their fierce resistance, had little chance against the newcomers 200 years ago. New Zealanders today have every chance to fight back at the ballot box: all they lack is the will to do so.
