Alien feelings rise in Godzone

14 Jul, 2002 08:48 PM6 mins to read

This Letter to the Editor (below) encapsulated the sentiments of unease that are providing political fodder in an election campaign in which immigration is an issue. PETER CALDER talked to its author to tap into the feelings that are fuelling the debate.

Sir,

Today I waited in a queue at a

Waiting in a queue at her local bank, she noticed that everybody else in the building was Asian.

She felt like a stranger in a land she had always called home and, she writes, she wanted to cry.

In the midst of an election campaign in which immigration is emerging as an issue, the letter struck a chord.

Its writer was giving clear voice to an idea often grumbled in undertones.

It seemed worth putting a human face to the words, worth asking what would move someone to write in such anguished tones.

The letter-writer, Janice Wilson, seems stunned when I call. Plainly leery of attention, she reluctantly agrees to meet for coffee during her lunch hour.

On a wet Thursday, Howick village, where she works behind a retail counter, looks pretty pakeha.

A pair of youngsters, walking hand in hand and chattering gaily and a busking teenage violinist are the only Asian faces.

Even in a food hall, the only diner enthusiastically piling sushi on her plate is a stern-faced, blue-rinsed pensioner.

Elsewhere, except for a Chinese-language notice outside a bank inviting customers to address inquiries to Janetta Kwan, the street looks conspicuously occidental. The sign on Muzza's Pies implores us to "buy one or we'll both starve".

Janice Wilson's bank, it turns out, is down the hill a bit at Meadowlands where I will later see a far higher proportion of Asian faces.

The bank will explain that most of its customers are Asian, that customers like discussing sensitive financial matters in a native language with bankers who speak it too.

In that sense, they say, their staffing policy is deliberate, though it is not deliberately exclusive. On another day, Mrs Wilson would have seen European staff members.

Mrs Wilson has lived in Howick for the best part of 30 years. She came when the phones were party lines, raised her family here.

She and her husband, a painter and decorator, flirted with the idea of living in Queensland, but settled for staying home.

But, she says, it's all changed. "There isn't a suburb you can go to that isn't absolutely inundated with immigrants."

One of the more vexed sentences in the English language begins with the words "I'm not a racist, but ... "

Mrs Wilson never uses that phrase and it is worth noting that she enjoys working for a business that is owned by a man of Asian extraction.

Nursing a cup of hot chocolate in her favourite cafe, she insists she has nothing against Asians in particular.

The scene in the bank, she says, is "just symptomatic of what the community is now like".

"I felt like crying," she explains, "because I didn't feel at home."

Where we're having lunch is Winston Peters country.

He addressed a packed and enthusiastic meeting there in the 1999 campaign and there's no reason to doubt that his message on immigration is ringing bells out there this time round.

Mrs Wilson, who, incidentally, says she is not a New Zealand First voter, laments the changing face of Auckland.

"I don't think anyone in Wellington knows what we're talking about," she says.

"Everyone here talks about it. It's a major topic. We go somewhere and say: 'We're the only whites here'."

Mrs Wilson's experience will be familiar to plenty of other pakeha New Zealanders.

Who, in Auckland at least, hasn't stood at a crowded city intersection or taken a city bus only to notice that every other face was visibly foreign, usually Asiatic?

In the 1996 census, 83 per cent of the population identified as European but official statistics show that only 70 per cent of births in 1999 were of children whose parents would call them European.

The face of the country is changing and white-skinned New Zealanders of British ancestry are finding the adjustment hard.

It's worth noting that it's not the first time the country's natives have been shocked by an upsurge in immigrant numbers.

Maori in the late 19th century must have felt profound unease as they slowly realised that newer settlers were beginning to outnumber them, though they didn't tend to write to the paper about it.

There's a visibility question as well. Our largest immigrant numbers have always come from Britain and Europe and don't stand out in a crowd.

Many immigrants now are as conspicuous as ... well, as pakeha settlers must have looked in the King Country in 1850.

The numbers don't offer Mrs Wilson much comfort either.

The Asian population is expected to double to 370,000 by 2016 - with a disproportionate number settling in Greater Auckland which bears the brunt of immigration growth.

But, says Associate Professor Cluny Macpherson, an Auckland University sociologist who has long studied the effects of immigration, New Zealanders need to be changing the image they have of themselves.

"The message has been there for a long time," he says.

"We have always thought our distance would protect us but the very lifestyle, the cleanness and greenness that we use to advertise ourselves, is what attracts people here.

"We cannot expect them not to want a piece of it."

Dr Macpherson is not without sympathy for the feelings of people like Mrs Wilson. But she wrote to the paper because she found her situation in the bank remarkable.

"It's going to get less remarkable. People need to get used to the fact that they are not going to understand everything that's going on around them as well as they did in the past."

Mrs Wilson remains uneasy.

"You've got to change, I know that," she says.

"But I still think it's happening too fast."