Deborah Coddington: Yet another backtrack by Peters

Look who's talking up Asian imports now - the Rt Hon Winston Peters, no less. The former member for Tauranga has had an extreme makeover. Since becoming foreign affairs minister, he's decided that attracting international students, especially from China, is not such a bad idea.

Last week Peters went overseas for the first time in his official role, to an Apec meeting in South Korea. On his departure he told NZPA he would discuss with a Chinese representative how to reverse the worrying decline in the number of Chinese students coming to New Zealand for their education.

"There was an irresponsible side of capitalism on export education. I regard that as a lessening of the obligation to China which we promised. I don't blame the Government for that. This was an industry that called for these changes, I think with hindsight we could have monitored their performance more closely," he said, presumably with a straight face.

One might question whether it was irresponsible capitalism or irresponsible politics that contributed to the declining number of Asian students. While it's true some private tertiary education institutes, including English language schools, went bust in a very public way - as Modern Age Institute of Learning and Carich did - that's hardly an example of irresponsible capitalism.

Some state-owned polytechnics have massively overspent their budgets but they get bailed out by the taxpayers, or merged with other state institutions, so the public don't get to hear complaints from out-of-pocket students left floundering with no qualifications.

The Sars scare didn't help (remember Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the bird-flu of 2003 that panicked us into wearing surgical masks?), but arguably it was Winston Peters' attacks on Asian immigration that did much to contribute to this country's reputation in China as hostile and insular.

Before 2003, international education was one of our largest earners of foreign exchange - $2.2 billion a year - after dairy, tourism and meat. In other words, the "Asian invasion" that Peters railed against gave us all a better standard of living, right down to the country's poorest who rely on publicly funded health, education, welfare and housing. Scare investment away and we all suffer, but that's exactly what happened.

Three years ago Winston Peters was singing from a different sheet, compared to last week's tune. In August 2002, for instance, he reckoned immigrants were necrophiliacs, triple murderers, rapists, fraudsters or HIV carriers.

In November of the same year he gave a speech saying New Zealanders were witnessing - nay encouraging - the Balkanisation of their own country.

Ever the master of sophistry, Peters will now say he was talking only about immigrants, not international students, but his emotional hysteria affected students nonetheless. We went from hosting 50,000 Chinese students in the year to March 2002, to roughly half that number in 2003.

And did Winston care?

Not that it showed - in Parliament he quoted approvingly from a letter published in the New Zealand Herald claiming Chinese students were responsible for "theft, fraud, fighting, assault, intimidation, vehicle crashes, disorder, domestic stabbings and a sideline of extortion and weapon-carrying".

When the then-Education Minister Trevor Mallard suggested we try to attract students from countries in the Gulf, Predictable Peters waffled on about terrorist threats and said the Government should "stop promoting New Zealand to overseas markets as the system is already buckling under the pressure of numbers".

"The Government should stop this idiocy and educate our own people and stop trying to make out that this level of imported students is some sort of salvation for New Zealand's economy," he added.

As John Tamihere says, Peters takes more positions than the Kama Sutra.

Predictably, the leader of New Zealand First, our Minister of Foreign Affairs who's not in the Government, is saying he has been "misconstrued".

He will blame the pesky media for this latest u-turn - he's been misquoted, his words have been twisted, taken out of context. Whatever, Winston - you're right and we're wrong.

You know, the Government knows, everyone in New Zealand knows you adore Arab and Asian immigrants, you'd never accept baubles of power, you love free trade, and Brad Tattersfield - speedily transferred from MFAT as your minder - has absolutely nothing to do with the new you.