Diana Wichtel: Peters principle profoundly puzzling

Winston Peters. Winston. Winny. He's been called a racist, an opportunist and compared to Pauline Hanson and a racehorse (Whinny?). Like some seductive, slightly toxic plant, he blooms every three years, give or take an early election.

And some people never learn, possibly because Peters appeals to the Alzheimer's vote - those who have forgotten who they are supposed to be voting for and/or what happened last time they voted for Winston.

If Bill English seems two-dimensional, around election time Winston seems to occupy more than his allotted three. To get to work I have to pass three hoardings featuring Winston and his three-fingered salute. I've taken to making a little finger gesture of my own back as I pass by.

Still, I would have been forced to take to the television with a chainsaw during leaders' debates if it wasn't for Peters' interjections. There was Bill English, who likes to take a bad sound bite and chew it to death, banging on again about how the health debt situation was a scandal "on the scale of the BNZ". "It's interesting Bill raises the BNZ," mused Winston. "When I tried to, you threatened to throw me out of Cabinet." Cut to Winston grinning carnivorously, like Tony Soprano after a particularly satisfying garroting.

He's a showman, a bad boy, difficult to dislike. He's been around so long, in so many guises, that he makes most of the rest look like amateurs.

And you can forgive Winston a lot for generating the best headline of this, or possibly any, election campaign "Peters not Chinese, scientist says". As the country grapples with major issues, Winston has the experts and pundits pausing to puzzle over his precise genetic make-up, as if he was a suspect corncob.

The consensus seems to be that he might be Taiwanese (though there are rumours that Nicky Hager's next book will expose a Government cover-up of compelling new evidence that Winston is actually an alien). He can be funny. Even Peters can no longer say "Can we fix it? Yes, we can!" with a straight face.

During the Holmes debate, someone brought up immigrants working illegally. Winston was off, talking about "gridlock on Auckland streets". "What?" said Holmes, "from people working under the table?" Why not? Winston blames immigration policy for everything from strained health services to John Davy.

He'll follow up a list of statistics about the numbers of people of a particular Asian ethnicity in Auckland with a blithe "Stating these facts is not implying criticism of people of any particular ethnicity". Right.

He says it has nothing to do with race in one breath and that "current levels of migration are fundamentally changing the character of our country" in the next. Auckland is in imminent danger of becoming a vibrant, multicultural city. Oh no.

Sometimes classic Winston is not so amusing. In the Sky leaders' debate, there was talk of a labour shortage in Southland. "So you want a bunch of people from Bangladesh and India to come down there? I don't think so," harrumphed Winston. No one asked him the obvious question: Why not?

How does he get away with sounding so Le Pen as his party makes its way steadily up the polls? Partly because, in a country of paradoxes, Winston is one himself. During that Sky debate we had the clearly Pakeha Green co-leader, Rod Donald, declaring "We support the Maori version of the Treaty" while the obviously brown - give or take the odd rogue gene from Taiwan or possibly Mars - Winston rips into him for supporting "a two-nation country".

A Maori is condemning the treaty gravy train, or "Treaty gravy supertanker", as Winston called it in a particularly hyperbolic moment. A Maori is talking about foreigners with strange ways taking our jobs. When he says it, it's somehow okay, at least in the eyes of the older, mainly white, treaty and immigrant-fearing constituency.

In other words, Winston has found his niche as a sort of one-man backlash against the PC times. His Maori-Scottish background, contrary nature and bags of charm make him the man for the job. Racism and xenophobia don't go away because they're driven underground. They continue seething below the surface, putting in the occasional call to talkback radio, until someone like Winston comes along.

A degree of xenophobia - fear of the outsider, the "other" - exists in most societies. Time and assimilation usually defuse it, unless it's exploited. Then it can harden into out and out racism, the desire to exclude people simply for what they intrinsically are. That's the dangerous game Winston is playing. And not very well.

Peters might pride himself on being able to put two and two together and make a Winebox, but some things about his campaign don't add up. Very big on crime, is Winston. It's one of his three fingers. Yet we don't hear him trumpeting any shocking statistics about the number of Asian or Indian or Bangladeshi immigrants who make up the crime statistics. Perhaps it wouldn't fit too well with his other fingers' unskilled barbarian hordes scenario.

It's a shame, really. On the hustings Winnie has again displayed qualities rare in a New Zealand politician, such as intelligence and a sense of humour. Yet he persists in playing the race card, however much he protests that he isn't, like a broken record.

If he's so desperate to fix things that are just plain wrong in this country, that would be a good place to start. But then he'd have to find some other way to attract our attention.

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