NZ First deputy sticks to immigration stance as reverberations go on

By ROSALEEN MacBRAYNE

New Zealand First deputy leader Peter Brown's week began with a letter to the editor of a local newspaper and ended still taking calls from overseas journalists after he invoked the name of Enoch Powell.

The mention of the British Conservative MP who railed against a wave of immigrants in 1968 was enough to have journalists scenting blood - rivers of it.

"If I had mentioned anybody but Enoch Powell it probably wouldn't have created the same sort of uproar," he muses.

All week the moderate Mr Brown, a third-term list MP who emigrated from Britain in 1964, has been besieged.

The 62-year-old is suddenly out of the shadow of his leader, Winston Peters.



Mr Brown supports Mr Powell's forecast that Britain's mass immigration policy in the 1960s would lead to many social and economic problems.

"As I recall, he inferred immigration should be firmly controlled. I think it was a valid statement and I never forgot it.

"Enoch Powell put his career on the line, lost it, but was subsequently proved to be very largely correct."

Mr Brown advocates restrained immigration and says he never supported Mr Powell's call to send coloured migrants back where they came from.

But history vindicated Mr Powell's prediction that Britain would pay a heavy price for taking 50,000 immigrants into its then population of 55 million, Mr Brown says.

Now he feels duty bound to warn New Zealand, with its four million people, of major problems ahead if it persists with 53,000 approvals a year.

He is not worried about what colour migrants are or where they come from, rather that they do not arrive en masse and are able to assimilate.

And Mr Brown would prefer "suitable" people who have jobs lined up, no criminal record and are disease-free.

A former National Party member who admired Mr Peters and threw his hat in the ring when the New Zealand First Party was formed, Mr Brown stood for the old Kaimai seat in his first (unsuccessful) bid for Parliament in 1993, pre-MMP.

The shipping industry consultant from the well-heeled Tauranga suburb of Matua came within 372 votes of the National incumbent, the late Robert Anderson. Immigration was an issue back then.

"I used to go to [campaign] meetings with a green sheet of blotting paper," says Mr Brown.

Likening it to New Zealand, he would demonstrate how a bottle of ink poured over the sheet would be absorbed but would turn the paper to mush.

"But if you used an eyedropper, you would successfully get all the ink from the bottle on to the paper, which would stay intact.

"It is not racial, it is the numbers game. If we all wanted to get into a football stadium, we would have to do it in a controlled fashion."

Mr Brown grew up in post-war Enfield, just north of London, and says he was aware of the demoralising effect an influx of migrants had on his father's generation of returned soldiers.

Those with low-paid jobs, such as his bus conductor uncle, could not improve their conditions because newcomers were willing to work more cheaply.

Before he came to New Zealand in his 20s as a qualified ship captain, Mr Brown had "stringent medicals" and a job waiting.

He married and was left to care for two young children when his wife died.

His second wife had three children and the five, now adults, are "great New Zealanders".

"My decision to come to New Zealand was the best economic and social choice I have ever made."

Feature: Immigration