KEY POINTS:
At his pre-election rally on Sunday, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters tried to inspire his followers to cast off their walking sticks and "act today" by borrowing Brutus's famous call to arms. "There comes a tide in the affairs of men, which, if taken at the flood,
leads to fortune."
What he omitted to tell his granny-packed audience was that disloyal Brutus failed to take his own advice. Having treacherously stabbed his boss Julius Caesar to death, Brutus lost the subsequent battle for power and was reduced to pleading with his Peter Brown-equivalent to hold the sword steady so he could run against it and die.
But Foreign Minister Peters has never been a great one for the small details. Like asking who was the mysterious fairy godfather who miraculously made his legal bill go down $100,000 overnight.
Perhaps he didn't want the complication of knowing he'd been bailed out with dirty foreign cash. For as an election looms, the man who is supposed to be the acceptable face of New Zealand abroad is once again winding up his xenophobic barrel organ.
According to his speech notes, he predicted to his Alexandra Park Raceway audience that "what we know points to the dirtiest campaign New Zealand has ever seen, full of smears, allegations and lies".
Of course, it's easy to be the oracle when you're the one setting the agenda.
After his usual warm-up against gangs and white-collar criminals and foreign this and that, he was off on the anti-immigrant trail, claiming we have "the most scandalous immigration policy in the Western world".
"Look at what is happening in Auckland - the immigration capital of New Zealand. Just last night on TV the tragedy of our flawed immigration system was highlighted: murders and kidnapping."
He wailed that the New Zealand First convention "was pushed to third place" - presumably a reference to its slot on the night's TV news bulletin. "Remember the years we spent warning them this would happen. The crime wave in Auckland is all too real - as are its racial and ethnic undertones."
Only Mr Peters could turn a recent cluster of attacks against Asian immigrants into an Asian crime wave with sinister undertones. Brutus, who lived - and perished - on believing and spreading false rumours, would have recognised a kindred spirit.
What crime wave? Nationwide, homicides have dropped from 109 to 88 in the past two years. In South Auckland, which has been the recent centre of attention, there were eight homicides last year compared with 27 in 2006. On a population basis, recorded offences have dropped over the past eight years.
As for "racial and ethnic undertones", the defining undertone in recent high-profile cases has been that it's the victims who appear to have been Asian.
Mr Peters implies the reverse, demanding that "we must support those who come to this country with a proper civics education programme which ensures our values and basic laws are taught and understood".
Given that the newcomers to this country are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of crime, perhaps a more vital priority would be to make such civics courses compulsory for every young New Zealand-born Kiwi.
A police report from December 2004, Working Together with Ethnic Communities, noted that Asians (which includes Indians), represent 6.5 per cent of the population but only 3 per cent of "recorded apprehensions". As for being ropey drivers, Asian drivers represented 5 per cent of all motorists involved in recorded crashes in 2002, and only 2 per cent of fatal crash drivers.
After Deborah Coddington's anti-Asian meltdown in North & South magazine in 2006, journalist Keith Ng analysed the figures and came up with a rather different picture.
He calculated that in 1996, Asians (including Indians) made up 3.8 per cent of the population and accounted for 1.9 per cent of those apprehended for crimes. By 2005, Asians made up 9.3 per cent of the population and represented 2.6 per cent of all apprehensions.
"So, as the proportion of Asians in the country increased threefold, their representation in crime statistics rose by only a third."
He concluded that, roughly speaking, "Asians are about a quarter as likely to be criminals as the average person in New Zealand."
It hardly backs the Asian crime wave nightmares of Coddington's and Peters' sleepless nights. Rather the reverse.
Still, Mr Peters is not likely to let such inconvenient facts get in the way of a good stir. Not when he can claim they come from a lackey like me of "the foreign-owned media".
