New Zealand First leader Winston Peters kicked off his election campaign with a speech to his party's annual convention in Taupo in which he claimed that protesters marching against the police "terror" raids were supporting apartheid.
It is no great challenge to decode the logic of the wilyold campaigner. The political ground claimed - with great electoral success - by former National leader Don Brash has been vacated by his successor, John Key. National has done the numbers and deduced that it may rue alienating the Maori Party when the time comes for the main parties to try forming a majority coalition after the next election. Likewise Labour has moved on from the day when Prime Minister Helen Clark described those who marched against the foreshore and seabed legislation as "haters and wreckers".
That leaves Peters free to play the race card, and he knows it may be the key to his political survival. His party is polling under 2 per cent - though, bizarrely, Peters has 5 per cent of the preferred Prime Minister vote - and is looking a doubtful starter for life after 2008, unless the leader sits and wins in Tauranga again - he was 730 votes short last time.
But Peters is one of politics' great survivors. Typically he takes Tauranga when the party's vote is below 5 per cent and the party crosses the 5 per cent threshhold when he fails to win the seat.
Perhaps Taupo will become the shorthand for Peters' electoral strategy, as Orewa was for Brash's. But if it does, it will be because voters buy another entirely specious argument. Apartheid was an oppressive policy of separate development inflicted on a dispossessed majority by a ruling minority. Those protesting against the police actions and their courtroom sequels are not seeking apartheid but evenhanded justice, openly dispensed. Nor may Maori activists or their supporters sensibly be called racists. Racism has nothing to do with skin colour, and everything to do with power. Anyone who argues that those arrested in Tuhoe and elsewhere last month are more powerful than the state authority unleashed on them is deluded. Or trying to win votes by any means necessary.
