When I arrived in New Zealand in 1991, I remember an extraordinary sense of elation. After growing up in Germany and traveling in the US and Central Amerika with its deeply entrenched social and economic inequalities, touching down here felt almost like entering an egalitarian paradise. There seemed to be a different social contract at work, a belief that society was, at least in principle, something we were all responsible for.
Of course, I know now that this was partly an illusion. New Zealand had its inequalities, prejudices and injustices then, just as it does today. I was also arriving as an outsider, and perhaps outsiders are particularly susceptible to seeing a new country through the soft-focus lens of possibility.
But there was something real about the place I encountered. There seemed to be a widely held belief that being a decent society meant looking after one another. People cared about their neighbours. There was a sense that public institutions existed, at least in part, for the common good, and that fairness, decency and a certain modesty about wealth and privilege were virtues worth preserving.
And by god New Zealand you had an excellent reputation in the world.
I remember thinking: These are people who still believe in a fair society.
It was a powerful feeling for someone arriving from the other side of the world.
Of course, the foundations were already beginning to shift. By the time I arrived, the political machinery of the previous decade had already set the Weichen, the points, or railway switches, towards a very different destination. Ruth Richardson and the economic reforms of the early 1990s were already helping to dismantle much of the social-democratic settlement that had shaped the country I had imagined I was arriving in. The egalitarian New Zealand I thought I had discovered was never quite as egalitarian as I imagined.
And yet, for all its imperfections, something about the social contract still seemed intact.
Fast-forward thirty-five years and I find myself looking around with a very different feeling.
What troubles me is not simply a change of government or a particular political policy. It is the erosion of the idea that we have a responsibility towards one another. Across much of the Western world, politics seems increasingly organised around fear, resentment and the identification of an other to blame.
Europe is lurching further to the right: the AfD making major gains in Germany, Nigel Farage and his increasingly ugly populist politics in Britain, Meloni in Italy, the National Front rally in France, Hanson in Australiaand the list goes on.
And New Zealand, which once seemed to me so comfortably removed from these currents, has not escaped them.
Here we have watched the cheap and nasty populism of Winston Peters and David Seymour increasingly dominate the political conversation, politics that seems to thrive on division, grievance and the deliberate cultivation of resentment. Māori become the convenient enemy. Beneficiaries are portrayed as somehow undeserving. Immigrants are turned into a problem to be solved. Those who depend upon the state, through no fault of their own, are too easily reduced to statistics and costs.
It is the politics of us and them. And that, perhaps more than any individual policy, is what saddens me. Because the country I fell in love with seemed to understand something that we appear increasingly in danger of forgetting: a society is judged not by how well its strongest members do, but by how it treats those who have the least power.
A decent society is not built from grand political theories. It is built from millions of small acts of consideration: looking after the person next door, making room for someone who is different, sharing what you have when you have enough, and understanding that none of us exists entirely on our own.
That was the New Zealand I thought I had found in 1991.
I know now that it was never quite as perfect as I imagined. But I also know that it was not entirely imaginary. Something was there. A social conscience. A belief in fairness. A sense that being a good society meant more than simply allowing everyone to compete with everyone else.
And perhaps this is where my own history becomes relevant. I am not going to be told by Winston Peters, or anyone else, that I should “go back to where I came from.” I know exactly where I came from, and I know exactly where I belong. I came here more than thirty-five years ago, made a life here, contributed what I could, and fell in love with this country and its people. New Zealand is where I chose to belong.
And precisely because I came from Europe, I recognise some of the language being used now. I recognise the deliberate creation of an “other”, the casual blaming of minorities, the suggestion that some people are somehow less entitled to belong than others. I have heard versions of this before.
What disturbs me most is that in Germany, of all places, there are now people who seem to have forgotten, or chosen to forget, where that road can lead. A country that lived through the catastrophic consequences of organised hatred should know better. Yet once again, old resentments are being dressed up as political common sense.
So no, Winston, I will not go back where I came from. I am exactly where I belong. And I will continue to speak when I see the same poisonous politics of division and exclusion being normalised here that I learned, through my own history, to recognise for what it is.
I did not come to New Zealand to become silent. I came here because I believed this was a country where people could stand up for fairness, decency and one another.
That belief is still mine. And I have no intention of giving it up.
Thank you for reading to the end.
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