There is also an excellent Editorial in the HOS:
New Zealand First may well be a party in its death throes, desperately casting about for the remnants of support that the often charismatic Peters once seemed to garner effortlessly from the nation's elderly.
What Brown and Peters may not have realised is that New Zealand in 2008 is a society far less nervous about our newest members. If not at ease with our differences - both those that are visible and those that are not - we are at least more tolerant. Middle New Zealand has more to worry about - mortgages, food prices and Robbie Deans' move across the Tasman - than where our neighbours' parents were born.
In 2026 there may be 790,000 ethnic Asian Kiwis, but that number is still less than a quarter of the European population and fewer than Maori. The number of those who care about what those figures mean will have declined even further.
New Zealand can be proud of its muted reaction to such overtly manipulative prodding this week. The days of archaic rantings such as Peter Brown's signalling a collective anxiety about who we are and how we relate are, finally, beginning to disappear.
