GUEST BLOG: Shane Te Pou – The pain of ‘go back to where you came from’

Often, politics seems a distant thing. Sometimes, it hits close to home. Two recents events hit home for me.

First, Aotearoa’s top diplomat tells a sitting MP, right there in the debating chamber, to “go back to your own country” because “that’s where they lie like a flatfish, but they don’t lie like that here.” The MP, Lawrence Xu-Nan, was born in China. He’s a citizen of Aotearoa. He’s a Green MP just doing his job. And the guy saying it is Winston Peters — Foreign Minister, Deputy PM, the bloke who’s meant to be charming Beijing and Washington in the same week.

Asked straight out if that was racist, Chris Luxon didn’t dodge it. “Yes, I do,” he said. “It is racist and offensive.” Ka pai. Say what you see. For about four seconds there, the guy actually looked like a leader.

Then came the “but.” Peters keeps his job. Peters keeps Foreign Affairs. Reporters push on why nothing happens to a minister the PM himself just branded racist, and Luxon reaches for the flimsiest line in Aotearoa politics: “This is him talking in his New Zealand First capacity.” Like Winston clocks out of being Foreign Minister and clocks back in as party leader mid-sentence. Like the Chinese embassy, who’ve lodged an actual formal complaint, gives a toss which hat he reckons he had on. That dog does not hunt, Prime Minister. You don’t get to call something racist on Monday and shove it under “not my problem” by Tuesday, just because of which business card the guy handed out that day. Either it was bad enough to say “racist” out loud, or it wasn’t. You don’t get the credit for calling it out and the comfort of doing nothing about it. Pick one.

This is personal for me, so bear with me a sec. I’ve got tamariki who carry both Māori and Chinese whakapapa — kids born and raised here, whose “own country” is the only one they’ve ever known. Winston’s sharp enough to dance right up to the line without quite going over it; he knows exactly how far “go back to your own country” travels without him having to wear the word himself. But that kind of talk doesn’t just stay with the guy who said it in the House. It gives cover. Somewhere last week some kid who looks a bit different, or carries two whakapapa instead of one, is getting told the exact same thing in a playground or on a bus by someone who now reckons the Deputy PM’s handed them permission. Winston didn’t invent that ugliness. He’s just made it a whole lot easier to say the quiet part out loud, and that’s on him, whichever hat he was wearing when he did it.

Here’s the thing with Luxon that just keeps coming up: he doesn’t seem to clock the gap between what he says and how it actually lands with everyone standing outside the boardroom. Rotorua was the other one that struck me. Growing up in Kawerau, Rotorua was the big smoke for me. The whanau have seen it through good times and bad. Right now, business owners in Sulphur City, white-knuckling through the worst trading conditions in years, turn up to hear from their PM, and get told they’ve got a “parent-child mentality.” Worth being clear about what “worst trading conditions in years” actually means, on his watch. Unemployment sat at 3.9 percent when Luxon walked into the job in late 2023. It’s now sitting around 5.3 to 5.4 percent nationally — the highest in a decade — and Bay of Plenty, Rotorua’s own patch, currently has the highest jobless rate of any region in the country. Life in Sulphur City has gotten harder under this bloke, not easier. So he rocks up into that and tells them Kiwi businesses need to grow up and stop looking to Wellington: “Who cares what the government thinks or does? Our job is to be adult, adult, adult.” One of them raised genuine fears about just surviving. He told her that was “a negative view.”

This is a guy who, asked about the capital gain on his own Wellington apartment, just shrugged and said “I’m wealthy and I’m sorted.” No apology, no awkwardness, just a flat statement of fact from someone who can’t picture what it’s like not to be sorted. Same instinct that had him, back in 2022, explaining National doesn’t do “bottom feeding,” that the party’s energy goes to people who are “positive and ambitious and aspirational” — like struggling is a personality flaw and not a rent bill. Line up “I’m sorted” next to “bottom feeding” next to “parent-child mentality” and that’s not three random stuff-ups. That’s a worldview. Luxon genuinely reckons the country runs like his old boardrooms did: the strong just crack on, everyone else should quit whining, and if you can’t keep up, that’s a you problem.

To be fair, he did twig by 4pm the next day that Rotorua was a mistake, and he apologised, said he’d got it wrong, small businesses are “the backbone of our economy,” he’s got “enormous respect” for people backing themselves. Fine. But an apology that only shows up once the transcript’s done the rounds and his own colleagues start ringing him isn’t instinct, it’s clean-up. The instinct is the first draft: “adult, adult, adult,” “he was talking as NZ First leader.” The apology’s just what the comms team writes once the instinct’s already blown up in his face.

That’s the pattern with this guy, and it’s why “out of his depth” isn’t just a dig, it’s a description. He can read the room after the damage’s done. He can’t read it before he opens his mouth. He knows the right word – racist – but not the right response. He knows the apology those business owners were owed, but only once the Rotorua chamber makes it too costly not to give one.

Shane Te Pou
Political Commentator