Two Wongs not sure what’s right
Peters’ divisive tactics way out of line
on to the beach. The beach is going bye-bye . . . and why does Auckland Council fund music in the parks? I’m sick of it as a ratepayer. Just get back to core services.”
Mr Cunliffe said the council needed more accountability, and Labour would review the Auckland Council legislation.
Ms Whitcombe later said she was not convinced, “but he is better in person than he is on the telly’’.
Later at Tamaki College, the questions were few and far between.
What were the big issues this election? “Education? Education?” he asked to a line of shy, nodding heads.
Flanked for much of the day by Labour candidates Peeni Henare, Carol Beaumont and Chao-Fu Wu, Mr Cunliffe had earlier been at the Ruapotaka Marae in Glen Innes.
Marae caretaker Georgie Thompson said she liked Labour’s health policy, and asked the easiest question of the day.
“Do those go through if you don’t get elected?”
Mr Cunliffe replied: “If you want those, you have to party vote Labour.” Two Aucklanders who share the name Wong have different opinions on Winston Peters’ “two Wongs” joke.
Property manager Dennis Wong found the comment “pretty offensive”. “I think it’s quite unnecessary,” he said.
Mr Wong is from Hong Kong and has lived in New Zealand for more than 13 years.
“I’ve stayed here for quite a long time. The thing is, I just don’t think it’s necessary to be racist.
“In New Zealand, they don’t want to have any racism at all so what is the reason why a politician wants to be racist first? . . . I’ve never liked Winston Peters.”
Auckland University Junior Rugby Club secretary Malo Wong said that although she wasn’t offended by the comment, she understood why others would be.
“I didn’t think it was offensive, I thought it was quite funny, actually.”
Ms Wong said that as she grew up with the surname, people had joked about it, but it hadn’t bothered her.
“I didn’t take offence to it at all. I think because I’m probably halfChinese . . . I think I’m kind of used to it really — being New Zealand-born, you hear it all the time. I’m okay with it. It’s just the way it is.” Winston Peters obviously had something of a deprived childhood. Those cheap Christmas crackers whose contents, along with the mandatory plastic whistles and keyrings, inevitably include the old joke about there being too many “wong numbers in a Chinese telephone directory” must never have graced the Peters family’s Yuletide dinner table.
Likewise, Peters’ brothers must not have on-passed to Young Winston their copies of those bastions of such humour, the and
How else to explain Peters’ “two Wongs don’t make a right” excuse for a joke, which he purported to have been unaware of until a Chinese man in Beijing told him it.
Who does Peters think he is fooling? The joke is so old it creaks. His repeating of it at his party’s campaign launch last Sunday was very deliberate.
Was it racist? Most certainly — especially in the eyes of the Chinese community, who should not have to put up with such childish tripe.
Is it dated? Most definitely. If you have not heard of or let alone perused copies of either comic, then you are not part of New Zealand First’s market demographic. And Peters would be delighted by that.
His success has always been based on picking up the votes of those who still live in the 1950s and 1960s and who considered to be high art and saw nothing odd or unsettling in singers and dancers blackening their faces on
It was a very different world — one which some New Zealanders have found hard to relinquish because the issues — like the television sets of the time — were always black and white.
Peters’ drawcard — pulled out for the umpteenth time at Sunday’s launch — is that he can re-create the Promised Land that was New Zealand in that era.
Peters knows that will not happen. He knows he is selling an illusion. Fine. That is his democratic right. But it is not within his rights to ferment a volatile political cocktail by not only pitting race against race, but also generation against generation.
Perhaps the real tragedy is that the rest of us are so bewitched by his oodles of charm that we find it impossible to ignore him. And more is the pity.