New Zealand First held its annual general meeting last weekend and affirmed it will contest the 2011 election. The party missed out on parliamentary representation last year achieving 4% of the vote, short of the 5% required to gain seats without winning an electorate seat. The most recent poll puts them at 1% support, and former MP Peter Brown called the party’s chances of getting back into parliament “Mission almost impossible”.

Can they do it? The party’s base has always been the elderly, consolidated by policies such the ‘Super Gold Card’ a discount card for senior citizens. What this means, to put it bluntly, is that New Zealand First voters must be dying at a faster rate than the general population. However, the number of people reaching retirement age is increasing, in two decades time, senior citizens will make up a third of the population. What this means is that the ideology behind other New Zealand First policies is dying along with their voters.

The Party has always used fear about immigration as a voter getter, exploiting the prejudice of generations that grow up in a different, less multi-ethnic New Zealand. This of course has a terrible effect on immigrants in the community. As anti-racism campaigner Tze Ming Mok put in a speech delivered to a rally outside parliament in 2004:

Do you know why some of us dread election year? Maori, Pacific and Asian people, refugees, people of the middle East and Africa, we’ll all undergo a miraculous transformation – from human beings, into political footballs...Election year means that me and my family, and people from so many minority communities, are going to be abused and harassed on the streets of our cities, for nothing more than our accents and the colour of our skin.

When people like Peter Brown are able to stand up in parliament and claim immigrants “will form their own mini-societies to the detriment of integration and that will lead to division, friction and resentment.” that provides a false legitimacy for the behaviour described above. The further away NZ First members are from a position of power, the better.