Anti-Indian graffiti has appeared in Papatoetoe and Shane Jones has spoken of a ‘butter chicken tsunami’ of immigration. How did this language become imaginable?
I was born in New Zealand. My great-grandfather arrived here over a century ago, part of a generation that helped build the communities many of us now take for granted. For most of my life, that history has felt secure, quietly woven into the fabric of this country. Lately, that sense of ease has shifted.
This is the first time I can remember seeing anti-Indian hate expressed with this level of visibility and confidence, not just online, but in the physical spaces we move through every day. Then there’s the senior minister…
This week, New Zealand First’s deputy leader Shane Jones said that New Zealand’s free trade agreement with India could lead to a “butter chicken tsunami” of immigration. Language like this matters. It reduces people to caricature and reinforces narratives that frame entire communities as a problem to be managed, rather than as part of the fabric of New Zealand society. In the context of recent events in South Auckland, it is difficult to ignore.
Racist graffiti appeared on a wall near Papatoetoe Central School about 10 days ago. This is usually treated as a discrete act; ugly, offensive, but ultimately localised. The graffiti appeared outside a primary school, a space that should represent safety, belonging and the early foundations of how children understand the world around them.
I have tried to shield my own children from the details, but for children who are Indian, just like them, and who attend that school, there is no such distance. They will have seen it, or heard about it, and they will have had to make sense of a message that was, in effect, directed at them.
That matters, because this was not just offensive – it was a despicable act, one that pulled children into the line of harm.
A man has now been arrested in relation to the Auckland graffiti, and police have described it as an isolated incident. While we’d love to think that when the police have made an arrest and the graffiti is removed and condemned, we can all move on.
But doing so risks missing the more important question: how did this become imaginable in the first place? And to how many people is it imaginable?
Earlier this month, a small group displayed banners outside a community venue in Auckland calling for “remigration” – that’s language that advocates the removal of people based on origin. A second piece of graffiti inciting racial violence against Indians was found in Royal Oak last week, though it’s unclear when exactly it was written.
When this kind of rhetoric is being expressed – even by a handful of people – it matters. It signals how exclusionary ideas are moving from the margins into public expression.
In the past, hate movements were more structured. There were organised groups, defined ideologies and identifiable entry points. Today, they are diffuse and fragmented, subscribe to hybrid-ideologies, and are often amplified by algorithms.
Harmful narratives emerge as content, memes, jokes, short videos, or in comment threads. They do not need to be coherent to be effective, only engaging enough to spread. And they do spread.
When they repeatedly spread, what begins as fringe becomes familiar, and what is familiar becomes acceptable. And for a small number of people, the step from consuming content to expressing it in the real world no longer feels like such a leap.
Those most affected by these shifts are often the first to notice them. Diaspora communities, including Indian communities in New Zealand, experience the early stages as low-level hostility, tone changes, coded language; the gradual erosion of what is considered acceptable.
By the time something like graffiti appears, the tone is rarely new for them, but others can no longer ignore it.
These early signals are always there but are consistently undervalued, dismissed as anecdotal or outside the scope of formal response systems. Government agencies tend to act once thresholds are crossed: illegality, violence, explicit threats. It’s a reactive system.
Responding to incidents after they occur cannot be the centre of response efforts. Everyone is talking about anti-Indian hate now because there has been an explicit threat and an arrest and charge laid. But what about everything that came before it? What paved the way?
We need to shift the focus upstream, learn how narratives form, how they travel and how they shape behaviour long before they result in visible harm. We need to treat community insight not as anecdote, but as an early warning system.
A longer term approach required. In a world where children are able to access online platforms at young ages, we need to invest in teaching them how to engage with difference and disagreement, not as a soft add-on to academic learning but as a requirement for social cohesion.
It is tempting to view graffiti as a one-off aberration, something that disrupts an otherwise stable system, but if we continue to focus only on the act itself, we will continue to respond too late.
The question is not whether we condemn what is written on the wall. It is whether we are willing to understand how it got there, and what that tells us about what comes next.
