WHEN I was 13 I used to leap out of bed and get the 7.30 bus into town. The early one from Highbury.
It wasn’t for academic reasons. I went to play handball with friends in the giant concrete “alleys” at college before any other kids could get there. We had the place to ourselves.  
Sometimes, in the last part of my journey, I’d walk along Haining Street, past the old wooden shacks that used to be there. I was aware of the infamous “Haining Street Murder” in which a Chinese man had once been killed in or outside one of the houses.  
Some of them had been gambling and opium “dens”. On particularly dark mornings, I shivered at the thought of some sickly arm suddenly reaching out of the shadows and strangling me without anyone knowing.  
Much later in life, I learned that the Haining St killer was a man called Lionel Terry.  He was born and bred in Sandwich, England. To say he was one sandwich short of a picnic barely does him justice.  
He immigrated here in 1901, to Auckland.  Within four years, he had sanctimoniously decided there were too many immigrants, especially Chinese, coming to New Zealand.  He set off on a 900-kilometre hikoi to parliament in Wellington, handing out xenophobic propaganda all along the way.
In colonial days, we had been very racist towards Chinese people. The government actually passed a law forcing Chinese immigrants to pay a whopping ten pounds just to immigrate here. And later, having considered it further, they bumped it up to one hundred pounds. Quite rebelliously, a Dunedin journalist wrote a poem defying this type of race-centred lunacy, and by some quirk of fate, it is now our national anthem.  
On September 24, 1905, as a 32-year-old “pure” new New Zealander, Lionel Terry, walked into Haining Street and (in what we’d nowadays call an act of terrorism) gunned down a 70-year-old Wellingtonian called Joe Yung.  
Terry was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.  But the court recognised he was actually barking mad and he duly spent the next 47 years in psychiatric hospitals in the South Island.
I remembered all this recently when Land Information minister Maurice Williamson said that Kiwis resisting foreign investment are being “racist”.  He is clearly correct.  But they’re not racist à la Lionel Terry. They’re more like spoilt, bloated little brats who just won’t share their toys.  
Odd because, realistically, humans have not lived in this land for very long. The initial Pacific settlers only reached these shores for the first time in about 1300.  That’s hardly ancient history. Europeans got here in 1642. So Kiwis are obviously an immigrant civilisation no matter what way you look at us. And because so many leave each year, we always need new blood. Our own best interests, you could say, lie in our openness to others. In those terms, racism itself is the worst immigrant we ever let in.