Londoners say Russians are snapping their city up. Canadians moan about rich Iranians. Welcome to globalisation.





What does Labour's Chinese-name exposé look like from 18,000km away? Fairfax political reporter Andrea Vance gives her view from Cambridge, where she is Wolfson Scholar.

Don't worry Auckland. You are not alone.

House prices are soaring in desirable metropolises across the globe. And beating up on Johnny Foreigner is the zeitgeist.

In London, cash-rich Russians are the scapegoats. Brooklyn's famous brownstone townhouses are reportedly being snapped up by European and Israeli investors.

Iranians and Russians are snapping up Toronto condos – the Chinese prefer Vancouver, wealthy Europeans head for the Canadian Maritimes.

Australia has its own so-called 'Asian invasion'. And in Singapore, buyers from China, Malaysia, India and Indonesia are out-bidding the locals.

Welcome to globalisation.

Trade barriers coming down got you through the worst of times. New Zealand absorbed the shock of the global financial crash by flogging its wares to a voracious Chinese market. It emerged (for a time) with a "rock-star" economy.

Since the ground-breaking 2008 free trade deal, your fortunes are tied to theirs. So isn't it a little churlish for Labour – the party which signed-up to the pact – to turn on the Chinese now?

Clinging to nationalistic policies is so often the last refuge of economies in the grip of insecurity. With choppy waters ahead for both nations, Labour has judged the time is right to pander to the mean-streak of anti-Asian sentiment that runs through many Western societies.

This kind of scapegoat gambit only works if there are enough people who tend towards xenophobia. Labour got an early break when its dodgy data and sloppy analysis was tacitly endorsed by some media.

A lift in last week's Roy Morgan poll is an empty, short-term win. Because this clumsy campaign reveals more about the party's lost values than it does about buying patterns in New Zealand's largest city. It screams of desperation, a party bereft of ideas and solutions.

Instead of engaging in a complex, intelligent debate about planning regulations, supply, densification and expectations, Labour went for the cheap shot. Like the far-right parties of Europe, the party attempted to turn popular anger against foreigners – ignoring the failure of previous governments and years of laissez faire.

Housing spokesman Phil Twyford masqueraded his crude and selective "evidence" as a critique of foreigners who push prices beyond the reach of Aucklanders. But he misfired because by singling out one ethnic group – Chinese – he inflamed tensions within New Zealand. It would have been more honest to climb the Sky Tower and yell "Yellow Peril" over and over.

Twyford should be mindful of the fate of Lord Glasman, who steered British Labour's "Blue Labour" experiment in the wake of British Labour's 2010 election defeat. An attempt to reconnect with the (mainly white) working class, it ended badly with Glasman's public assertion that Labour should talk to the far-right English Defence League. He followed it with another interview in which he said: "Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first."

There are more worrying parallels with Europe, where parties (mostly on the far-right) who stand on an anti-immigration platform have won success. Rather than accept obvious flaws within the Eurozone banking system, German, British and French politicians and media are trotting out stereotyped image of the Greeks as lazy, corrupt and over-pensioned. A consequence is that bigotry, Islamophobia and open racism – thankfully stigmatised over the last few decades – have noticeably crept back into the mainstream.

That's where blame game politics gets you – with one minority or nation set against another.

Objecting to race-based rhetoric is not "political correctness gone mad". Nor is it shutting down debate. It is a reasonable expectation that politicians rise above the unacceptable and the ugly and tackle the real issues of housing affordability.