Isn’t it astonishing that, not even two weeks out from the Christchurch shooting’s first anniversary, the senior cabinet minister Shane Jones – an MP for New Zealand First, a party you could arguably describe as our local Ukip branch – is basing his re-election campaign on stoking anti-immigrant racism.

In a television sit-down last weekend the “retail politician” – Jones’s words – went after the Indian community, blaming its students for “ruining” New Zealand universities and arguing the country was opening the doors too widely to immigrants from “New Delhi”. He guaranteed that only New Zealand First would cut immigration. Labour, in Jones’s telling, is too “PC” to make the necessary cuts, and National are apparently in the pocket of Johnny foreigner taking big-money donations from overseas contributors. They won’t follow through either.

It’s convenient, if a little predictable: only I, Shane Jones, can save you.

Which is fine. But a political salesperson should probably make at least a nominal attempt to match the pitch with the facts. In truth, international students are helping keep the country’s higher education system in business. Indian citizens pay steep fees that fund researchers, teachers, and administrators across New Zealand. Those same citizens, contrary to what Jones asserts about New Delhiites, are finding it increasingly tough to make it through the closing door as well (Immigration NZ rejects Indian applicants at a much higher rate than those from elsewhere).

And let’s not forget that, in the wake of the Christchurch shooting, politicians promised tolerance.

Of course for Jones the chief consideration is his political advantage in the here and now. His party’s brand is literally New Zealand First, and his leader, Winston Peters, has spent the past three decades pushing fake news about immigrants before anyone had the vocabulary to name it. Who can blame Jones for getting in on the action? Well, for one, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who told Jones directly and forcefully his language and his “facts” were wrong. It’s a welcome intervention, but it should come with an additional warning: if it happens again, consequences will follow.

Politicians with an eye on optics tend to dress racism in generalities or exceptions – “some, I assume, are good people” – but what distinguishes Jones is his willingness to wear the specificities. He’s quite deliberately targeting just one community. If, say, the regional development minister were keeping his comments abstract – focusing only on his vague calls for a population policy – perhaps we could safely open a discussion. But Jones seems to find it impossible to resist. Last year he told media, true to form, Indian families had no right to bring the “whole village” over.

It’s an irresponsible message, of course, but political tacticians cherish their racial caricatures. In 2005, Peters told an audience that moderate Muslims were working “hand in glove” with Islamic extremists and terrorists, and that the Christian faith was under “direct threat from radical Islam”, presaging precisely the ideas that would animate online neo-fascism a decade later. In Anders Breivik’s pre-attack propaganda, to take one example, the Norwegian terrorist depicted Islam as a Trojan horse in Europe, the titular moderates arriving in peace only for the hidden radicals to rip apart the continent, its “white” heritage, and its Christian religion.

I should state for the record: Jones has said: “There’s not a racist bone in my being”, and Peters is hardly a neo-fascist sympathiser. Nor are Peters’ comments responsible for what other people do half a world away. Yet a good number of his talking points line up with the neo-fascist movement’s positions a decade-and-a-half later. In 2003, to take one more example, Peters told the media third world immigrants were bringing tuberculosis to an Auckland hospital.

That particular talking point – immigrants as disease carriers – can claim a rich history in New Zealand. In 1920 Prime Minister William Massey brought his immigration restriction amendment bill before the House. In his introductory speech the Reform party leader told lawmakers the bill enacts “a deep-seated sentiment on the part of a huge majority of the people [that] this Dominion shall be [a] ‘white’ New Zealand”. In the ensuing debate, speaker after speaker stood to inform their colleagues the changes were necessary to stop a “vast influx of Asiatics” (sound familiar?) from overrunning the country with, yes, “tuberculosis”.

It’s tempting to ignore both Peters’ and Jones’s recurring comments and their echoes from the past. Words are wind or whatever. But the Christchurch shooting exposes that for the lie it is. One of the alleged shooter’s aims, the Washington Post reports, was to “reduce immigration rates”. It’s a strangely bureaucratic formulation for someone who imagines those same immigrants as “invaders”. But the phrase – sometimes expressed by politicians in metaphors like turning off the tap or closing the flood gates – is so soaked in the discourse that the alleged shooter probably didn’t think about its incongruous use in his otherwise crisis-tone writings online.

This makes for a very awkward question: are anti-immigrant politicians giving cover for neo-fascists to voice and enact their hatreds in plain sight?