Time and time again, mainstream New Zealand has been quick to go from welcoming migrants to turning on them, says Professor Paul Spoonley.
He is working in Germany, at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, where he's studying the far right and demographic change in New Zealand.
When you look back at our history of race relations and immigration, he says clear trends and repetitions start to emerge.
"We have moments when the politics of hate and anxiety reassert themselves," he says. We saw it in the 1970s, against Pasifika migrants, and in the mid-1990s against a new wave of Asian migration.
In the 2000s, there's been similar growing Islamophobia.
White nationalism has always had a place in New Zealand. As Mutu said, the first British explorers operated on a mandate of white supremacy.
Around 1960, Spoonley says contemporary white nationalism arrived in New Zealand with a political party called the National Social White People's Party and other less formal groups.
Moves to welcome immigrants fuelled the white nationalists, he says, as they became "deeply anxious about the decline of white rule and the politics of decolonisation".
On the whole, Spoonley says the majority of New Zealand shows "warmth" towards immigrants. Auckland is one of the world's "super-diverse cities", with Māori, Pacific and Asian people combined making up more than 50 per cent of the population.
But Spoonley warns some people hold onto strong white nationalist beliefs.
"There is a group of New Zealanders, around 12 to 15 per cent, who are deeply anxious about the increasing diversity of New Zealand. And this racial anxiety about diversity translates into opposition and hostility," he says.
On March 15 this year a white supremacist killed 51 Muslim worshippers and wounded many more, in Christchurch.
Propaganda by the alleged killer indicated he held strong anti-immigrant views, and the attacks were praised on white supremacist social media platforms.
"This development of new forms of the radical right, now often referred to as the alt-right, was helped by the internet and the arrival of populist and nationalist politics in the mainstream," Spoonley says.
Over time, New Zealand has made progressive advancements. Through the 1970s and 1980s, protest movements including the Māori Land March forced the country to consider its history and indigenous rights. The Waitangi Tribunal was formed.
Those movements meant New Zealand, more than other nations, had a level of comfort welcoming new immigrants, Spoonley says.
But, as Ip said, when race relations appear to be improving things will often take a turn for the worse.
"It comes and goes. It's like three steps forward, two steps backwards. Or, two steps forward, three steps backwards. It ebbs and flows," she says.
While it looked like New Zealand was comfortable with large levels of immigration, as it took in one of the highest levels of migrants in the OECD between 2013 and 2018, everything started to unravel.
"The visit by Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern in 2018 highlighted New Zealand was now part of the internationalisation of the alt-right and its conspiratorial views about Muslims, the media and politicians," Spoonley says.
"White nationalism was back."
