June 27, 2016
Brexit raises racism fears
A Maori business expert says Maori might be right to be nervous about Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Ella Henry from Auckland University of Technology’s school of Maori development says as a small economy New Zealand is vulnerable to the sort of fluctuations in financial and currency markets that Brexit could generate.
That’s despite producers here having aggressively sought other markets in the 40 years since Britain joined what was then called the Common Market.
She says a lot of the impact is likely to be social rather than economic.
"Those people who voted to leave the European common market in Britain, did so because they were sick of immigration. That seems to be the trend in the thinking of why so many Britain's said lets get out of Europe because it meant free immigration. Now that's a kind of racist xenophobic attitude and if that's how Britain feels then it's probably not going to be good for us brownies on the other side of the world either," she says.
Ella Henry says whatever Britons thought they would achieve by voting for Brexit, they probably won’t achieve it.
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