If you mention Brian Tamaki in New Zealand, you get two reactions instantly.
One side sees a polarising agitator who thrives on controversy. The other sees someone saying out loud what plenty of people think but feel they are not allowed to say. That split was on full display today at the March for New Zealand. I’m not pretending everyone has to like the man. Plenty don’t. But I do agree with one part of the message that gets conveniently blurred by mainstream coverage.
This was about mass immigration, not “no immigration”. That missing word matters.
In his speech, Tamaki framed the day as a peaceful show of support for “Kiwis first”, claiming authorities and media had tried to scare people off with threats of enforcement and a heavy police presence. He also argued the narrative is routinely shaped to make protesters look violent or racist.
He spent a lot of time on the decision to block any march across the Auckland Harbour Bridge, saying other groups have been allowed to use it, and suggesting politics played a role.
Then he got to the core issue that New Zealand’s immigration settings are letting in too many people, too quickly, without proper standards, and the pressure lands on wages, housing, and public services. He says he is not against immigration in principle, but against open-border settings and “mass numbers”
That is the part I think deserves an honest debate, without pretending any concern about numbers automatically equals hatred of migrants. The same speech also contains the stuff that turns many Kiwis off completely.
Tamaki leans hard into culture-war language, credits national success to Christianity, blames Helen Clark for removing Christian values, and attacks the political class as corrupt. He also singles out named police leaders and ties public institutions to religion and ethnicity in a way many people will see as inflammatory.
That’s the Tamaki problem in a nutshell. A policy concern plenty of people share, delivered with rhetoric that makes it easier for critics to dismiss the whole protest as bigotry.
You can support immigration and still think the dial has been turned too far, too fast. You can want skilled migrants, tighter enforcement, and higher standards without wanting to “close the gates”. If the media drops the word mass, it collapses a real policy argument into a character judgement: “anti-immigration” equals racist. That’s lazy, and it makes the debate worse.
New Zealand needs to take a harder look at mass immigration.
