Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Stuff is reporting a survey on attitudes to overseas ownership of NZ farms. New Zealanders aren’t just opposed to Chinese buyers of the Crafar farms because they’re racist — they say so themselves.
According to the story, the survey asked
“The Chinese company Shanghai Pengxin wants to buy the Crafar farms; do you support or oppose selling the farms to this Chinese company?”
and then
“Do you agree, or disagree, with this statement: ‘I don’t care what the nationality of the company is, I don’t want the farms to be sold to a foreign buyer’.
Not surprisingly, people who had said they didn’t want Shanghai Pengxin as the buyer went on to say that it wasn’t just Chinese buyers they were opposed to.
If you really want to find out whether people feel differently about a Chinese buyer, this isn’t the best way. You want to ask different samples of people about Chinese buyers and buyers from, say, the UK, or Monaco, or some other country with more NZ farm ownership than China. That way, people’s natural reluctance to admit to anti-Chinese bias won’t distort the results.
A survey like that would actually be interesting, since it’s not at all clear whether anti-Chinese bias is a big factor or a small one.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »