“Go back to where you came from” has to be one of the most inane and ignorant comments. It usually appears when any rational argument has disappeared. I have had it hurled at me many times — even on social media recently — despite having been a proud Aussie citizen for more than 40 years. And a former senator.

When I was a senator, Senator Pauline Hanson threw it at me on national television — and also told me to pick up my manners on my way back from New Zealand. That exchange came up again in court recently in a defamation action brought against Hanson by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi. Hanson’s lawyers argued the One Nation leader couldn’t possibly be racist because she also insulted white people. I won’t go deeper here because that defamation case is still ongoing.

New Zealanders are used to derogatory remarks from this side of the ditch. What do you call a New Zealander in a suit? The defendant. New Zealanders are very well-balanced; they have chips on both their shoulders. And my sister had the unfortunate name of Barbara when the apocryphal story abounded that NZ men preferred sheep. (Baaa-braa. Get it?) So, what do you call a New Zealander with more than one bedmate? A shepherd.

Kiwis are not above insulting each other. The rivalry between the north and the south islands is palpable. Up north, people down south, in cities like Christchurch and Dunedin, are often called “pig islanders”.  

Speaking of pigs, the then prime minister Robert “Piggy” Muldoon had a clever response when a journalist asked him if he was at all worried about the “brain drain” from Kiwiland to Australia.

“Not at all”, he replied. “It will improve the IQ of both countries.”

(My relationship with Piggy was strained. He once said in print that “with a name like Derryn he has to be queer” and, referring to my beard, warned “never trust a dog that barks behind a hedge”.)

Trivial Pursuit question: name three things Muldoon and Hinch had in common. Both were born in New Zealand. Both led their political parties. Both played The Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show.

The New Zealand accent, at times as harsh and ugly as the South African accent, also made Kiwis easy targets. I remember some graffiti in Bondi where many arriving Kiwis gravitated to and set up house. Somebody had scrawled “Bondi sucks”. Some smartarse had written below it: “New Zealand seven”.

Of course, New Zealanders only copped half the derogatory remarks that immigrants from Italy and Greece endured when they settled here, even though John O’Grady tried to make light of the racism in his bestseller They’re a Weird Mob written under the pen name Nino Culotta.

It is happening again now with people from the Middle East. “Go back to where you came from!”

In the 1960s, the migrants who also felt it were the Brits who came to Australia under our government’s ambitious new deal to build our post-war population with assisted migrant passages. They were summarily dismissed as “10-pound migrants”, and if they dared complain about anything after they got here, they were “whingeing Poms”.

Any way you cut it, Pauline, I have news for you: citing me as part of your defence isn’t going to work.