Kiwi Spanish resident complains of racist abuse

WELLINGTON - New Zealand police are looking into a racial abuse complaint filed by a Spanish-origin child cancer researcher camping on conservation land.

Lucia Alonso-Gonzalez, who was born in Spain, but has lived in New Zealand for five years, claimed that she and her partner Alan McDermott had pitched their tent at the Piano Flat camp in Southland, about 70 meters from a large group of families.

There were up to a dozen adults and about eight kids.

“We were talking to the children and playing with the dogs in a friendly way. “They seemed nice enough,” the New Zealand Herald quoted Alonso-Gonzalez, as saying.

The couple went for a walk and when they returned hours later the adults were drinking and playing loud music.

At 9.30 p.m., Alonso-Gonzalez asked them to keep it down, but was ignored.

At midnight she tried again: ” They started screaming at me. They said, ‘We’re real Kiwis here - we’ve been here for longer than you. Come back when you’re a real Kiwi’.”

She said the group called her a “b***” and to “f*** off”.

She went back to her tent and told McDermott, who went to speak to the group and was also abused.

The couple did not feel safe so packed up in the dark and drove 48km south to Riversdale, where they slept the night of December 29 in their car with their dog.

Southland Department of Conservation officer Kelwyn Osborn said the issue was a police matter. (ANI)