Auckland zone director Bill Rayner wrote in a submission to Auckland Council that the community and lifestyle of the region's older residents "is under serious threat from the rapid and huge changes in size and ethnic mix projections included in the Auckland Plan".
His submission also calls on Auckland Council to hold a forum to make decisions about the Super City's "optimum size and ethnicity".
Mr Rayner told the Herald he was not against immigration, but feared that its scale and speed was threatening to turn Auckland into "an Asian city" out of kilter with the rest of NZ.
The vice-president of Grey Power's central Auckland branch, David Shand, has taken strong issue with the submission and says the organisation "seems to have become a group of embittered old white people".
He has challenged Mr Rayner - who is part Maori - to define optimum ethnicity, calling it "a horrifying concept which would not be out of place in the apartheid era in South Africa".
Grey Power national president Roy Reid said he shared Mr Shand's concern about the submission, which would be challenged by at least two other board members at a meeting in Auckland next week.
He said he told Mr Rayner he thought part of the submission was racist, and he did not believe it reflected the views of the membership at large. "New Zealand is becoming a multi-racial society," Mr Reid said. "There's going to be a mixture of people from all over the world and it is something we are going to have to learn to live with."
But Mr Rayner was last night sticking to his guns, saying he was offended by such criticism of his plea for Auckland to adopt some sort of population policy rather than accepting unprecedented changes to its size and ethnic makeup.
Among the plan's predictions is that Asian people will account for 30 per cent of Auckland's population by 2021 - up from 19 per cent in the 2006 census and and 5.5 per cent in 1991.
He said that as a descendant of settlers who arrived here in 1845 and of Ngati Kahungungu, he was a product of generations of cultural assimulation but was worried about the social impact of such a large shift, a concern he believed was shared by professional demographers.
"I think New Zealand has had very good integration, but when you get the traditional core societal structure suddenly shifted, it's a different issue."
Mr Rayner said he was also concerned about older immigrants trying to pass the time in unfamiliar surrounds while their families were out working long hours. "I quite often just ask them in for a glass of water - you see them wandering along on their own."
- Mathew Dearnaley of the New Zealand Herald
