Fliers with the message “it’s alright to be white” have been distributed throughout the Matua community.
The flier claims that white people don’t need to say sorry as they are considered to be “nature’s finest”.
There was also a link in the flier to a pro-white supremacist website claiming that its core mission is "the survival, expansion and advancement of the white race".
It also claims that “non-white immigration is white genocide” and that people are proud to be white they should contact like-minded people.
The Bay of Plenty Times has alleged that the pro-white rhetoric is linked back to a US-based church.
University of Auckland Māori studies Professor Margret Mutu told the NZ Herald the message the flier writers are sending is "a rather sad, misinformed and misguided" in trying to promote that "white Christians are superior to all other human beings".
She says that New Zealand’s white supremacy problem is its “ugly underbelly”.
This isn’t the first time that Tauranga has been a target of such vitriol, with a similar flier being circulated in Ōtūmoertai in 2019.