Category: Maori Issues
The Prime Minister has said that New Zealand has far too many state agencies for a country of our size. He’s not wrong. It’s one of the reasons why government spending has escalated out of control.
This week, the Race Relations Commissioner expanded his mandate. No longer content to give certificates to school girls opposing right wing politicians, he is now entering the super-city debate. In fact, it seems there is no issue that Joris de Bres believes is beyond his influence.
Speech to ACT Annual Conference, Wellington, 27 February 2010: As you know I run the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, a public policy think tank that produces the biggest weekly electronic newsletter in the country. It enables me to keep my finger on the pulse of public and political opinion. It is from this perspective that I would like to share some observations that might assist ACT in looking forward.
“We have no problem with Pakeha living on our lands, we invited them there. But the problems we have is when they basically ignore us and trample all over us, at which time we say okay enough’s enough, we want all of our land back. You people can stay on it but so long as you acknowledge that we are the mana whenua and when we say to you that this is right and that is not right, that you listen to what we say”.
You and I, gentle readers, can see all too clearly what is happening to our country. In despair we watch the whole colossal slow-motion train wreck, helpless to do anything about it. It is not that we are not trying to help. We warn, we write letters to newspapers, we support blogs such as this, we make our views plain to politicians, we spread the word in season and out of season. Yet nothing we say or do makes the slightest bit of difference. We are modern day Cassandras, gifted with prophecy yet cursed that our accurate predictions of doom will never be believed.
New Zealand has a lot to be proud of but there are some aspects of life ‘down under’ that we would prefer not to mention. Near the top of that list is racism.
There was a poem which my mother had learnt off by heart as a girl and portions of which she could long remember and recite to us. It was, I later discovered, Whittier’s Barbara Frietchie, and it tells of a true episode in the American Civil War when Confederate forces, occupying a town in the north, decreed on pain of death that all Union flags in the town should be taken down.
It is not easy to rile New Zealanders, but Hone Harawira’s abusive email clearly did. By claiming that he was entitled to rip off taxpayers with his jaunt to Paris because Whities had been ripping off Maori for centuries, Hone Harawira exposed the racist thinking that underpins the Maori Party. As Labour’s former Tai Tokerau MP Dover Samuels said, Mr Harawira is “advocating what he really believes in. A lot of people sitting with him in Parliament believe the same thing”.
‘White motherf*****s have been raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries….’ This is, it seems, the sincere personal view of Hone Harawira, a member of the New Zealand Parliament, and one, indeed, whose party forms part of our coalition government. He expressed it in a private e-mail to Buddy Mikaere, a former director of the Waitangi Tribunal who had ventured to inquire about who ~ Harawira himself or the taxpayer ~ was paying for a side-trip to Paris for sightseeing which Harawira and his wife had taken when in Europe on parliamentary business.
The recent deal between the Maori Party and National over free insulation for Maori houses - whereby social assistance will be based on race, not need - lays a new paving stone on the path to a country divided by race.
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