Sir Bob Jones
nopunchespulled.com
Auckland journalist, English-born Steve Kilgallon, over the years has called me for info’ on things I know about. He’s balanced and sensible and not a beat-up artist like so many in his trade. Thus when he recently wrote an expose about Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon I treated it with respect.
The guts of the story related to an alleged illegal kick-bag attempt by Meng Foon two decades back, and the anger of investigating Police officers at how it was covered up. Foon says he can’t remember it.
But it wasn’t that which interested me, rather it was the revelation that before becoming Gisborne’s mayor, Foon made his living running “a pokie bar in Gisborne’s most deprived suburb of Kaiti”, to quote Kilgallon. This is a mainly maori suburb. Pokies are predominantly the pre-occupation of impoverished maori women.
After Kilgallon’s revelation Meng Foon went to ground and for a month or so we heard nothing from him which was certainly a blessing. But he’s now made a tentative comeback with the same old divisive maori nonsense, which even if unintended, simply causes resentment. The blame for maori failure lies squarely with maori and is not a consequence of prejudice.
That said, wearing my pop psychologist’s hat I can’t help wondering if motivating Foon’s hugely harmful, even if well-meaning, constant blathering, has at its root guilt for the appalling harm he committed decades back, exploiting vulnerable and irresponsible maori women’s weakness to line his pockets.
I’ve railed away about allowing pokies into New Zealand for decades, in newspaper columns and other outlets. Recently the Wellington City Council announced its intention to phase them out. The last decent mayor the city had, Dame Kerry Prendergast, wearing one of her multitude of charitable activity hats, wrote a letter to the Dominion-Post arguing that if they’re removed, such weak character victims would simply gamble online and the profits, unlike the pokies, would go off-shore.
I like Kerry but that’s a fallacious argument, a bit like saying we should turn a blind eye to shop-lifters failing which they’ll resort to more serious crimes.
If I’m right about Meng Foon’s guilt motives, then that’s to his credit. But even if unintended, his activism is in my view doing more harm than good.
His latest comeback outburst reveals his extraordinary bias. Commenting on an incident in Levin in which a young maori man was assaulted by two thugs, allegedly because the victim had idiotic traditional tattoos, Foolish Foon as I shall henceforth describe him, “wished the victim a speedy recovery”. Nothing wrong with that but as the vast majority of assaults are committed by maoris, many against non-maori, has Foolish ever felt moved to issue those victims a speedy recovery? Should he be so disposed he’d find this a full-time job, such are their volume, which at least would have the redeeming virtue of denying him time for his other idiotic utterances.
Carry-on the way he does, it can’t be too long before Foolish accuses hospitals of racism for only having white sheets on their beds.
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