Arthur
Recently I heard my partner fulminating in the background and I asked why she was annoyed. It turned out that she was subjecting herself to the slanted opinions of one of Stuff NZ’s opinion writers, one Jade Kake yet again. As one who tries to limit unnecessary anger, I seldom read the vile tripe and mind dirt published by Stuff. My partner considers Kake to be a brown racist so I thought I’d punish myself by reading the latest opinion from Kake.
Jade Kake is an architectural designer, writer, and housing advocate based in Whangarei. Of Maori and Dutch descent, her tribal affiliations are Ngapuhi, Te Whakatoohea and Te Arawa.
Stuff
Reading the article, you instantly realise that she is one of the many weekend, born again Maori types who have to rant, pontificate and lecture about all things Maori. New age woke drips from every syllable. The Dutch side does not seem to exist.
This particular piece of hers is about the recent announcement of the loosening of housing intensification rules. Naturally, new housing must be centred around the ‘special people’ and a few unspecified ‘others’.
[…] if Maori, Pasifika and families from other cultures are to live at greater densities, including in terraced housing and apartments, what are some of the design considerations?
In a medium density environment, special attention needs to be paid to shared spaces, and how these promote positive interactions between whanau members and with neighbours and manuhiri.
Now, I can be on board with this regarding everyone from all cultures, backgrounds and races. This new density has the potential to be a social disaster if developers do what they usually do and have been for decades. That is, cram in as many ghastly looking cookie-cutter budget boxes with tiny rooms on a section as they can for a profit, having scant regard for neighbours, wildlife and families etc. Kake makes a valid point. But like all bitter Wokes, she has to poison her message with the empty sound-bite slogans, weasel words and tiresome clichés of the woke left. She also sprinkles in the strategic Maori words to prove her Maori credentials to the crowd. We also get a tiresome phrase borrowed straight from the CRT handbook: “critically interrogate“.
With a majority of Maori now living in urban environments outside the hau kainga, there is a need to critically interrogate our cultural assumptions and expectation (and with mana whenua, to determine the tikanga that applies) to deliver culturally-appropriate housing for Maori through medium-density housing in urban areas.
stuff.co.nz
Yes, everything has to be ‘critical’ something. Not only that; to add power, we have to ‘interrogate’ like the Gestapo. It adds so much gravitas to written and verbal excrescences. But wait, there’s more. Not content with ‘critical’ whatever, we have the favourite of brown neck extremists nationwide, the ubiquitous “decolonise“.
If we’re to decolonise our urban environments, we need to begin by critically interrogating our cultural norms and expectations, acknowledging that for many of us culturally inappropriate housing is the environment we have grown up in and been shaped by.
I believe the proposed MDRS provides a tangible opportunity to begin to decolonise our housing to accommodate whanau Maori and tikanga Maori. Critically, the key to unlocking the potential of these reforms is close engagement with the Maori housing sector, and as is often stated, what’s good for Maori is good for everyone.
What an arrogant statement, “what’s good for Maori is good for everyone.”
I have another view of a truly multicultural society for Kake to consider. What is good for everyone is good for Maori. Everyone benefits, everyone gets ahead.
This could have been a good article on how caution and good decision making on intensification must be considered so everyone has their needs met. It could have been about how iwi could wisely spend their massive Treaty settlements on actually helping their urban populace by building developments for them. Alas no. What we got is the usual brown racist, woke diatribe to mainly denigrate non-Polynesians. In Kake’s version of democracy, the minority rules. First, we got Three Waters benefiting a minority and now we have Three Buildings (on a section) that must benefit a minority.
This is a bitter Kake indeed.