“I would have called him a non-Maori who happens to be Maori. He’s a Pakeha who happens to be Maori.”
The gobbledygook of racial identity politics summed up in two sentences.
MP Debbie Ngarewa-Packer’s quote above describes what she would have called David Seymour in preference to Willie Jackson’s “useless Maori” slur.
Seymour, with Ngapuhi ancestry and openly ‘proud of his Maori whakapapa’ fails the ethnic purity test because his politics do not focus solely on the welfare of tangata whenua. Debbie, on the other hand, with her double-barrelled bicultural surname and moko is a real Maori who only cares about te ao Maori. Fellow party member Rawiri Waititi is a super Maori because he has a full Maori name and more moko, despite looking like he just mugged John Wayne.
Perhaps rather than a matter of DNA, being Maori is a state of mind? Maybe a bundle of traits can be defined as Maori-like. If so, surely one of them would be courage. The bravery of the traditional warrior, the defiant spirit of the Land Wars, the ferocity of the Maori Battalion… On that basis I would charge the Maori Party and its two MPs as not being very Maori at all.
Their decision to not run a candidate in the Tauranga by-election is an act of cowardice.
Maori Party President Che Wilson claimed his decision was on the basis of a safety issue, as “Tauranga is a hotspot” for “hate speech from white supremacists on social media”. Even if that is true (which I highly doubt), what does he honestly imagine is going to transpire in the retirement capital of New Zealand? The Maori Party hopeful getting up to speak and immediately being drowned out by a mob of blue-rinsed old dears throwing sieg heils and singing SS marching songs? The idea that the electorate that has twice voted in Maori (but not super Maori) MPs (Peters and then Bridges) is really a racist “hotspot” is absurd. And the idea that Te Paati Maori couldn’t find a candidate staunch enough to stare down a few shaven-headed army-surplus-shopping goons is even more so.
So perhaps it is cowardice of another kind – the cowardice of political cynicism. Rather than front up on the hustings like other parties and try to convince their fellow New Zealanders to vote for them, they have decided to let woke scary stories do the job. Te Paati have as much chance of winning Tauranga as I have of winning New Zealand’s Next Top Model and the same could be said of the other minor parties. But by-elections and their media prominence allow a dry run for the general election, where policies and issues can be debated on the national stage. If you are interested in debate that is. If you are only interested in power, why not play the race card, not to mention the pity card, and claim as critical race theory has it, that the system is rigged? Of course the system was fine until about five minutes ago, giving Te Paati two parliamentary seats even though they received less party votes last election (1.2 per cent) than NZ First and the Conservatives, who have no representation in parliament at all.
This utterly cynical view of our system of government, exploiting it when it suits, arrogantly slandering it when it does not, goes hand in hand with a view of the Treaty of Waitangi as a ‘partnership’. A purely judicial creation (the word does not appear in the English text and is only unearthed from the Maori version via a lot of very convenient linguistic contortions), it allows Maori political groups a double bite at the cherry: once as democratically elected representatives and again as treaty ‘partners’.
Perhaps the answer is for Te Paati Maori to pack up their kete and leave the parliamentary system altogether. Rule by chiefly dictate (sorry, korero and then consensus) all those Maori who wish to join them in their parallel country. As long as it is funded by a Maori-only tax, of course.
Respected Maori MPs of the past such as Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Maui Pomare knew where such madness led. They sought to improve the lot of Maori within the democratic system, understanding that colonialism was a reality under which their people could prosper or not, often dependent on their own efforts.
And what of the chiefs who met at Waitangi more than 180 years ago and decided an overarching authority – the British Crown – was preferable to the anarchy of the musket wars?
Or were they all ‘Pakeha who happened to be Maori’?
Te Paati Maori need to reconsider their boycott of Tauranga and take their fingers off the rhetorical blunderbuss – scattering racist accusations where ever they point it. It exposes them as grandstanding frauds more interested in playing woke politics than serving the people they claim to represent.
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