OPINION
Phil Green
- UPDATED
I write this the day before Waitangi day, when the nation waits with bated breath to see how the newly minted Prime Minister engages with Maori on the most controversial and divisive manicured lawns in New Zealand.
By the time you read this, it’ll be a yawn and the news will be replete with the media calling Luxon a racist and Hipkins, “a man for our times”.
Call me psychic, but you don’t need to watch TV1 or listen to RNZ to know how the latest showdown with non-Maori politicians and activist Maori turns out. I wonder if our politicians revere Neville Chamberlain and, like Trump, consider Churchill to be an aberration most unfit for civil discourse.
Let me be clear, the New Zealand civil service and bureaucracy including the courts have sold out to their leftist-leaning sympathies, and the non-Maori governing mandarins have already established a Maori mandate to rule our country. Appearing at Waitangi to grovel amid the Maori elite is the Government’s obeisance to a system of appeasement which culminated with John Key supporting the UNDRIP document in 2010.
While New Zealanders were having BBQs, watching the rugby and generally enjoying the benefits of a first-world nation, built upon the backs of hard-working “settlers and colonists”, the left-oriented activists were having a field day convincing government and the universities that every bad statistic revealing bad Maori outcomes was in fact a post-colonialist settler outrage.
When Hipkins and Luxon kowtow before the Maori elite at Waitangi, it won’t be the poor and dispossessed Maori they’ll be talking to, which we all take an interest in succouring. No, it’ll be the CEOs of Maori corporations who don’t pay tax, and who have never heard of the “trickle down” theory. Or if they have, they still consider it the Crown’s job to clean up the poverty mess that every single country in the world tries to assuage.
Spoiler alert, poverty isn’t going away any time soon, even with targeted programmes favouring Maori.
Now we turn to whakapapa, or the genealogy of our brethren thus blessed with Maori antecedents. Whichever way you look at it, this topic appears scarily like racial profiling, and didn’t another group of people get into a whole lot of trouble earlier for this very thing?
It reminds me of the photos and memoirs of slaves in the American civil war who were white, except their mothers were black. They were still slaves. This was an extraordinarily sensitive topic at the time but reminds us today how, despite genetic profiling, if your skin ain’t brown in New Zealand in 2023 you’re not going to receive the full bona-fide cultural experience of being Maori. Extra suspicious looks if you’re blonde and fair. I know this from personal experience. Don’t tell Kate Hannah.
The lack of wisdom amongst our politicians has been well discussed here on the BFD, but it’s got to such a level now that it’s hard to write about when you know that the die has already been cast.