OPINION
JD
With political commentators as diverse in their views as Chris Trotter and Matthew Hooton beginning to voice their concerns that something akin to civil war between Maori and non-Maori is imminent and that we do not have the resources, in the police or military, to deal with it, we need to look at how this state of affairs has come about.
The driving force within some parts of the Maori body politic seems to be that they feel threatened by the coalition Government’s intention to place Maori as the second language in department titles and other signage, disband the embryonic Maori Health Authority, repeal some of Labour’s pipedream smokefree legislation and seek some clarification on what the Treaty of Waitangi actually means to all New Zealanders.
These actions, to quote failed politician and underpants aficionado Tukoroirangi Morgan, who has now re-invented himself as chief advisor to King Tuheitia and “éminence grise” behind the politicisation of the Kingitanga movement, are seen as “proposals that marginalise and diminish the significance of te reo Maori” and an “all-out attack against Maori, the trigger for Maori to unite around the country to convey their outrage”.
These incendiary claims require us to review each of the Government’ actions to determine how serious they really are.
With titles and signage, it is logical, as English is the lingua franca of NZ and spoken by everyone, including the hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Pacific, Asia, Africa and elsewhere who have arrived on our shores over the past few decades, that, for the purpose of clarity and understanding it should always come first.
Since Maori translation always follows, such commonsense actions can hardly be the diminishment of te reo Maori, as Morgan claims.
Re a separate Maori Health Authority: NZ is a small country economically – so much so that we can hardly afford one health authority, let alone two. The simple question is then: would Maori prefer to be treated in the Pakeha health system, with all of its invested resources, inadequate as some might claim them to be, or would they prefer to be treated within a separate Maori health system, which must always be second rate because of the impossibility of allocating sufficient funds to run an additional parallel service in NZ?
One presumes that question has only one answer. So pulling back from the notion that a separate Maori Health Authority of any real quality is even faintly possible can, again, not be considered as an all-out attack against Maori.
Health services, not just in NZ but the world over, can never provide all possible health care. They are finite resources facing an infinite level of demand as medical science continues to make advances that could conceivably have every individual living to 100 years plus if this could be funded, which it cannot.
Better then to have one health service at least partially funded as best we can, than two separate services that both suffer as a result of the dilution of scarce resources. The final outcome of not wasting funds on a new and separate health service bureaucracy and delivery mechanisms must be an improvement for Maori in the services they, and all other Kiwis, get from their primary provider: Health New Zealand.
Then there’s the idea that repealing Labour’s nascent smokefree legislation will, as Morgan claims, “result in more Maori dying from cancer-related illnesses (as) more than 2100 Maori die annually from smoking-related issues”. This is an emotive claim that denies two very basic facts.
One, that Maori, like all of us, have free will and are not forced to smoke and develop cancer as a result. And two, that prohibition always fails to produce its desired result, as the great American experiment with the banning of liquor in the 1930s and the ongoing failure of drug bans in NZ and around the world clearly indicate.
As the coalition Government rightly states: to attempt something similar with tobacco products in NZ would have no effect other than to bring into existence a large and lucrative black-market trade, to the detriment of us all, Maori included.
Finally, to the question of a ‘re-interpretation’ of the Treaty of Waitangi. This is being deliberately misrepresented, again quoting Morgan, as an attempt to “legislate away our Treaty rights”, which risks “tearing the bonds of this nation apart”, when in fact it is simply a plan to restate the basic tenets of citizenship extending to all New Zealanders, namely:
1. All citizens of New Zealand have the same political rights and duties.
2. All political authority comes from the people by democratic means.
3. New Zealand is a multi-ethnic liberal democracy where discrimination based on ethnicity is illegal.
How can this be a set of revolutionary principles that diminish Maori in any way?
If indeed a state of affairs is developing where the coalition Government, according to Chris Trotter, will have to “defer, or scrap altogether, their de-Maorification agenda” or risk the “angry rangatahi that are Te Pati Maori’s nation” turning “nationwide protests into a full-blown revolution”, then we should ask who is to blame for this suddenly looming threat of civil war.
The blame sheets home to two distinct causes. Firstly, Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government was infected with massive hubris triggered by their majority success in the Covid election of 2020. This, they chose to believe, gave them a mandate for change, when all they actually had was a populace driven by fear that gave them only a mandate to defeat Covid and maintain the status quo.
On the back of that hubris, Ardern decided on a cynical ploy to lock in the Maori vote by pandering to the demands of the Maori caucus. Driven largely by the political ego of Willie Jackson, this took the form of “Maorification” of government departments, the introduction of te Tiriti mandates into the management of all levels of the civil service and beyond, a separate Maori Health system and a mooted separate justice and prison system, etc.
All of this was intended to show Maori that they were separate and apart from other Kiwis and that only Labour, and more specifically its Maori caucus, could properly represent them, so downtrodden and oppressed are they within NZ society as a whole.
This is the common theme of neo-Marxism: there must always be two classes of people – the oppressed and the oppressor. Thus, with Labour losing its appeal among the working classes who have advanced and no longer consider themselves to be oppressed, painting Maori as a new oppressed class to which they could pander was seen by Labour’s theorists as the next logical step.
Of course this attempt at manipulation was a spectacular failure and did not lead to a Labour lock on a grievance-driven Maori vote. Instead it caused an even more leftward shift of this particular vote to Te Pati Maori, with all of the problems for racial harmony that the perceived validation of this party’s radical and racist opinions will engender within NZ over the next few years.
Then, with Ardern’s Government bearing prime responsibility, we ask why the Kingitanga is also suddenly jumping onto this anti-coalition bandwagon? That can be seen as a simple case of self-preservation among the Maori elite.
Having observed the burgeoning radical ethos among the young ‘protestor classes’ within Maori, the elites fear that, unless they too can be identified with it, they will rapidly become irrelevant and lose their privileged position, together with the wealth, respect and deference they currently enjoy. To counter this they are attempting to place themselves front and centre as leaders against ‘de-Maorification’.
It should also be noted that while the term ‘de-Maorification’ implies racist activity, in reality the coalition Government is merely seeking a return to the political state that existed before Ardern’s ill-fated attempt to change things. An attempt made without any mandate from the 97 per cent of Kiwi voters who do not espouse the radical Maori cause (compared to the three per cent who voted for Te Pati Maori: the bastion of this radicalisation).
In sum: The current racially based unrest is absolutely the fault of the last Labour Government’s cynical and failed attempt to pander to and lock in the Maori vote. This is now being built upon by two other distinct forces. The small minority of radical Maori whose political lives depend upon fomenting grievance, dissatisfaction and unrest and the Maori elite seeking to maintain their relevance by showing that they too can issue threats of revolution with the best of them.