OPINION
Do Maori activists ever wonder why their actions do not provoke equal and opposite reactions from Pakeha? And, if they do, how do they explain the absence of mass rallies of the ‘colonisers’ with flags and tolling bells to match the impressive theatricals of Tame Iti on the Waitangi Treaty Ground?
The optimists will, of course, interpret the Pakeha’s political lethargy as an endorsement – of sorts. Either, they’re on side with the tangata whenua – ‘You go, bro!’ Or they subscribe, perversely, to the 40-year-old insight of Donna Awatere: that Maori sovereignty was bound to triumph because Pakeha simply couldn’t imagine a world in which such a victory was possible.
The pessimists will warn their optimistic brethren not to get too cocky. ‘The dogs of racism may be sleeping fitfully at the moment, but the way we keep kicking them, they’re bound to wake up and start snarling any minute now.’
Many other Kiwis would say that the dogs of racism sprang to their feet and started snarling months ago. At the general election the voters set them free. Now they roam the corridors of parliament, baring their teeth at anyone who looks at them sideways. No one’s actually been bitten yet, but the day one of those no-longer-sleeping dogs decides to sink its teeth into the body politic cannot be far away.
And then there are all those Maori-adjacent Pakeha, positively panting in anticipation of a Kiwi version of The Turner Diaries: when ‘Cracker’ pulls on his white hood and robes, grabs his shotgun, climbs into his ute and heads for the nearest big city for a replay of the Land Wars of the 18th century.
Klansmen in the New Zealand countryside? Who knew! Right-wing farmers, yes. Boofhead rugby players, who make a hobby of rarking-up wokesters from the Big Smoke, sure. But the Ku Klux Klan? Kiwi blokes would rather dress up in their wives’ frocks than be seen in a white sheet. For most New Zealanders, demonstrating that much commitment to any kind of cause is just plain naff.
It tells us something, surely, that on the same Saturday that 10,000+ Maori turned up at Ngaruawahia’s Turangawaewae Marae, 35,000 Kiwis turned out to hear the Foo Fighters. “My Hero” indeed!
It isn’t difficult to imagine how frustrating this Pakeha unwillingness to ‘get political’ must be to right-wing activists. All those people who, over the past three years, spent countless hours doing everything they could to rouse the sleeping giant of Kiwi opposition to all this ‘Maori stuff’. That poor bugger, Julian Batchelor, for example, who organised his very own nationwide “Stop Co-Governance” tour only to suffer the indignity of seeing his hall-bookings cancelled by gutless local councils and his audiences outnumbered by the pro-co-governance protestors outside.
Batchelor dreamed of replicating the election-eve rally organised by Labour’s John A Lee on 13 October 1938. That night, upwards of 70,000 Labour supporters poured into the Auckland Domain. The trade unions with their banners flying. The first state house tenants grateful to the party that built them. Ordinary Aucklanders celebrating the passage of the Social Security Act and looking forward to the better New Zealand that was coming. As political demonstrations go, Jack Lee’s event knocked King Tuheitia’s into a cocked hat.
Batchelor was convinced that, by the time the New Zealanders of 2023 had heard ‘the facts’ about co-governance, they, too, would be ready to turn out in their tens of thousands to tell the Labour Party they were having none of it and to warn the National Party that it had better not go all soft on them. No ifs, no buts, no maybes – this ‘Maori stuff’ had to go! Didn’t happen. On the night of Friday, 13 October 2023, the Auckland Domain was empty of everyone, save young lovers, dog-walkers and pro-Palestinian vandals.
Funny thing is, Batchelor got what he wanted. Not the big rally, with bright banners and passionate speeches, but something much more effective. In the fortnight preceding 14 October, and on the day itself, hundreds of thousands of Kiwis marked their ballot-paper and dropped it in a ballot-box. The anti-co-governance numbers prevailed: peacefully and without a fuss, just the way New Zealanders like their politics, even when they are toppling a government loathed and detested by a clear majority of the population.
Which isn’t to say that mass outpourings of political sentiment among non-Maori New Zealanders have been permanently relegated to the past. Jack Lee’s democratic-socialism of the 1930s; the anti-Vietnam War mobilisations of the 1970s; the Springbok Tour protests and Nuclear Free New Zealand activism of the 1980s: it is tempting to see these as the product of another country altogether. Of the ‘Old New Zealand’ dreamtime, before the bucket of cold water that was Rogernomics and Ruthanasia woke us all up.
But that would be a mistake. It is just under five years ago that a homicidal Australian walked into a Christchurch mosque and started shooting. The nation was stunned. This was not who Kiwis were. Not one of us cared enough about a political cause to butcher 51 defenceless people in its name. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern captured the impulse we all felt to link arms and throw a wall of human empathy around the devastated Muslim community of Christchurch, by declaring, “They Are Us”.
But, it wasn’t enough. Practical people that we are, the call went out to gather together and demonstrate to the world our empathy, our solidarity and our outrage. And that’s what we did: gathering by the tens of thousands in parks and sports grounds in the spirit of what the Maori call rangimarie – the overlaying of peace. And the message that the people of New Zealand – European, Maori, Pasifika, Indian, Chinese, Afghan, Somalian, Filipino – joined to the message of their prime minister was simple – but very powerful: “They are us – and this is who we are.”
And that is why the Pakeha give the impression of political lethargy. Not because we don’t care about all this ‘Maori stuff’, but because we are (to paraphrase Peter Mandelson) ‘intensely relaxed’ about Maori making their case in all the ways that Maori can: in hui, in hikoi, in haka. We might not appear to be listening, but we are – and thinking, too.
But those Maori activists should be – and almost certainly are – aware, that if anyone is foolish enough to move beyond hui, hikoi and haka, and take a leaf out of Brenton Tarrant’s diabolical play-book, then Maoridom will discover what Pakeha can do – when they are pissed-off.