An Extraordinary Promise.

An Offer Maori Could Not Refuse: It is hard to imagine a better way of demonstrating the injustice that lies at the heart of our nation’s story. The first time the Māori refused to sell their land to the Pakeha, the Pakeha imported 12,000 imperial troops from Great Britain and confiscated vast tracts of it. Then, having overcome all serious indigenous opposition, successive settler governments passed laws encouraging the Pakeha to take what little productive Māori land was left. Image by Dave Tipper.

THE GREENS MANIFESTO, released on Sunday (9/7/23) contains an extraordinary promise. If it finds itself in a position to do so, the Green Party will “explore” the return of land “wrongfully alienated from the tangata whenua”. To be clear, the Greens are not referring to Crown land. The process envisaged involves giving Māori “a right of first refusal”, enabling “the return of private land to iwi, hapū and whānau at point of sale”.

To describe this policy as “challenging” does it a disservice. On its face, the Greens’ policy is nothing short of revolutionary. Slowly, but surely, Māori could reclaim the lands that were, by war or legal chicanery, taken from them. The processes of colonisation, to which the extinguishing of native title has always been fundamental, would be thrown into reverse.

“But, they can’t do that! All Hell would break loose!” Certainly, that would be the cry. But how loud would it be, really?

After all, the process described has for many years constituted an important aspect of the Treaty Settlement Process. The right of first refusal to land which the Crown no longer wished to own was granted to Ngai Tahu in 1998.

“But, granting first refusal to iwi, hapū and whānau in relation to Crown land is quite different from encouraging them to exercise the same right in relation to private land”, the critics would object. “To give Māori such a right would fundamentally derange our entire system. Individuals and companies must be free to sell their property to whomsoever they please – otherwise the free market economy falls apart.”

Putting to one side the legal nicety that the Crown is deemed to own every hectare of New Zealand already, and that those who purchase real estate generally hold it “in fee simple” from the King. (And you thought feudalism was dead!) What the Greens are proposing is simply that Māori be given the first opportunity to meet the vendor’s price – not that they be given the power to set it! The market will continue to work – at least in the short term. Over time, however, more and more land would, indeed, revert to Māori ownership.

Apart from it being an affront to their colonial amor propre, what respectable reason could Pakeha have for caring who ends up buying what they have chosen to sell? When Kiwis flick on their homes, the identity of the purchaser doesn’t usually signify. What matters is that the transaction goes smoothly, and that the agreed purchase-price ends up in the vendor’s bank account. If iwi corporations were to become major players in the buying and selling of New Zealand real estate who, apart from inveterate racists, would really care?

Certainly not the generations of New Zealanders born after 1965. For more and more of the generations at the end of the alphabet, buying and selling property has become a pipe dream. Some of them might even welcome the steady transfer of real estate from Pakeha to Māori: arguing (with some justification) that large iwi corporations could hardly be worse landlords than the grasping rack-renters who lord it over them now.

No, if the Green’s policy is going to cause trouble, then it will be in the long, not the short, term. Think about it. Once iwi, hapū and whānau have finally reclaimed their lost whenua, how likely is it that they will allow it slip through their fingers a second time? Which can only mean that a time will come when most of New Zealand is in the hands of iwi, hapū and whānau ill-disposed to selling their whenua, their taonga, to any but their own.

Which is why this Green policy comes under the rubric of “Te Tiriti”. It is hard to imagine a better way of demonstrating the injustice that lies at the heart of our nation’s story. The first time the Māori refused to sell their land to the Pakeha, the Pakeha imported 12,000 imperial troops from Great Britain and confiscated vast tracts of it. Then, having overcome all serious indigenous opposition, successive settler governments passed laws encouraging the Pakeha to take what little productive Māori land was left.

By re-creating the disposition of New Zealand real estate at the time of the Treaty’s signing, the Greens’ policy would right these wrongs.

Aotearoa was Māori land – it could be again.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 July 2023.

Passing The Tests.

Professional Failure: New Zealand’s education system – once celebrated as one of the most successful in the world – is in free-fall. By all the recognised international comparators, we are failing – and failing fast. So bad have things become that it is increasingly difficult to find a sufficient number of willing and able participants to make our international test-results robust enough, statistically, to stand comparison.

BY 2024, this country’s education system is supposed to be delivering competency in literacy and numeracy to all young New Zealanders. What used to be called the “Three Rs” – readin’, ‘ritin’, ‘rithmetic – should have been mastered by all but a handful of students heading into NCEA examinations. Ominously, our education system is far from achieving this most basic of objectives.

The Ministry of Education has been trialing the NCEA assessment tests that it plans to have in place by 2024. The first trial-run took place last year, the second in July of this year, and the results of both trial-runs are dire. Of the approximately 16,000 Year Ten students (14-15 year-olds) tested in July, only 34 percent achieved a “pass” in writing; 56 percent in maths; and 64 percent in reading. These results differ only marginally from those obtained in 2021.

That is to say, after ten years of schooling, only a third of young New Zealanders can write coherently; only half possess basic computational skills; and only two-thirds can cope adequately with a level of written communication fundamental to success in adult life.

These numbers represent a scarcely believable tale of professional failure across New Zealand’s education system. What it reveals is a society that is rapidly losing the ability (if it hasn’t already lost it) to keep itself going – let alone improve itself – on the basis of its own human resources.

Try to imagine the response of New Zealand’s principal export markets if tests revealed that no more than two-thirds of its livestock could be described as healthy. Or if, by other measures, that fraction of healthy animals fell to a half, and then to a third. People would demand to know how the Ministry of Primary Industries could possibly have missed such a catastrophic decline. They would demand to know what it was doing to lift the overall level of New Zealand’s livestock health.

The livestock analogy is brutal, but a level of brutality is warranted here – if only to wake New Zealanders up to the perilous situation in which they now find themselves. For decades, we have been telling ourselves that the best way to make our country wealthier, fairer, and happier was by educating its young people to the highest possible international standard. We looked at countries with world-beating education systems – and test results – like Singapore and Finland, and assumed that theirs was the level of performance to which our own educational experts aspired.

Clearly, that was an unwarranted assumption. New Zealand’s education system – once celebrated as one of the most successful in the world – is in free-fall. By all the recognised international comparators, we are failing – and failing fast. So bad have things become that it is increasingly difficult to find a sufficient number of willing and able participants to make our international test-results robust enough, statistically, to stand comparison. In a telling sign of the times, this dearth of suitable participants is being presented by some school principals as a signal that it is time for New Zealand to abandon international comparisons altogether.

Thankfully, at both the political and bureaucratic levels, New Zealand’s perilous decline has been noted and remedial action demanded. By 2024, the slide must stop. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. The call has come very late, and, tragically, it is likely to be resisted.

Across academia, in the teacher unions, and increasingly at the chalk-face, the whole notion of education being an international enterprise, in which young New Zealanders must be able to participate (and compete) with confidence, is being rejected. In its place, “progressive” educators are erecting a system geared to rectifying the cultural and social inequities arising out of New Zealand’s colonial past.

With increasing vehemence, international standards are rejected as “Eurocentric” – or even “white supremacist” – weapons for obliterating the unique insights of indigenous cultures. The bitter letter-to-the-Listener struggle over the merits of “Western Science” versus “Mātaurānga Māori”, was but the tip of the ontological iceberg currently ripping a massive hole, albeit well below the waterline of public perception, in New Zealand’s education system.

The extent to which this debate has progressed is revealed in the responses to the shocking performance revealed in the trial-run NCEA assessment tests. According to a post on the RNZ website, “independent evaluators” are concerned that: “New literacy and numeracy tests could lower NCEA achievement rates among Māori and Pacific students.”

“They’ve gone back to the ark with these one-off tests which is just ridiculous”, fumed Peter Brooks, Principal of Fryberg High School. “I don’t know where this idea came from that you could test for literacy and numeracy on one day, online, just on computers. It’s just fraught with problems. To me it’s a giant leap backwards in terms of determining whether the kid’s literate or numerate or not.”

A report by Evaluation Associates Ltd identified “a risk fewer priority learners – which included many Māori and Pacific learners, those from low socio-economic backgrounds, and students with special education needs – would achieve an NCEA qualification once the tests were introduced.”

That a disproportionate number of Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders remain concentrated in the lowest socio-economic groups is one of the saddest constants of New Zealand sociology. Breaking the dismal cycle of low incomes, low expectations, low educational attainment, has eluded successive governments operating in the neoliberal era. Convincing Treasury, the business community, and the broader electorate, to endorse the level of spending required to transform the education sector into a credible mechanism for Māori and Pasifika escape from structural disadvantage, is a goal our politicians have yet to set themselves – let alone achieve.

In part, this failure is explained by the unwillingness of the more privileged sectors of our society to state with brutal clarity that breaking free of the dismal cycle of “lows” will only ever be achieved by aiming and scoring “high”. Parents must be told that there will be no special pleading; no softening of standards; no blaming of history. Their children must pass the tests, and they must help them pass the tests. The New Zealand state can build schools, and it can train teachers, but it cannot instill a determination in young Māori and Pasifika to be educated to the fullest extent of their powers.

It must also be made brutally clear that if young New Zealanders – preponderantly Māori and Pasifika – do not acquire the skills needed to run their own country, then their own country will be run by those who do have the skills. Increasingly, these managers and professionals will not even be Pakeha, but people from far-off places, with little or no empathy for the indigenous culture of Aotearoa.

The best way Pakeha New Zealanders can undo the damage of colonisation is to offer Māori an education system equal to the both the expectations of the rest of the world, and to the promises contained in te Tiriti o Waitangi. The best way for Māori to achieve tino rangatiratanga is to take that offer – and ace the tests.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 24 October 2022.

Understanding Colonisation.

Relentless Advance: The Anglo-Saxon colonisation of North America and Australasia was a very different proposition from the colonisation of India and Africa. In a relatively short period of time the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand were reduced to insignificant minorities by an unceasing flood of settlers from Europe.

SO, HOW DOES IT WORK? At every level, on every subject, the same explanation is offered for Māori disadvantage – colonisation. What’s more, the word itself has acquired such a talismanic quality that its mere utterance is sufficient to close down any further discussion. After all, the only people likely to challenge the colonisation explanation for Māori disadvantage would be the colonisers’ descendants themselves. And they would say that – wouldn’t they?

The colonisers’ descendants might also raise the question as to whether Māori were, in fact, colonised at all. Not a question that anyone would have thought to raise fifty years ago. In the 1970s the argument that Māori had not been colonised would have been laughed out of court. Back then it was generally accepted that, under the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori had ceded sovereignty to the British Crown. What’s more, the British, very soon after the signing of the Treaty, had exercised their sovereignty by annexing New Zealand, declaring it a British colony, and appointing a Governor to rule it. Oh yes, the Māori had been colonised alright – they’d been colonised good and proper.

But, fifty years later, the story has changed. Today we are enjoined to believe that the Māori chiefs gathered at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 did not cede sovereignty to Queen Victoria. Indeed, no less a body than the Waitangi Tribunal has declared that the sovereignty of Māori iwi and hapu remains intact to this day.

It is a curious sort of coloniser who, 180 years after the event, proclaims the untrammelled sovereignty of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands his ancestors had claimed as their own. If the indigenous people of New Zealand were not subjugated by military force, relieved of their lands, forests and fisheries, and pushed to the margins of colonial society, then what was going on between the 1850s and the 1970s?

In the most brutal and unvarnished terms, what was going on between the signing of the Treaty and the military suppression of all Māori resistance in the 1860s and 70s, was a deliberate policy of overwhelming the indigenous people by settling tens-of-thousands of immigrants across the country, to the point where their numerical superiority rendered the construction of a second Britain in the South Pacific a feasible proposition. What made “New Zealand” possible was the reduction of the Māori to a militarily and politically powerless minority in their own land.

A particular kind of colonisation, then? Not at all the same as the colonisation visited upon India and Africa. Not even the same as the colonisation visited upon England and Ireland by the Normans. That sort of colonisation featured a relatively small number of conquerors and a very much larger number of conquered. Hundreds-of-millions of Indians were ruled over by around 100,000 British soldiers and administrators. This was the sort of colonisation which colonised peoples could dismantle – which is pretty much what they spent most of the twentieth century doing.

But, the Anglo-Saxon colonies of North America and Australasia were a very different proposition. In a relatively short period of time the indigenous peoples of those lands were reduced to insignificant minorities by an unceasing flood of settlers from Europe.

This huge discrepancy in numbers rendered military resistance futile. Always there were more, and more, and more Europeans to replace the settlers and soldiers killed by the indigenous tribes. North America and Australasia thus became “Neo-Europes”, ruled over and overwhelmingly populated by Europeans. Even where they escaped becoming the victims of outright genocide, indigenous cultures: their languages, customs, modes of political and economic organisation; found themselves smothered by the sheer pressure of European numbers.

This is the process which Māori, along with the many other indigenous peoples forcibly assimilated into the Neo-Europes created by Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, call “colonisation”. The cultural suffocation that inevitably attended the submerging of indigenous peoples beneath a relentlessly rising tide of nineteenth century immigrants. Settlers who came to stay – and who, more than a century later, are still here.

Within the institutions of the state, and even in a number of private organisations, the answer to colonisation is being presented as “decolonisation” and “indigenisation”. As if the cultural and demographic facts of New Zealand life can be re-configured to the point of somehow undoing the facts of New Zealand history. Regrettably, this strategy carries within it distressing intimations of coercion. The threat is there, all the more daunting for being unstated, that those who refuse to decolonise and indigenise will pay a price.

Given the degree of coercion involved in colonisation itself, this hard-line approach is entirely understandable. Unfortunately, it is also likely to provoke the colonisers’ descendants into adopting an aggressively oppositional stance, which, given the balance of demographic forces, is almost certain to be counterproductive. Attempting to undercut “the tyranny of the majority” by unilaterally redefining the meaning of democracy will only make matters worse.

The decolonising concept of “co-governance” cannot succeed if it is understood by Pākehā to mean that Māori will be empowered to exercise a right of veto over the ownership and delivery of essential state services mostly paid for by Pākehā taxes. European cultural traditions and political norms are simply too deeply embedded in the Neo-Europe called New Zealand for this crude approach to righting the wrongs of the past, and overcoming the inequities of the present, to succeed.

Much more likely to secure Pākehā support is the argument that, in the making of New Zealand far too little concern was shown for the impact the colonists’ nation-building was having on the lives and treasures of Māori iwi and hapu. In their eagerness to create a second Britain in the South Pacific, the colonisers simply crowded-out the indigenous people whose rights they were pledged to respect. Presenting co-governance as a way of encouraging Māori to reclaim their lost space has a high chance of success. That the colonial state smothered and suffocated Māori culture and Māori rights is historically undeniable, and morally indefensible.

Ceding Māori the space they need to both rediscover and redefine their tino rangatiratanga is unquestionably the right thing for Pākehā to do. Encouraging Pākehā to join them in that expanded space is unquestionably the best way for Māori to make Aotearoa less European and more indigenous.

Decolonisation is not a programme to be imposed, it is a skill that Māori and Pākehā can only acquire together.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 7 October 2022.

A Bridge Of Insufficient Strength.

Not Strong Enough: There is no short-cut from our colonial past to a bi-cultural future. Surely, following this flood-ravaged fortnight, the Prime Minister realises that, when the waters rise in fury, bridges get swept away.

A GREAT DEAL can be learned from the metaphors politicians choose to illustrate the challenges they are required to overcome. At the recent gathering of Māori and Pakeha leaders at the Māori King’s Turangawaewae marae, the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, gave us the metaphor of te Tiriti o Waitangi as a bridge. Somehow, she suggested, New Zealanders must be brought safely across this fragile structure. Her job is to lead them.

Listening to the Prime Minister, I was reminded of the compelling final scene of the movie The Man Who Would Be King, in which Sean Connery strides bravely towards safety across a swaying rope bridge. Behind him, enraged tribesmen hack away furiously at the anchoring cables. Beneath him, a yawning chasm waits to swallow-up the foolhardy Scottish soldier.

Certainly, it is difficult to escape the notion that the Prime Minister perceives this present moment to be one of considerable historical danger.

Behind us lies the old society of colonial New Zealand. A society based upon assumptions of racial superiority. A society founded upon the dispossession of the Māori. A society riven by multiple inequities and injustices. Ahead of us lies Aotearoa – the new bi-cultural nation in which a “partnership of the races” will expunge the inequities and injustices of our racist past.

Across this perilous gap between yesterday and tomorrow, the Prime Minister has suspended the Treaty. She offers us her hand – and bids us cross.

The problem with Prime Minister Ardern’s metaphor is that far too few New Zealanders believe the Treaty is strong enough to carry them across the chasm. They fear the chaos into which their country will be plunged if the bridge proves unequal to the burden imposed upon it. They simply do not share the Māori people’s unwavering confidence in a document once referred to by a Chief Justice of New Zealand as “a simple nullity”.

Even those enthusiastic about a bi-cultural future for Aotearoa-New Zealand are beginning to express their doubts about the “official” interpretation of the Treaty as a “partnership between races”. Dame Anne Salmond, for example, writing for the Newsroom website, reminds us that race is “a colonial idea with an ugly history, associated with slavery, genocide and the dehumanisation of others, and utterly inimical to respecting [New Zealanders’] ‘tapu and mana’.”

Pakeha conservatives, on the other hand, listen to what they judge to be the exaggerated and essentially self-serving claims of Māori historians and lawyers who would have us believe that te Tiriti o Waitangi is Magna Carta and the United States Constitution all rolled into one unchallengeable fragment of Holy Writ. Their reading of New Zealand history and New Zealand law simply cannot be squared with what is fast becoming the “official” explanation of the Treaty.

For far too many New Zealanders the Prime Minister’s invitation to step onto her bridge to the future is an invitation to catastrophe.

Perhaps there would be a higher level of confidence in the Treaty’s strength if the Prime Minister was better able to explain its corollary – “co-governance”. So eloquent on other subjects, Jacinda Ardern becomes uncharacteristically tongue-tied when invited to “sell” the concept behind what her critics characterise as Labour’s racially-charged and electorally unmandated policies – most particularly Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s “Three Waters” project.

This inability to explain co-governance is not restricted to the Prime Minister. The attempt by her Māori Development Minister, Willie Jackson, to reassure New Zealanders that they have nothing to fear from this “new” variant of democracy has succeeded only in frightening the bejesus out of them. If this is what lies on the other side of the chasm bridged by the Treaty, then the Sixth Labour Government should not be surprised at the number of Kiwis declining to make the journey.

In the wise words of Dame Anne: “Rather than seeing the Treaty as a ‘bridge’ across a chasm of misunderstanding, in the spirit of ‘pernicious polarisation’, perhaps Te Tiriti can be visualised as a meeting place where different groups of New Zealanders come together in a spirit of tika/justice, pono/truth, and aroha to share ideas, resolve injustices and seek peace with one another.”

There is no short-cut from our colonial past to a bi-cultural future. Surely, following this flood-ravaged fortnight, the Prime Minister realises that, when the waters rise in fury, bridges get swept away.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 August 2022.

Blame Games.

The Pathologies Of Poverty: And all this must have been known. In the ministries of Social Development, Health, Education and Corrections. In the Police. Politicians must have known about it, too. How could they not? When, every day, the victims of their “Look markets – no hands!” policies were beating a desperate pathway to their electorate office doors? But knowing something, and doing something aren’t always the closest of neighbours. Often they’re as far apart as Devonport is from Otara, and Remuera from Otahuhu.

AND SO, at last, we understand what building your house on someone else’s home means. It means living on top of those who were here before you. It means doing everything within your power to prevent them from getting out from under your crushing weight – and standing upright. It means always having someone to blame.

It means packing your poorest, your most desperate citizens, into a handful of ramshackle South Auckland suburbs. Requiring them to send their kids to substandard schools. Providing them with hospitals that start falling apart even before they are finished. Denying them an effective system of public transport. Paying them the minimum wage. Crowding them into sub-standard accommodation. Policing them harshly. Imprisoning them in shamefully disproportionate numbers. Offering them little, if any, rehabilitation when they are in jail.

And now, as if all this beneficence wasn’t enough, it means expecting them to co-operate fully with the authorities in the fight against the Delta variant of Covid-19.

And amazingly (given their treatment) most of the Māori and Pasifika residents of South Auckland are doing exactly that – co-operating fully. In spite of being shut in behind a complex motorway system that might almost have been designed for the purpose of keeping South Auckland out of sight and out of mind. In spite of all the evidence indicating that when Covid arrives it heads straight for the poorest part of town. In spite of Māori and Pasifika community workers warning those charged with managing the Covid-19 pandemic that the official messaging was all wrong for their people. In spite of everything the Pakeha powers-that-be did, or, more accurately, failed to do, the Māori and Pasifika residents of South Auckland are getting tested – and vaccinated – in their tens-of-thousands.

And inevitably, it isn’t enough.

Maybe, if successive governments had spent the last thirty years building the sort of state housing that the soon-to-be-dismantled Housing Corporation was perfecting in the early 1980s, then the people of South Auckland would have been sheltered from the Coronavirus in decent, publicly-owned and properly maintained homes.

Maybe, if those same governments had worked co-operatively with South Auckland not-for-profits and cultural institutions to design and support a system of health delivery attuned to the needs and preferences of Māori and Pasifika families, then, when Covid-19 arrived, those same families would not have fallen prey to misinformers and conspiracy theorists.

Maybe, if both National and Labour had entertained the truly radical notion that entrusting local communities with the power and the resources to teach their children in a way that made them proud of their successes, rather than ashamed of their failures, then the talent and entrepreneurial spirit abounding in those same communities might have been invested in something more personally and socially rewarding than criminal gangs.

But, because those past governments didn’t, our present government is continuing the practice of crowding individuals and families into motels and boarding-houses. It is difficult to imagine an environment better suited to the spread of a virus – especially one as infectious as the Delta variant of Covid-19. (Concentrating so many of the gangs’ actual and potential clients in these places must also be acknowledged as extremely helpful – although not to public health, or personal security.)

And all this must have been known. In the ministries of Social Development, Health, Education and Corrections. In the Police. Politicians must have known about it, too. How could they not? When, every day, the victims of their “Look markets – no hands!” policies were beating a desperate pathway to their electorate office doors? But knowing something, and doing something aren’t always the closest of neighbours. Often they’re as far apart as Devonport is from Otara, and Remuera from Otahuhu.

And, truth to tell, all of us living in the House of Middle-Class Pakeha know that our wealth and comfort comes with a hefty price-tag. It’s just that we’ve learnt how to defer calculating the cost by keeping the decaying communities of the poor, rank with the stench of deprivation and discarded dreams, as far away from our leafy suburbs as possible. Out of sight, out of mind, works every bit as well for the “boguns” and the “boofheads” of the Pakeha working-class as it does for Māori and Pasifika communities – better, in a way, since working-class Pakeha lack the conscience-tugging combination of ethnicity and indigeneity.

But, guilty consciences are difficult to live with. Especially when it becomes clear that all the te Reo speaking and name-changing that guilt-ridden Pakeha can be bullied into accepting will not make one South Auckland family richer or better housed. Unfortunately, where consciences turn sour, prejudices tend to flourish. Once the idea takes root that leafy Auckland is being kept from its pleasures by homeless Māori and Pasifika, the demands will not be slow in coming for South Auckland to be locked-down, ring-fenced, and left to stew in its own Covid juices.

It is then we will discover just how securely the House of Pakeha has been built on the home of Māori. How willing tangata whenua truly are to go on carrying its weight – and accepting its blame.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 September 2021.

Morbid Symptoms: Why Are Māori Vaccination Rates Plummeting?

Not Enough Shots In The Arm: The percentage of 8-month-old Māori babies in Counties Manukau receiving their primary course of immunisation on time has fallen from 85 percent in May 2020 to 68 percent in May 2021. A report prepared for the Counties Manukau DHB attributes this startling drop-off to: “Cultural microaggressions, white privilege, stereotyping and prejudice.” This is not, however, the only explanation.

MĀORI VACCINATION RATES are plummeting. The percentage of 8-month-old Māori babies in Counties Manukau receiving their primary course of immunisation on time has fallen from 85 percent in May 2020 to 68 percent in May 2021. The data for Pasifika also shows a fall-off in timely immunisation. From 93 percent of babies receiving their primary course on time in October 2020, to 82 percent in May 2021. Those New Zealanders who do not fall into the Māori, Pasifika or Asian categories – presumably the Pakeha population – also registered a slight fall-off. From around 92 percent in 2020 to just under 90 percent in 2021. Only Asian New Zealanders immunised their children in numbers above the 95 percent target rate. Fully 98 percent of their 8-month-olds are receiving their jab on time.

These statistics are grim. Clearly, something important has happened over the course of the past 18 months to discourage Māori parents from immunising their children on time. The most obvious suspect is, of course, the Covid-19 Pandemic. Its disruptive effects tend to be concentrated among the poorest sections of any given population: African-Americans in the USA; peasants and slum-dwellers in India. After the elderly and the chronically-ill, it is the poorly-paid, the poorly-housed and the poorly-educated members of society that Covid-19 strikes down.

An evaluation of the immunisation services provided to the Counties Manukau DHB does not, however, blame Covid-19 for the sudden drop-off in the Māori vaccination rate. The failure to maintain the pre-Covid percentage is, instead, attributed to: “Cultural microaggressions, white privilege, stereotyping and prejudice.” The authors of this evaluation identified “a failing and culturally incompetent system” as the culprit. “Whānau were in a constant state of stress forced to engage in a system that is inherently racist. Implicit and explicit biases, as forms of racism, were present in both whānau and staff interviews.”

The NZ Herald (whose investigative efforts are responsible for bringing the report of the Counties Manukau DHB’s innovation and improvement centre, “Ko Awatea”, to the public’s attention) suggests that its authors are firmly of the view that the racism identified can only be remedied by setting up a framework for radical cultural change within the institution:

“This should aim to decolonise dominant discourse and biases … Understanding of the journey from historical trauma to the manifestation of Māori health status today is integral for staff to increase cultural competency and responsiveness.”

One can only assume that, in this instance, the “dominant discourse and biases” in need of decolonisation is medical science itself. The obvious implication being that the whole notion of “medical science” is a white supremacist construct which arrogantly denies the possibility of any other rational system for understanding and managing the health of human beings.

The scientific method does not, however, acknowledge a place for this kind of relativistic thinking. Quite correctly, scientists warn that if we say that vaccination is just one way among many of successfully controlling potentially fatal communicable diseases, then we are effectively giving anti-vaxxers carte blanche to spread their dangerous lies far and wide. Indeed, one could argue that it would be a particularly pernicious form of racism that pretended to acknowledge the efficacy of indigenous medicines while quietly ensuring that those who placed their trust in “White Medicine” enjoyed measurably better health outcomes than those who were encouraged to believe otherwise.

One might further speculate that the attribution of all Māori misfortunes to the effects of ‘colonisation’, up to and including the transmission of colonial-era trauma (presumably genetically) through successive generations of the colonised, is almost certain to foster a deep-seated mistrust of the colonialists’ descendants. That being the case, there is scant reason for any Māori accepting this explanation to trust a single word the Pakeha Plunket nurses/vaccinators, contracted by the Counties Manukau DHB to lift the level of Māori immunisation, might say.

If so, then the consequences can only have been made more serious by the contemporaneous global upsurge in anti-racist activism driven by the Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd by a White American police officer in May 2020. These protests intensified dramatically the conviction (among Whites as well as Blacks) that the evils of White Supremacy were both universal and irreversible. The Day of Jubilee would only come when People of Colour took their futures into their own hands. As that unfolds, they advised, the best thing Whites can do is shut up and get out of their way.

Though essentially unrelated to the anti-racist upsurge, the rapid spread of outlandish conspiracy theories which accompanied the intensification of the global Covid-19 Pandemic contributed hugely to a growing loss of faith in all forms of authority. Not only scientists were challenged, but so, too, were mainstream politicians and journalists. Social-media-generated conspiracies filled the vacuum which this widespread rejection of “the system” had created – especially among those who felt excluded from the good life so many others seemed to enjoy.

Overlay these deep-seated feelings of social inferiority and rejection with ethnicity, and you have the makings of a perfect storm.

That the very health-sector groups most likely to benefit from the Labour Government’s radical plans to restructure the New Zealand health service, might seize upon this opportunity to offer up yet more evidence of the urgent need to create a health service run by Māori, for Māori, within an aggressively decolonised co-governance structure, is hardly surprising.

Most of all, it was important for the decolonisers to keep at bay the most obvious socio-economic explanations for the sudden drop-off in Māori vaccinations. Any notion that the failure to vaccinate their kids on time might have less to do with the fact that they were brown, and a lot more to do with the fact that they were poor, had to be excluded from the explanatory framework.

Certainly, the contribution of Dr Nikki Turner, director of the Immunisation Advisory Centre, would not have been welcomed by the ‘It’s All the Fault of Colonisation’ brigade. In this respect, the final paragraph of Nicholas Jones’ Herald article is the clincher:

“There were many factors behind the drop off, Turner said, including badly stretched health services, the need for more cultural sensitivity, and increasing poverty and stress on families, who move more because of the housing crisis.”

Tragically, the interests tied up in the transformation of the New Zealand health system have little incentive to alienate the economic elites with whom they are, for the moment, collaborating. Māori-Pakeha co-governance may be possible under Capitalism, but the elimination of social and economic injustice is not. The system change we need is not the one foreshadowed in He Puapua.

It was the Italian socialist, Antonio Gramsci, who said it best:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Like plummeting Maori vaccination rates.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 20 July 2021.

Paper Victories.

When Things Turn Nasty: How does a commercial enterprise enforce a legal right against an ever-expanding body of human resistance, without the conflict escalating well beyond its original causes?

WILL THE MARINA at Kennedy Point (Pūtiki Bay) on Waiheke Island ever be completed? On paper, the answer is an emphatic “Yes!” The developer, Kennedy Point Boatharbour Ltd (KPBL) has ticked all the procedural and legal boxes right up to the Supreme Court. On paper, there is nothing to impede the construction of KPBL’s 126-berth marina.

On paper.

But this dispute, which in the week just passed flared into violent confrontation, is no longer taking place on paper. It is unfolding in the waters of Pūtiki Bay. On paper, Fletcher Building was authorised to build at Ihumatao. On the ground, the matter was not so clear-cut. If the images of burly construction workers flinging young Maori women into the sea, now viewable on Facebook and Twitter, bring a surge of supporters to the aid of the Ngāti Paoa protest movement, Protect Pūtiki, then KPBL will be faced with precisely the same dilemma as Fletcher Building. How does a commercial enterprise enforce a legal right against an ever-expanding body of human resistance, without the conflict escalating well beyond its original causes?

At both Ihumatao and Pūtiki Bay, the issues at stake are acutely political. Central to both is a series of increasingly controversial questions: Is the Law neutral? Is the Law colour-blind? Is the Law an instrument of colonial oppression? Is the Law, in any meaningful sense, compatible with the articles of the te Tirit o Waitangi?

In the eyes of tangata whenua, these are questions which the Law itself cannot resolve. How can the Law possibly judge its own legitimacy? Especially in a dispute where one side’s reliance of “the rule of law” is presented as a significant contributing factor to the conflict? A case of “Who guards the guardians?” and no mistake!

If this all sounds like an introduction to “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) the idéologie du jour, currently terrorising Republican Party-controlled legislatures all across the United States (and a number of political commentators here in New Zealand) then that is no accident. According to the University of California at Los Angeles’ Luskin School of Public Affairs, CRT “rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colour-blind, however, CRT challenges this legal ‘truth’ by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle of self-interest, power and privilege.”

The backstory to the Ihumatao stand-off certainly confirms this argument. The land in question was confiscated by the colonial government as it launched its armed invasion of the Waikato in 1863. It was taken from a sub-tribe deemed to be “in rebellion” for not swearing its allegiance to Queen Victoria with sufficient promptitude. That the land was then on-sold to Pakeha farmers certainly smacks of “self-interest, power and privilege”. The farmers’ claims to ownership of the land, while indisputably legal, would struggle to clear the hurdle of justice.

The dispute over who possesses Pūtiki Bay presents an even thornier set of questions. While the area remained in public hands, all the residents of Waiheke Island enjoyed equal access to its amenities, and the kororā (Little Blue Penguins) who nest in the adjoining breakwater stones came and went unmolested. It was only when the Auckland City Council effectively transferred the bay from public to private ownership that the trouble started. Critical race theorists would say that such a transfer was simply par for the course. City officials and regulators will always favour Pakeha business interests over those of the kaitiaki (indigenous guardians) of the “lands, forests, fisheries and other treasures” guaranteed to them under Article Two of te Tiriti o Waitangi. By CRT reckoning, the Law that made the alienation of Pūtiki Bay possible could never be either neutral, or colour-blind. Why? Because it was written by Pakeha, for Pakeha.

The stand-off at Pūtiki Bay, therefore, poses a much more dangerous question to the New Zealand state. It demands to know for how much longer the guarantees embodied in the articles of te Tiriti are expected to languish unheeded and unenforced, while Pakeha law continues to deprive Maori (and other New Zealanders) of what remains of their collective resources and treasures? There are no easy answers to this question because, ultimately, it is not a legal question at all. Ultimately, it is a political and constitutional problem.

It is no accident that the MP with responsibility for Waiheke Island, the Greens’ Chloe Swarbrick, is watching the stand-off at Pūtiki Bay with close attention. Ideologically sympathetic to the Maori campaign for radical constitutional change, she is also, as a committed environmentalist, acutely aware of how badly served Pakeha themselves continue to be at the hands of a legal system which seems irrevocably oriented towards power and privilege.

From all over New Zealand one hears the complaints of conservationists and local communities that the laws of the land are not being enforced by local and regional authorities. That, just as the rights of the indigenous people are overlooked and/or ignored, the rights of the poor, and the poorly-connected, are routinely brushed aside.

The explanation for this inconsistency has stood the test of time: “These decrees of yours are no different from spiders’ webs”, the Sixth Century BC Scythian prince, Anacharsis, is said to have remarked to the celebrated Athenian law-giver, Solon. “They’ll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they’ll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.”

What could yet emerge from the Pūtiki Bay protests is something very similar to the convergence that left the Police and the Government so helpless at Ihumatao. Not Maori alone confronting developers and their minions, but younger Pakeha New Zealanders standing alongside them in solidarity against a system that, time and again, has proved itself profoundly deaf to their urgings for a gentler, greener and fairer New Zealand.

Perhaps it is time for a thoroughgoing reassessment of exactly where New Zealand now stands. For how much longer, for example, does the New Zealand state expect to get away with operating a legal and administrative system borrowed holus bolus from the United Kingdom, and used with ruthless efficiency to make permanent the dominance of British settlers and their descendants over these islands? For how much longer does the business community and the agricultural sector expect their interests to be accorded priority? For how much longer are those excluded from the world of the comfortable and the secure expected to remain silent – and peaceful?

The answer, on paper, is what it always has been: forever. On paper, Kennedy Point Marina will be built and return a healthy profit to its investors. On paper, those Ngāti Paoa protesters will be arrested by the Police, and fined by the courts, for trespassing on their people’s ancestral land. On paper, all the avenues of legal redress for what is happening at Pūtiki Bay have been closed-off.

But, although history is written on paper, that is not where it is made. It is made in the world of flesh and blood and human passion, by the sort of people who, when thrown off a developer’s barge, into the water, and kicked in the head, climb right back on. And, by the people who, outraged by what they have witnessed, decide to stand with them.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 July 2021.

Hard Questions - Hard Answers.

Bodies On The Line: Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the 1981 Springbok Tour, Maori asked their Pakeha friends and comrades to explain why they were willing to get their heads broken for the rights of indigenous Africans, but had yet to put their bodies on the line for the rights of indigenous New Zealanders?

NATIONAL’S PAUL GOLDSMITH has become the target of considerable criticism for his stance on the impact of colonisation on Maori. Most particularly, he has been attacked for expressing the view that “on balance” the legacy of colonisation must be adjudged positive. Goldsmith’s explicitly historical perspective is, necessarily, a broad one. Politically-speaking, however, his opinions are downright incendiary. If he didn’t anticipate the fierce reaction his words were bound to provoke, then much of the National Party’s tone-deafness on Maori-Pakeha relations is explained.

Certainly, it is hard to fathom how National could have been part of the general political discourse in Aotearoa-New Zealand without grasping the centrality of colonisation to the current debate about the future shape of this country’s institutions. How could the party have missed the way in which the colonisation of Aotearoa-New Zealand has come to play the same role here as slavery plays in the race-driven ideological conflicts currently convulsing the United States?

Is National genuinely unaware of just how many of the ills currently afflicting Maori are attributed to the impact of colonisation? Every set of negative statistics: from consistently low levels of educational attainment, to the grossly disproportionate number of Maori in Aotearoa-New Zealand’s prisons; the whole sad saga of a people’s on-going under-performance has been laid unhesitatingly – and with undeniable justification – at the door of colonisation. How can the country’s largest political party not know this?

Part of the answer, perhaps, lies in the common misconception that “colonisation” is a word to be conjugated exclusively in the past tense. That it relates only to long-dead statesmen wearing wing-collars and staring out at us stiffly from the black-and-white plates reproduced in history books. Something that happened long ago. Something done and dusted. Something about which it is possible (and permissible) for Opposition National MPs to offer considered historical judgements.

Well, it’s not – and it really is astonishing that Paul Goldsmith and his colleagues could possibly believe that it is. The clearing of Bastion Point didn’t happen in the Nineteenth Century, it happened just 43 years ago, in 1978. That’s well within the lifetime of the Baby Boomers – and even of some Generation Xers. Paul Goldsmith, for example, would have been a 7-year-old the last time a pugnacious National Party prime minister staged a full-scale demonstration of the political, legal and military power of the New Zealand colonial state – for the benefit of tangata whenua.

It was that same prime minister, Rob Muldoon, who, just three years later, communicated an equally unmistakeable message to his core supporters – i.e. that the rights of people of colour counted for much less than the rights of White Rugby supporters living in Aotearoa-New Zealand and Apartheid-era South Africa. Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the 1981 Springbok Tour, Maori asked their Pakeha friends and comrades to explain why they were willing to get their heads broken for the rights of indigenous Africans, but had yet to put their bodies on the line for the rights of indigenous New Zealanders?

Could it be, they wondered, that fighting for South African Blacks cost them nothing, except a few bruises and a few nights in jail (for which they could claim bragging rights for the next 40 years!) while fighting for the lost lands, language and dignity of the original Maori inhabitants of Aotearoa could end up costing them everything that 140 years of colonisation had bequeathed Pakeha?

That was a hard question – and only a few of the Springbok Tour protesters were willing to give Maori an honest answer.

Forty years later, exactly the same question is being put to all Pakeha – with even greater force. More importantly, it is not just Maori doing the asking. Two generations after the Tour, the same challenges that were once laid at the feet of a relatively small group of left-wing activists are being laid down for the whole nation of Aotearoa-New Zealand to pick up. The children and grandchildren of those Springbok Tour protesters are looking at their elders with a steadfast gaze. As if to say: “It’s time.”

And still, apparently, Paul Goldsmith and his National Party colleagues, do not get it.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery in North America, can help them. These words are from his second inaugural address, delivered on 4 March 1865:

Fondly do we hope ─ fervently do we pray ─ that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether’.

Paul Goldsmith appears to believe Maori are in some way indebted to Pakeha. In truth, it’s the other way ‘round.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 June 2021.

A Failure of Tone: The National Party’s Week of Woe.

Tone Deaf? From a party-political point of view (and what other point of view should a National Party MP be taking?) Paul Goldsmith’s comments regarding the “benefits” of colonisation merely played into the fast-solidifying narrative of National being a stale white bread party that can’t get out of its own way when it comes to voicing outdated racial attitudes. What’s more, given the events of the week just past, National’s attitudes on race are beginning to look like the least of its worries.

PAUL GOLDSMITH, on the “benefits” – to Maori – of colonisation. First of all, and obviously, he shouldn’t have said it. From a party-political point of view (and what other point of view should a National Party MP be taking?) such a comment merely plays to the fast-solidifying narrative of National being a stale white bread party that can’t get out of its own way when it comes to voicing outdated racial attitudes. What’s more, given the events of the week just past, National’s attitudes on race are beginning to look like the least of its worries.

As with so much of National’s recent behaviour, Goldsmith’s comments raise some very dangerous questions. The most obvious being: ‘What’s wrong with these people?’ and, ‘In what, strange, alternative universe is conduct and attitudes like these considered okay?’ Questions that lead, inevitably, to a much broader concern about the quality of National’s due diligence when it comes to candidate selection. People begin to wonder whether the reason so many National candidates turn out to be embarrassing duds, is because their general demeanour and mode of discourse is construed by the selectors as entirely unremarkable. Or, to put it more bluntly, because National’s awfulness is now a feature, not a bug. They’re all like that.

Now, back in the days when the National Party boasted upwards of 200,000 members, what National’s candidate selectors recognised as good, solid, middle-of-the-road New Zealand-ness corresponded pretty much exactly with the perceptions of the ordinary voter. Back in those days, when memories of the Second World War and the enforced egalitarianism of the trenches were still fresh, unusual and/or disturbing idiosyncrasies were much easier to spot. People still recalled the stereotype of the “spiv”: the black-market con-men who were “all Brylcreem and no socks”. Both of the major parties were tolerant of a wide range of political beliefs and priorities, but the men and women they chose to represent them all evinced a reassuring sameness.

The effective destruction of New Zealand’s mass political parties, along with the thoroughgoing de-democratisation of the decision-making structures that remained, which the introduction of neoliberalism more-or-less mandated, robbed them of their almost automatic capacity to pick the “right” sort of person to represent them. The new economic order also required the major parties to abandon their former tolerance of heterodox ideas. Ideological orthodoxy now trumped social conformity. Especially after the arrival of MMP and its backroom-assembled Party Lists, the party bosses cared less-and-less about what MPs did privately – so long as they didn’t do it in front of the cameras and frighten the markets.

And it got worse. The political culture of neoliberalism bred its own, very special, kind of politician. Just as the producers of reality TV shows like Survivor are careful to screen out anyone displaying what most people would consider the “normal” human traits of compassion, co-operation and honest-dealing, in favour of the selfish, the ruthless and the faithless; so, too, are political parties careful to screen out those who display an excessive independence of mind and/or a principled unwillingness to subordinate their conscience to the dictates of the party leadership. The days of so-called “maverick” MPs like Mike Minogue and Jim Anderton are long gone.

The upshot, for the National Party, was John Key and his affably cynical amanuensis, Steven Joyce. Those of an older generation may have grumbled into their single malts about the party falling into the hands of a quintessential “spiv” and his backroom Machiavelli, but nobody who mattered cared. In a world where all that counts is the ability to buy and sell, the currency trader should be king. In a political environment where the ability to fake sincerity rates as the ultimate accomplishment, calling someone Machiavelli is a fulsome compliment.

Like it or not, these were the sort of role models National was happy to present to the next generation of aspiring MPs. Unfortunately, younger generations have a nasty habit of noticing attitudes and behaviours their elders would prefer them to overlook. This propensity to model themselves on the real – rather than the ideal – may be a perverse sort of compliment to the generation in charge, but the final product, when it steps into the public spotlight all-too-often proves to be an accident just waiting to happen – as National has discovered to its cost.

The ultimate guard-rail against these political eruptions is the party’s organisational leadership. The party president, in particular, must have an especially sensitive nose for potential stinkers. It’s a huge responsibility: in effect the president, and his/her colleagues on the party’s executive committee, must substitute their own judgement for the mass party’s homogenising instincts. In this regard, the incumbent National Party President, Peter Goodfellow, must be adjudged a costly failure. To put it crudely: far too many stinkers have been given the nod. National urgently requires a more sensitive pair of nostrils.

Not that Goldsmith is one of the stinkers, far from it. He’s one of National’s few remaining conservative intellectuals. As a politician, he is refreshingly open about expressing his opinions. The problem he has, however, is a very obvious lack of the common touch. Goldsmith is the polar opposite of Simon Bridges – a National politician who has not the slightest difficulty with the diction of the ordinary Kiwi. The bookish Goldsmith, one suspects, would struggle in the average public bar: too concerned about the facts; not concerned enough about the tone.

Factually, Goldsmith has a case to make. Colonisation has not been an unequivocal evil. What it has done, however, by forcing them to respond to its ever-increasing impact, is divide Maori.

Since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, the internal divisions within Maoridom have resolved themselves into three broad factions: the Loyalists; the Adapters; and the Rejectionists. For the Loyalists, the British Crown has remained a symbol of power and authority over and above the treacherous settler state. Having secured its protection under Article Three of the Treaty, successive generations of Maori leaders have continued to appeal to the only institution which has been willing to defend them from the “democracy” of the Pakeha majority.

Strong believers in the hereditary principle, and inheriting all the aristocratic mana of their forefathers, they have found it hard to believe that the British sovereign – the ultimate rangatira – reigns over her subjects but does not rule them. Even today, many Maori leaders evince a profound mistrust of the democratically elected legislature, and show a decided preference for working with the executive and judicial branches of the New Zealand State. Cabinet, and a sympathetic judiciary, have taken the place of well-disposed Governors and the Church Missionary Society.

The Adapters continue to seek an enduring modus vivendi with the world of the Pakeha. Their original vision of the 1840s and 50s: of the Pakeha in their place, the tangata whenua in theirs, and the Treaty over them all, continues to inspire a significant minority of contemporary Maori – not least the authors of He Puapua.

More numerous, however, are those for whom the Treaty and the Maori tribes’ heroic resistance form just one part – albeit an important part – of their family heritage. For two centuries they have taken the Pakeha’s tools and used them to construct a new identity. One-hundred-and-fifty years after the Sovereignty Wars, and with the genealogies of tangata whenua and tauiwi inextricably intertwined, they think of themselves – and call themselves – New Zealanders.

For the Rejectionists, however, the British Crown turned out to be nothing more than the glittering bauble which ruthless settler politicians raised above their heads as proof that their government’s bare-faced larceny would soon enjoy all the security of legal title.

The rejectionists cast aside Crown and Treaty in favour of a return to the old ways. One thinks of Rua Kenana, lost in the mists of the Ureweras. Or of the fiercely independent Maori communities of Northland, the King Country and the Waikato and Whanganui Rivers. Among these proud tenders of te ahi kaa – the home-fires of inextinguishable possession – the incantations of their forefathers continue to work their magic, and, in the very bones of the land, they hear the echoes of Rewi Maniapoto’s last, defiant challenge: Ka whawhai tonu matou, ake ake ake! – “We will fight on, forever and ever and ever!”

Goldsmith’s mistake was his failure to appreciate that, for the moment, it is the rejectionists who have the floor.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 7 June 2021.

Will New Zealand’s Body-Politic Be Snatched By Trumpism?

“They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”

WHO CAN FORGET the penultimate scene of the 1956 movie classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers? The wild-eyed doctor, stumbling down the highway, trying desperately to warn his fellow citizens: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next! You’re next!”

Ostensibly science-fiction, the movie shuddered with political unease. Something had taken over the American body-politic. People had begun to question whether their neighbours were still their neighbours: people to eat, drink, talk and argue with; recognisably loyal Americans. Had something really turned them into something else? Something alien?

The crisis currently gripping the United States is far from over. Within 72 hours, it is possible that catastrophic violence will have broken out in all 50 state capitols – as well as in Washington DC. The fanatical followers of President Donald J. Trump have called a million of their far-right comrades onto the streets – with their guns. If even half that number show up, armed to the teeth, the US authorities will face the greatest challenge to the constitutional integrity of the republic since 1861.

Hyperbole? Not really. There are growing fears at the highest levels of the federal government that a so-far-undetermined percentage of law enforcement officers and military personnel may have secretly repudiated their oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

They are concerned that Americans may encounter at the state level the same curious reluctance on the part of law enforcement to confront and challenge what was clearly an insurrectionary mob hellbent on preventing the Congress from certifying President-Elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College majority.

A number of congressmen and women have reported to the American documentary film-maker, Michael Moore, that when they parked their cars outside the Capitol Building on the morning of Wednesday, 6 January, they were struck by how much it felt like a Saturday. Where were the Capitol Police? Why was the place so quiet? Asking around, Moore learned that out of the more than 2,000 Capitol Police personnel available, barely a fifth had been rostered-on for duty that fateful Wednesday.

This was in spite of the fact that the hostile intentions of the tens-of-thousands of angry Americans summoned to Washington by President Trump had been flagged for days. To the congress-persons and their jittery staff-members, the situation must have seemed eerily reminiscent of the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone arrives at the hospital in which is father lies gravely wounded, only to find the place more-or-less deserted, his Police guard withdrawn, and the imminence of a second “hit” palpable.

The hit came in Washington, claiming five lives, and avoiding perhaps hundreds more only by virtue of the bravery and quick-wittedness of such loyal Capitol Police officers as were willing to do their duty. That, and a fair measure of dumb luck saw the insurrection – the coup d’état – thwarted.

Whether America’s luck will hold until 12:01pm on Wednesday, 20 January 2021, when Joe Biden assumes the powers of the USA’s Commander-in-Chief, remains to be seen. With Donald Trump still in possession of the awesome weaponry of the presidency right up until mid-day on the twentieth, the survival of American democracy must be considered an open question.

It’s easy, so far from these daunting events, to feel smug. New Zealanders, we are confident, could never disgrace themselves so completely as Trump’s lumpen stormtroopers. Such confidence is, however, misplaced. New Zealand’s political system may differ considerably from that of the United States, but culturally we are blood brothers. The same racial neuroses, born of the same historical transgressions, afflict both peoples.

Americans and New Zealanders, and in this context those terms refer to the descendants of the European immigrants who subjugated the indigenous populations of both countries and built upon their confiscated territories what they anticipated proudly would become a shining (white) city on a hill, have much in common. Both peoples were raised in the deadly coils of Nineteenth Century capitalism and the blood-soaked imperial networks that kept it fed. Slavery and its successor institutions may have made the culture of the United States more vicious, but the racism that exonerated both peoples’ colonial excesses is embedded no less deeply.

As the Twenty-First Century gathers momentum, and the moral compromises of the Twentieth begin to fray, New Zealanders must accept that the makings of “Trumpism” are here already.

We are next.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 January 2021.

Whose History?

Confronting The Past: What to do with our anger? That’s what counts now – as the promised New Zealand History curriculum nears completion. Should every Pakeha explorer; every missionary and trader; every royal emissary and military man be tried and convicted posthumously? Should every statue of the squat Queen-Empress be hauled down? Must every town and city – and the streets transecting them – be re-named? How are such questions to be answered - and by whom? Image by Dave Tipper.

THE DESCENDANTS of nineteenth century Pakeha colonists have some questions to answer about the past. By the same token, however, the descendants of nineteenth century colonialism’s Maori victims have some questions to answer about the future.
 

For the past 150 years only one story has been told about the origins and evolution of New Zealand – the Pakeha story. That needs to change. But, if the change amounts to nothing more than substituting a new Maori narrative, every bit as all-encompassing and unchallengeable as its Pakeha predecessor, then it is difficult to see how we, as a nation, will be very much further ahead.

Let us consider some examples of this growing determination to replace an old story with a new one. About a week ago, the Hamilton City Council responded to a threat to vandalise the statue of Captain John Fane Charles Hamilton (after whom the city is named) by uplifting and removing it. The Royal Navy Captain, it was alleged, was responsible for the deaths of many Maori in the Land Wars of the nineteenth century. His statue constituted an egregious affront to the sensibilities of local iwi.

The fact of the matter is that Captain Hamilton fell, sword in hand, at the Battle of Gate Pa, not far from Tauranga, in 1864. He met his death on the parapet of a Maori fortification while attempting to rally wavering British troops who, at that moment, were being shot down in their dozens by skilfully entrenched Maori warriors. Hamilton killed no one in that brutal encounter. By my calculation, the length of the naval officer’s sojourn in and around New Zealand, prior to being struck between the eyes by a musket ball, was just 177 days.

Hamilton’s conduct did, however, conform in every respect with the Victorian ideal of martial valour. He died, as all good Victorian captains were expected to die: bravely, facing the foe, for the honour of his sovereign and the glory of her realm. It’s why the new colonial settlement on the banks of the Waikato River was given his name. As a bona fide hero of the war Her Majesty’s forces had just won, he was someone to be remembered.

That the Maori activist who threatened Hamilton’s statue got most of the details of its subject’s short sojourn in New Zealand wrong, matters much less than the general validity of his objection to Hamilton’s posthumous role in memorialising the confiscatory colonial war in which he, however briefly, had participated. That objection is made even stronger by the statue’s provenance. Far from being a relic of the nineteenth century, it was gifted to the Hamilton City Council well into the twenty-first. Were I Maori, such careless reiteration of the colonial narrative would leave me frustrated and angry.

What to do with that anger? That’s what counts now – as the promised New Zealand History curriculum nears completion. Should every Pakeha explorer; every missionary and trader; every royal emissary and military man be tried and convicted posthumously? Should every statue of the squat Queen-Empress be hauled down? Must every town and city – and the streets transecting them – be re-named? Shall future generations of Otago university students be denied the pleasure of sinking a pint or three at The Captain Cook?

Because, if that is the way it must be: if the nineteenth century imperialists’ actions can only be answered by equal and opposite indigenous reactions in the twenty-first; then isn’t it inevitable that the anger and frustration ignited by the erasure of Pakeha history will set off a whole new cultural conflagration?

Maybe not. Earlier this week I heard a supposedly well-educated journalist and broadcaster make it clear that he hadn’t the faintest idea of Oliver Cromwell’s contribution to our history. Like Captain Hamilton and Captain Cook, Cromwell stood condemned for participating in historical events too vast for blame, too permanent for guilt.

That a small Central Otago town, once the home of disenfranchised goldminers, was named for the man whose “New Model Army” decided the issue between the Divine Right of Kings and the Rights of the People, has long been forgotten – along with its sharp political point.

The wind that blows from the past scatters the fog of the present, revealing the future. It’s blind breath cannot distinguish white skin from brown. History touches us all.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 June 2020.

Defining Issues

Courtroom Drama: There is no off-switch in a courtroom. Neither is it possible to turn the page in disgust. Ill-formed and ill-defended opinions will be exposed ruthlessly and unapologetically. As Shakespeare put it: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.” Sometimes the best course of action is to take no action at all.

UNFOLDING, IN A WELLINGTON COURTROOM, is a drama which speaks directly to the defining issues of our time. What is racism? How central is racial discrimination to the moral deficiencies of our society? What is Hate Speech? More importantly, what is the relationship between Hate Speech and Free Speech? And, lastly, what sanctions – if any – should be imposed upon those whose opinions give widespread offence?

It is, of course, forbidden to comment upon the rights and wrongs of a trial in progress. My apologies, then, to all those anticipating a right royal roasting of either the plaintiff, or the defendant, or both, in the matter of Sir Robert Jones versus Renae Maihi.

What can be observed of defamation cases in general, however, is that it is possible to be too protective of one’s good name. A court of law is a fearsome and dangerous place for those unaccustomed to having their ideas and opinions publicly scrutinised and dissected by persons whose ability to marshal and present contrary evidence has been honed by years of legal training and experience. There is no off-switch in a courtroom. Neither is it possible to turn the page in disgust. Ill-formed and ill-defended opinions will be exposed ruthlessly and unapologetically. As Shakespeare put it: “Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.” Sometimes the best course of action is to take no action at all.

Let us then turn, then, to the broader issues at play in that Wellington courtroom: Racism, Hate Speech, Free Speech, and the most effective response to willful offensiveness.

Increasingly, in this country, as in other countries dominated by Europeans, racism is being viewed as the fundamental driver of social, economic and political injustice. Fifty years ago this was not the case. For most of the Twentieth Century, unequal class relations were deemed to be the primary cause of injustice. With the demise of actually existing socialism, however, and the global triumph of neoliberal capitalism, class inequality has become, to paraphrase Lord Alfred Douglas: the lack of love that dare not speak its name.

The neoliberal ruling-class, with considerable political finesse, has tapped into the energy once devoted to uplifting the working-class (within whose ranks are many, many people of colour) and diverted it into identifying and demanding atonement for the sins of slavery and colonisation committed by the ancestors of contemporary Europeans. The process of elevating racism to the status of the West’s original and abiding sin was greatly assisted by the inspirational examples of Martin Luther King’s non-violent campaign for African-American civil rights, and the African National Congress’s four-decades-long struggle against Apartheid. The impact of these historical struggles on the indigenous victims of European colonialism was direct and enduring.

The development of Maori nationalism in New Zealand offers an excellent example of the process. As the neoliberal experiment gathered momentum in Aotearoa, the formerly close ties between Maori, the traditional left and the trade unions were broken. By the early 1990s, what Dr Elizabeth Rata has dubbed “neo-tribal capitalism” was rapidly transforming Maori nationalism into a vital political adjunct to the all-conquering neoliberal project. The nightmare of working-class Maori and Pakeha making common cause against what was fast becoming a strategically bi-cultural ruling-class faded away, to be replaced by the new and rapidly expanding Maori middle-class’s scorn for the irredeemably racist redneckery of the Pakeha proletariat.

In this context, any unabashed expression of white ethnic chauvinism is almost always construed by Pakeha intellectuals as an unforgivable affront to the state’s steadily evolving anti-racist and decolonisation projects. For those Maori deeply embedded in these processes, however, such reiterations of white supremacist ideology are a godsend. Every such outburst reinforces the anti-racist and decolonisation critique and highlights the baked-in character of the colonisers’ prejudices.

Why then condemn such racially charged outbursts as “Hate Speech” and seek to punish its purveyors? Surely, by constantly exposing their racism, white supremacists provide ongoing and invaluable confirmation of the colonisers’ moral deficiencies? This may well be true, but it’s also irrelevant. The decolonisation process can only be advanced in an environment of hair-trigger outrage and demonstrable indigenous distress. Racism must, therefore, be confronted and condemned whenever and wherever it raises its ugly head, and the offending and offensive racists held accountable for the harm they have inflicted.

It is, accordingly, entirely unsurprising that the liberal-democrats’ passionate defence of the citizen’s right to freedom of expression is viewed as a serious obstacle to the success of the anti-racist and decolonisation projects. At the core of the free speech argument is the proposition that every citizen is obliged to uphold the right of every other citizen – even those whose views fundamentally contradict their own most cherished beliefs – to express their opinions freely and without the fear of any retribution beyond their opponents’ vigorous refutation.

The problems begin when the vigorous refutation of offensive speech is no longer considered sufficient. When the paucity of intellect and the absence of evidence so obvious in the arguments put forward by the racially prejudiced cease to be the best reason for fair-minded people to reject not only the content of those arguments, but also the morally dubious claims of the people making them. When the citizenry, in their confusing and contradictory entirety, are deemed inadequate to the task of determining the proper shape of their society and its future. When the responsibilities of government are entrusted exclusively to those powerful enough to determine which opinions are “correct”. And when those who deviate from such opinions are subjected to the full rigors of the law. At that point, it is possible to give these problems a name.

Totalitarianism.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 13 February 2020.

Taking Control Of The Nation's Story.

Fatal Contact: With the arrival of Captain James Cook on this day in October 1769, the islands of what would become New Zealand ceased to be the preserve of Polynesian navigators and settlers and became a part of both the world’s map and the world’s history.

THE MAORI NATIONALIST assault upon the historical meaning and reputation of Captain James Cook is entirely understandable. With his arrival in October 1769 these islands ceased to be the preserve of Polynesian navigators and settlers and became a part of both the world’s map and the world’s history. It is this sudden and irreversible transformation that presents such a formidable obstacle to the Maori nationalist cause. Its proselytisers know that once Cook’s map of New Zealand was added to the global stock of human knowledge, the world of the Maori was doomed.  Small wonder that the outspoken Maori nationalist, Dr Arama Rata, recently described Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, as “a death ship”, and characterised his arrival as an “invasion”.

Maori nationalism is not, however, about mourning the loss of the pre-European world that Cook’s arrival made inevitable. It’s partisans are not so reactionary as to suppose that the restoration of the status quo ante is either possible or desirable. No matter how loudly they might lament the loss of life that accompanied the first encounters between Maori and Pakeha, they are well aware that no Maori would thank them for magically uplifting their children from twenty-first century New Zealand and dropping them into eighteenth century Aotearoa. No, what Maori nationalism seeks is a reversal of political fortunes: the creation of an Aotearoa-New Zealand in which Pakeha will no longer call the shots.

A radical revision of New Zealand and, indeed, of global history, is crucial to achieving this political reversal. The cultural and scientific achievements of the European peoples, especially their dramatic expansion into, and eventual subjugation of, practically every other significant land mass on the planet, must be re-cast as an horrific tale of murder, rape and theft - undertaken by that global human scourge which Dr Rata calls “white people”. Only when the general perception of European civilisation has become one of technological prowess unmitigated by compassion or restraint, and the colonisation process is presented as uniquely oppressive and destructive of land and people, will the nationalist cause enter its next and most important phase – that of radical constitutional transformation.

When it comes to effecting that transformation, a surprising amount of faith has been vested by Maori nationalists in demographic change. Surprising, because in their hopes of overtaking the Pakeha population at some point in the reasonably near future, the nationalists are showing a confusing degree of confidence that the rapacious colonisers will simply stand back and allow the balance of democratic power to shift irrevocably in favour of the tangata whenua. That this is most unlikely to happen is demonstrated by the fact that, for the last 30 years, the “White Settler Government” has presided over an immigration regime which saw the “Asian” population rise from fewer than 5 percent of the population to 15 percent – a figure rivalling that of Maori New Zealanders.

Was it purely a matter of chance that this rapid reshaping of New Zealand’s demographic structure coincided with the flowering of the “Maori Renaissance”? Or, is it evidence that the Maori population will never be permitted to rise to a level where the dominance of European political and economic models is threatened? Have Maori nationalists not noted the change in the official terminology used to describe New Zealand society: from “bicultural” to “multicultural”? The determination of the New Zealand state to integrate its domestic economic institutions ever more inextricably in the global economy renders the Maori nationalist project ever more problematic.

From the nationalists’ perspective, the only hopeful aspect to the present situation is the enormously high level of historical ignorance in the New Zealand population – especially in the young. Forty years of failure to present a coherent historical narrative to successive generations of students has left young New Zealanders prey to the anachronistic blame-gaming of Maori nationalists. Descriptions of Cook as a “colonialist” and, even more risibly, a “white supremacist”, have been swallowed whole by those Pakeha disposed to range themselves against the negative effects of racism and colonisation on contemporary Maori. If Maori nationalist historians can seize control of the new, soon-to-be-compulsory, history curriculum, then the necessary ideological preparations can be made for a radical constitutional transformation. Only thus can the historic reversal of Maori fortunes, which began on the day the Endeavour arrived off the New Zealand coast 250 years ago, be overturned.

But only if the “White Settler State” is a great deal less determined to maintain its power and privilege than the Maori nationalists have, so far, been willing to admit.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 8 October 2019.