National's Two-Fingered Gesture

Sending A Message: Justice Minister, Judith Collins, has responded to criticism of her appointment of Dame Susan Devoy as Race Relations Commissioner with the highly revealling comment: “The far left does not have a monopoly on caring about race relations.” History suggests, however, that if the Left doesn't have a monopoly on, then the Right isn't even in the market for, improved race relations.

DAME SUSAN DEVOY’s appointment as Race relations Commissioner sends a very clear message. But about what? And to whom?

 

An answer may be found in Justice Minister Judith Collins’ observation that: “The far left does not have a monopoly on caring about race relations”.

 

Ms Collins packs a great deal of political information into this typically belligerent statement.

 

It speaks powerfully and directly to the Right’s long-standing resentment at finding itself, again and again, on the morally indefensible side of history.

 

From the mid-1970s, the National Party positioned itself, politically, as the defender of the Pakeha majority against any and all charges of racism that the Maori minority, and others, were increasingly levelling against them.

 

According to National, race relations in New Zealand were extremely healthy, and it was an affront to this country’s internationally celebrated reputation for fairness and tolerance to suggest otherwise.

 

This position became increasingly untenable as, over the course of the 70s, 80s and 90s, a new generation of historians systematically demolished New Zealand’s great foundational myths: the version of history which the inheritors of colonialism had so assiduously constructed since the wars and confiscations of the Nineteenth Century.

 

The most important to be taken apart was the Myth of the Moriori.

 

For decades, New Zealand schoolchildren were taught that their country’s first inhabitants, the Moriori, had been wiped out by the Maori – the warlike, culturally superior race of settlers who supplanted them.

 

For the Europeans who had replaced Maori as the dominant racial group in New Zealand, the Moriori Myth was morally indispensable. By establishing an historical narrative based on successive waves of settlers, each one stronger and better fitted for survival than the last, the European conquest and despoliation of the Maori could be painted as part of a “natural” progression.

 

“We” (the Pakeha) were no worse than “they” (the Maori) when it came to asserting the right of the stronger to overpower the weaker. We were, however, “better” than they were – because rather than wipe out the people who’d stood in our way, we “advanced” Europeans were willing to share with the vanquished all the “benefits” of Western Civilisation.

 

That the Maori had not fared as appallingly as Australian Aborigines or the Native Americans spoke eloquently of New Zealand’s “progressive” record of race relations.

 

The true and tragic story of the Moriori people (of the Chatham Islands) offered as little to Pakeha as it did to Maori. (Which probably explains why both races were content to connive in its extraordinary distortion.)

 

The myth was , however, of such critical importance to Pakeha self-perception that, even today, you still find many New Zealanders clinging tenaciously to its reassuring message of moral equivalence.

 

Conservative New Zealanders remained highly resistant to the unpalatable truths emerging from their nation’s colonial past. Rather than let the new historical research bring about a re-evaluation of their previous assumptions concerning race, they and their National Party representatives became even more determined to uphold all the old shibboleths.

 

National’s defence of the Springbok Rugby Tour of 1981 not only made it a target for the entire New Zealand Left (from Labour to the Workers’ Communist League) but, as events steadily vindicated the arguments of the protesters, it also helped to foster a deep-seated sense of right-wing grievance.

 

Nelson Mandela Free: The National Party has found it very difficult to accept that on the question of Apartheid - as on so many other racial questions - the Left has been vindicated, and the Right condemned, by History.

 

The Left had accused the Right of being on the wrong side of history, and History had been unkind enough to concur. Politically, National had no option but to accept the enhanced role of the Treaty of Waitangi (and its tribunal) and celebrate the victory of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (once described as “terrorists” by Sir Robert Muldoon) but it rankled.

 

Oh yes, it rankled.

 

And as those historical victories were transmuted into a framework of human rights recognition and protection (building on the more liberal Sir Keith Holyoake-led National Party’s Office of the Race Relations Conciliator, and the Labour Prime Minister, Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s, Bill of Rights Act) the Right’s sense of grievance – of being put-upon by what it labelled “political correctness” – grew and festered in the body politic.

 

Just how large this cancer had grown was revealed in 2004 when National Party Leader, Dr Don Brash’s, “Nationhood” speech, at Orewa, saw his party’s position in the Colmar-Brunton opinion poll advance by a record 17 percentage points.

 

National’s narrow defeat in 2005, and Dr Brash’s successor, John Key’s, tactical alliance with the Maori Party, both muted and diverted the Right’s angry rejection of the Left’s “political correctness”. Anti-Maori prejudice was channelled into hard-line welfare and law-and-order “reforms” – measures guaranteed to hit Maori New Zealanders the hardest.

 

Dame Susan’s appointment is emblematic of National’s continuing denial of its historical moral delinquency. With her controversial announcement, Ms Collins simultaneously delivers reassurance to an aggrieved Right, and an obscene, two-fingered gesture to “the far left”.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 26 March 2013.

Telling The Majority "Where To Get Off"

Straight From Central Casting: The millionaire Invercargill businessman and Act Party donor, Louis Crimp, has instantly become the pin-up boy of the Liberal Left's anti-racist agenda. But, loathsome though they may be, is the Left's confidence in the social and political marginality of Mr Crimp's views on Maori culture really justified? Recent local government polls on seperate Maori representation suggest otherwise. Is it possible that the bi-cultural project and democracy are essentially incompatible?

LOUIS CRIMP could have come straight from Central Casting. His narrow face, those pinched features: all the Invercargill businessman needed to complete the quintessential red-neck ensemble was a greasy pair of denim overalls and a shotgun. Certainly, his reported assertion that: “All the white New Zealanders I've spoken to don’t like the Maoris, the way they are full of crime and welfare”, fitted him out perfectly for the red-neck role.

How did New Zealand’s liberal intelligentsia respond to this “racist” eruption from the Deep South? Curiously, with considerable satisfaction. Here, in all its brutal honesty, was living proof of the Left’s fondest prejudices. In Mr Crimp they were confronted with the sum of all their cultural fears.

“But wait,” (as they say on the infomercials) “there’s more!” Not only was Mr Crimp guilty of (ahem) cultural insensitivity, but he was also a millionaire and a major donor to the Act Party. Talk about your “three-strikes” policy! Strike One: Guilty of being a redneck. Strike Two: Guilty of being a rapacious capitalist. Strike Three: Guilty of donating $125,000 to the Act Party’s election campaign. For the promoters of a bicultural, decolonised, anti-capitalist New Zealand, Mr Crimp is the political gift that keeps on giving.

But are those for whom Mr Crimp’s unapologetic expressions of racial unease constitute a weird sort of vindication genuinely representative of majority opinion in New Zealand? What if the dream of bi-culturalism, now so deeply embedded in the social policy agenda of the political class, is most emphatically not the dream of those who live outside the magic circles of elite policy formation and its unmandated bureaucratic implementation? What if, three decades of bi-cultural propaganda notwithstanding, a majority of New Zealanders continue to harbour attitudes toward Maori not all that dissimilar to Mr Crimp’s? What then?

Before answering that question, let’s see if we can find any evidence which might help us to determine whether the bi-cultural message has been accepted by a clear majority of New Zealanders; or, if it is only among Maori that the concept of a Treaty of Waitangi-based “partnership” between  coloniser and colonised continues to resonate.

On the same day as Mr Crimp’s remarks were published, the people of Nelson, in one of those curious historical coincidences, concluded a postal ballot on whether or not their city council should guarantee Maori representation around the council-table by creating a special Maori ward. According to The Nelson Mail, the voters’ answer to this bi-culturally-based question was an emphatic “No!” Of the 15,387 votes received, 3,131 were in support of the proposal, with 12,298 in opposition. The turn-out was 43 percent. At 79 percent of those participating, the result was within 1 percentage point of the findings of The Nelson Mail’s own opinion poll on the issue.

Nelson City’s response matches closely the response of voters in Waikato District who, in a similar ballot, concluding on 5 April 2012, voted 80 percent to 20 percent against separate Maori representation.

Nor is this opposition to separate Maori representation limited to provincial New Zealand. A survey of 1,031 New Zealanders conducted by Consumerlink (a department of the Colmar Brunton polling agency) found that 72.4 percent of Pakeha who answered Yes or No supported the abolition of both the Maori roll and the Maori seats, with 70.08 percent also favouring the abolition of the Waitangi Tribunal. On the question of separate Maori representation on local bodies, 73.29 percent of Pakeha voted against.

It would be quite wrong to extrapolate these figures into some sort of confirmation of Mr Crimp’s caustic assertion that most “white” New Zealanders “don’t like the Maoris”. They do, however, raise serious doubts about the actual level of support for the entire bi-cultural project. It is at least arguable that what most Pakeha New Zealanders really “don’t like” is the whole notion of Maori separatism. Were Pakeha given a choice between the present approach to race-relations, and one which advanced the principle of undifferentiated citizenship in a unitary and colour-blind state, all the evidence suggests that the latter option would win the support of more than two-thirds of the General Electorate.

In other words, the bi-cultural project cannot withstand the audit of democracy and must be imposed from above. That, at least, is the opinion of Race Relations Commissioner, Joris de Bres, who responded to the Nelson ballot by saying that the law should be changed so Maori seats are a right, rather than subject to a vote of the majority: “To put it to a general vote without a very informed electorate, I think, always runs the risk of the minority being told where to get off.” Better, presumably, for a minority to tell the majority where to get off?

Call me a red-neck if you will, but I “don’t like” that at all.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 22 May 2012.