Somehow the pettiness of Waitangi Day 2017 has managed to be a fitting tribute to our hollow National Day.
Te Tii Marae’s stubbornness towards the media as the media turn up to annually vilify Maori grievance mixed with the way Labour overshadowed the announcement they were trying to woo back urban working class Maori by shooting itself in the foot with Identity Politics mixed with every Maori MP from white political parties attacking Te Tii Marae mixed with Winston Peters standing up for the media mixed with Hone Harawira being Hone Harawira all combined to paint a picture of fraction and division papered over by hollow promises and avoidance.
Meanwhile 10 000 NZers are incarcerated (over 60% of them Maori), 41 000 are homeless (many of them Maori), Maori continue to underperform in education, Maori continue to die younger and continue to be failed by Government agencies. They continue be damaged by poverty and they are far less likely to own their home.
These Maori are joined by huge percentages of Pacifica and Pakeha and migrant communities who are also suffering from poverty and inequality.
Waitangi Day is our national day to pause and check whether the Government of NZ, the Crown if you will, are living up to their obligations to all those who are party to the Treaty – Maori, Pakeha and all those who call New Zealand home.
This should be a day where we celebrate that we actively work to for personal, economic and cultural sovereignty under a Government who have an obligation and responsibility to provide it.
Instead of this vision of what Waitangi Day should be, we get a deluge of pettiness lost in an ocean of quibbling sophistry.
Betrayal goes way beyond the Treaty of Waitangi.
Deceit and betrayal are now the bywords of the age we live in.
Expect a lot more deceit and betrayal, and an increasingly petty and bizarre ‘puppet show’ as all the fundamental factors get made worse by those in power and the system ‘progressively’ destroys itself.
However, long as junk-food and petrol are cheap and there is a choice of mindless garbage available via digital devices the masses will remain locked into denial of reality.
It has always been thus Bomber…
The only reasonably acceptable coverage of Waitangi Day celebrations was by RNZ this morning. I turned on the TV for a while, and was severely disappointed by what Maori TV showed (children’s programs, then at least a Maori language tutorial of sorts, but little or nothing on the actual events today). The rest of the channels were full of the usual diet of superficial and trivial nonsense, including infomercials.
So that is what “broadcasting” looks like after 8 years of John Key’s reign, now taken over by a dull but hard line Bill English.
As for most people, they will be turned off yet again, by stupid debate about whether it was fair or unfair that media were banned from Te Tii Marae, whether the charges asked for were exorbitant, and whether certain politicians had a point in making claims, that again mostly served their own agendas.
With the low level emphasis on the actual meaning of Waitangi Day, a virtually hidden “celebration” that is not covered anywhere, until the 6pm news tonight (in bits palatable to the largely white middle class Kiwis), and with all this continued disrespectful reporting, we can soon dig this day, and allow a new type of Don Brash rail against it all, to create a replacement “New Zealand Day” for “all” New Zealanders.
The mass immigration we have had is also a convenient instrument by the ruling class in government, to continue to divide and rule agendas of the past, to gradually assign the bi-cultural treaty culture to its death bed, so a neoliberal version of “multi culturalism” will replace it for the future.
There is in my view no doubt about this to be a kind of agenda by some very powerful groups, they rather want us all to be mere serfs slaving away 24/7 to get the one or two percent at the top ever richer and more powerful, while the rest of us will have no cultural or ethnic identity of any sorts anymore.
RIP Waitangi Day, I say, with this crap going on.
The politicians who railed against the media ban, and spoke of little else in front of microphones and cameras, they seemed to rather be annoyed that they were not given their limelight moment on the Marae at Waitangi. As it is election year, they would all have waited for an opportunity to take to the stage at Te Tii, and talk grand and smart arsed, trying to score political points.
The fact that the Marae decided to not admit the media, that denied them of this opportunity, hence the lamenting and abuse towards the persons who decided to block the media. So people who may care would have to go and read about it, which fewer and fewer people do.
Electioneering opportunity lost, that is what this was all about.
a perfect showing this year of the Maori elites demanding large sums of cash whilst average Maori in jail or homeless
keep voting Maori party to keep the fatest of the fat well fed and living it up while the people they supposedly serve languish in poverty and misery
This is how i see it. If they are only going to show the protests, the flinging of excrement/dildoes, the swearing, the marches, then they can pay for the privilege of only highlighting that small part of Waitangi Day to Aotearoa. I have always enjoyed Waitangi Day, and allow my children to roam with their mates knowing they will be safe, sadly people that have never attended think this day is filled with violence and arrests. Watching the news last night, the first thing on Waitangi Day was an old Maori man and his wife yelling something incomprehensible. How predictable, sigh.
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