Pakeha Gothic
Māori, Pacific job candidates fast-tracked to interview stage at ADHB
All eligible Māori and Pacific job candidates are being automatically fast-tracked to the interview stage for openings at Auckland DHB.The change has been made to try increase workforce diversity, and has already resulted in more Māori and Pacific candidates being interviewed and hired.
If job-seekers aren’t hired, managers must give specific feedback to HR, so the unsuccessful candidate can be coached to improve their chances in future interviews.
A new assessment tool prompts interviewers to think about “reflecting our communities and prioritised health outcomes”, along with traditional skills and experience.
There has been an explosion of rage online about Hospitals attempting to get more Māori and Pacific Island staff by fast tracking them to the interview stage. This attempt to get more Māori and pacific Islanders into our health work force is decried as racism by many white New Zealanders who feel outraged that this is somehow giving Māori and Pacific Islanders an advantage.
Note, it doesn’t get them the job, it just ensures they gain the experience of the job interview process.
According to some of our white friends online, this is racism.
It really says something about us as a country when the rage is focused at Hospitals trying to hire more Māori & Pacific Islanders because ‘that’s racist’, but there is no rage at those same Hospitals not resuscitating Māori & Pacific Island babies…
Māori babies less likely to be resuscitated, bias blamed
Babies close to death are less likely to get life saving treatment if they’re Māori, Pacific or Indian – and experts partly blame racial bias.A Weekend Herald investigation can reveal the ethnic divide in resuscitation attempts on very premature infants.
A top-level health body is now calling for all maternity and neonatal workers in New Zealand to be put through compulsory anti-racism training.
…attempts to make our health workforce mirror the population it is attempting to heal = racism!
Māori, Pacific Island and Indian babies not resiuciated by that same health work force = total silence.
This obscene double standard is us.
This obscene double standard is NZ
Collective trauma over a generations of merciless influenza. :p
More seriously though, I’m guessing it may have something to do with pakeha stereotypes being viewed as “ok” because they tend to be far more “positive” than the stereotypes of other minorities.
Perhaps the outrage over hiring more Maori can be explained that it reminds racists of the utter failure of colonisation to benefit Maori.
When Maori are over-represented in prisons, it brings smug satisfaction to racists. It reconfirms prejudice that Maori are somehow inferior to pakeha.
Hiring more Maori is a slap in the face to those same racists. They can’t be smug over it. So they scream “racism! racism!” and feel smug over that instead.
“New Zealand has the “most sophisticated forms of racism on the globe”, former Associate Minister of Maori Affairs John Tamihere told an audience in Masterton last week”
https://times-age.co.nz/sophisticated-racism-call/
When we had the TB epidemic around 1906- 1908 our people (Maori ) were dying in droves and to make matter worse many of the pakeha nurses would not treat them so they decided to train Maori Nurses to look after our own people.
I have only experienced racism once in our public health system by a Scottish women whose English I couldn’t understand sad when she ain’t even from here but brings her baggage we don’t need people like her here.
Michelle: “I have only experienced racism once in our public health system by a Scottish women whose English I couldn’t understand….”
Individual prejudice is just that: prejudice. It’s par for the course for humans to be prejudiced against other people who don’t look like them, or don’t speak the same language. For reasons I won’t go into here, I and members of my family, have personally encountered such prejudice from others.
The term “racism” has become an epithet which unfortunately shuts down debate and the free expression of perspectives. Calling people racist doesn’t materially change their behaviour: not surprising, given that how they think is being challenged.
As to your experience with the Scottish woman: I’d take a guess that she was from the Glasgow area, where Scots (not Gaelic) was once widely spoken, and probably still is by some people. Scots was the language of Robbie Burns: it was spoken by those of my ancestors who came from that area. The accent is very strong, and many of the words aren’t actually English – well, not modern English, in any event. I’ve treated patients from that neck of the woods: until they acquired some rudiments of Kiwi English, we were mutually almost incomprehensible, to our amusement. She’ll almost certainly have had as much difficulty understanding you as you did her, you know. And it may well be that what you interpreted as “racism” was simply her incomprehension.
We had the same white backlash over cultural training and cultural competencies for our NZ Nurses when the late Irihapeti Ramsden raised this issue the white back lash was very severe and showed how racist we really are in our country and that we still have a very long way to go.
Michelle: “We had the same white backlash over cultural training and cultural competencies for our NZ Nurses when the late Irihapeti Ramsden raised this issue…”
I well remember the debate over cultural safety, and it wasn’t just white backlash: we were in Canterbury at the time, and the issue flared up as a result of a nursing student at ChCh Polytechnic going to the press. As I recall, she’d failed the cultural safety component of her course, and took exception to that.
Yes, there was a fair bit of hostility in the press; various commentators weighed into the topic. There was no internet, no social media in those days; talkback and letters to the editor were the media by which people expressed their opinions.
As it happens, many of us in the health sector were unequivocally on the side of Dr. Ramsden and the Nursing Council; and there were voices in the media who took a more nuanced approach. That debate was an instance of free speech in action. People are entitled to differing opinions, and to air them, even if you don’t like it.
It’s worth pointing out that, despite all the outcry, cultural safety/awareness remained a component of the nursing curriculum. Indeed, other health professions moved to incorporate similar components into their training, if I remember rightly. And since then, Maori-focused, and by-Maori, for-Maori services have proliferated.
Yet here we are, all these years later: the picture for Maori health is as bad as ever it was. Worse, according to some; hence the claim to the Waitangi Tribunal. It seems to me that it’s past time to look outside the health system for solutions.
What’s ‘anti-racism training’? Will EVERYONE in the health sector be put through this, regardless of provenance?
That will be interesting.
How will we know that hearts and minds have been elevated as a consequence? Who measures this? What are the indicators? Do we know?
And the ‘cultural values’ material: which version will be made The One? ‘One version to bind us all?’ Pan Maori with an Auckland accent?
That also will be interesting.
There is so much missing from this report of a study. Was the report simply produced to fan the usual indignation? Seems to be.
Andrea: “What’s ‘anti-racism training’?”
A good question. I don’t know; I doubt that those proposing such training do either. I remain of the view that racism is in the purview of governments, not of individual people. We’re all biased in favour of our own ethnic group: people who look and talk like we do, and who share our values. But that’s not racism.
“How will we know that hearts and minds have been elevated as a consequence? Who measures this? What are the indicators? Do we know?
And the ‘cultural values’ material: which version will be made The One?”
Indeed. Everyone who works in the area of healthcare – and who may be required to undergo training of this sort – should be asking just such questions.
“There is so much missing from this report of a study.”
This Herald article is a most unfortunate piece. It looks to me as if it’s been written by a journalist without a background in science. It’s been shorn of the context around infant survival. I quote from the article:
” Dr John Tait, chairman of the mortality review committee and chief medical officer at Capital & Coast DHB, said no baby would not be resuscitated because of the colour of its skin.
Rather, bias could be found earlier in the chain of events leading up to the birth, and help explain why more Māori, Pacific and Indian women have babies whose condition, such as low birth weight, makes resuscitation less viable.
“Is enough effort going into Māori and Pasifika health to prevent them going into labour early? If people don’t come to antenatal clinics…should we be going to them?””
Exactly. Skin colour isn’t a determinant for resuscitation being tried; it’s all the other variables that matter. Babies who don’t survive share those important variables, but skin colour isn’t among them.
I find all of this very disheartening. Pretty much all of my working life was spent in the healthcare services, and for all of that time, we were concerned about, and put effort into, making services accessible to Maori and Pacific people. Almost 50 years ago, I learned te reo, so as to better relate to the Maori people with whom I worked (though it wasn’t always received with enthusiasm, I must say).
Since at least the early noughties, we’ve had Maori-focused, and by-Maori for-Maori services. Yet now we see reports of this sort, presenting data without the vital context and suggesting that bias against Maori and other ethnicities results in differential outcomes for these infants. And there’s a big claim to the Waitangi Tribunal about how badly health services are treating Maori.
On RNZ one morning recently, in the context of a report on the Waitangi claim, I heard one Maori man unwittingly (I suspect) put his finger on the problem for Maori and healthcare. He said that middle class Maori do fine in the system: it’s all the poorer people who don’t. Which is precisely the point: it’s about class, not ethnicity. Poor health status is closely linked to low socio-economic status. Everyone working in the health system knows that (it’s also true of education and crime stats, by the way).
When I was first working in the health service, poor people were as likely to be pakeha as Maori. But since the arrival of Rogernomics and the catastrophic benefit cuts by Ruth Richardson in the early 90s, the poor have become disproportionately Maori. Of course Maori want better health outcomes; but casting aspersions at the unfortunate health workers is the wrong way to go about it. Agitating for more services run by Maori is just attempting to treat the symptom, without paying attention to the cause. Maori need to get behind efforts to raise benefit levels in the first instance; that’ll do more to improve health status than a jumbo jetload of Maori doctors and nurses.
As for all Maori and Pacific job applicants being fast-tracked to interview: in virtue of what wouldn’t people see that as affirmative action? That’s what it is, even if the reasons for doing it are well-intentioned. The “polypref” option – also affirmative action – has applied to the medical schools here since the early 1980s at least; I’m not sure that it’s resulted in vast numbers of extra Maori doctors being trained, though.
Every time our country votes in a nasty greedy selfish lying national government Maori and Pacific people are worse of in all facets of life, many die unnecessary or prematurely and many don’t receive timely or the same level of intervention or health treatment. All this has already been proven no need to dispute it.
Michelle: “Every time our country votes in a nasty greedy selfish lying national government Maori and Pacific people are worse of in all facets of life….”
The downward slide for Maori in modern times actually began in 1984, with the Lange Labour government and the arrival of neoliberalism in the shape of Rogernomics. The next major blow was the Richardson benefit cuts of the early 1990s. That was a National government, to be sure. The Clark administration came to power in 1999; contrary to the expectations of many of us, the government didn’t restore benefit levels to where they should have been. That was a shameful omission, and has been a significant contributor to entrenching poverty – which differentially affects Maori – in NZ.
And of course, we’re all familiar with the nine long years of the Key administration, when continuous cuts to – or failure to increase to appropriate levels – the budgets of public services, have resulted in the godawful mess we now have. It’ll take years for the Ardern administration to fix things; even assuming that some aspects are fixable. The disaster of the housing situation is beginning to look as if it isn’t.
And during the last 40 or so years, we’ve had the arrival of drugs – cannabis, more recently and catastrophically, meth – which have also differentially affected Maori society.
“…many die unnecessary or prematurely and many don’t receive timely or the same level of intervention or health treatment.”
My experience in healthcare provision was that poor people – disproportionately Maori – were more likely not to keep clinic appointments, to present for treatment later, when disease was more advanced (and thus options for effective treatment more limited), not to follow the advice or guidance of the health professional, not to be able to afford prescriptions, not to keep follow-up appointments. And so on. We used to think that Maori healthcare providers would have more success; but the statistics suggest that’s not the case, unfortunately.
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