It should surprise no one that Labour tried to kill off any questions about Ihumātao while Jacinda is in Tokelau…
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tried to prevent media asking about Ihumātao
Jacinda Ardern has personally tried to prevent media from asking about the Ihumātao dispute while on a charm offensive in the Pacific.
Her staff threatened journalists with restricted access to the PM if they did, forcing her Beehive team to intervene from Wellington.
After crisis calls from the capital, media were allowed a second shot.
…her staff are fucking idiots and I say that as someone who knows them.
Here was what Labour said before they were in power…
…so their sudden cowardice is eye rolling. The truth is that Labour are frightened by what has erupted at Ihumātao for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it doesn’t look good for an indigenous land protest to explode while Jacinda is touring other Pacific Islands and making promises to them while neglecting her own first nation peoples but secondly, Labour fear what is happening at Ihumātao because it crosses that most sacred of NZ lies, that we have great race relations.
Settler Nation NZ won’t accept what is happening at Ihumatao because private property that has been stolen from Māori never being returned is the central plank of our economy. Despite Māori losing 95% of their land within a century and almost being wiped out as a race, we tell ourselves ‘well, we aren’t as bad as Australia’ as if that fucking means something.
We hold up correct pronunciation of the Te Reo as more important than the actual deconstruction of racism. We shrug when Oranga Tamariki steal Māori babies, we shrug when the justice system is proven to be racist, we shrug when mental health services fail Māori, we shrug when the health system fails Māori.
“That’s their fault”, we tell ourselves, “At least we aren’t as bad as Australia”.
We have ignored the truth that stealing Māori land is the core economic strength of our nation and we have lied to ourselves that our comparison with Australia is somehow a means to ignore everything else.
“We beat our indigenous people once a week, Australia does it daily, aren’t we great” is the mentality.
This lie is sacred to us because it allows Settler Nation NZ to live guilt free on stolen land without any legal threat to that privilege. We hold up the joke settlement process and the pittance paid out in compensation as our ultimate proof of race relations superiority and we scream ‘one law for all’ at any attempt to challenge that narrative.
NZ is a deeply racist country with deeply racist institutions that create deeply racist outcomes, when you screw around with Settler Nation mythology you create a lynch mob of angry ruddy necked white people wanting the revenge only an outright military genocide can create.
Don Brash triggered that lynch mob with his Orewa Speech, the question is who will try and trigger it now for their own political power?
Certainly not a great look, supposedly the teflon leader is only offering useless advice now, not achieving nothing at all. The media seems to be going out of its way to paint Fletcher as the innocent party here. Anyone in the construction field knows that Fletcher has controlled the entire country for decades, at that it employed a hundred bankers that led to its financial distress. In areas like the Tamaki Regeneration, where state housing occupants have not been treated well, but 4500 dwellings are set to be construction. 25% to be social houses, with no yard. Fletcher proposes the same deal, and if Tamaki can be used as a blueprint, they would sell the 75% remaining at $1 million plus per townhouse. The profit more than covers the 25%. Fletcher is the only winner in the deal as it stands. No wonder they are keeping quiet. But if this land is sacred, then it must be treated with respect, lest we awake the lava taniwha that lies beneath this city. Kia Kaha SOUL
An interesting perspective Martyn.
Racism is alive and not very well disguised.
This is a beat up. The PM is showing leadership by trying to dampen the fire over this. She quite rightly needs to gather information.
Suppression of the media isn’t leadership, it is fascism.
I don’t recall even Key pulling this shit.
Cindy is a progressive alright. Progressively getting more arrogant and contemptuous of us “little people”. Fuck her.
No its not fascist, its authoritarian.
Well said and on the mark. When European settlers arrived in New Zealand they enshrined private property rights at the peak of the pyramid. The deal was that anyone could be part of the system whether they were property-disenfranchised Maori or non-property owning settlers but would have to work within the capitalist/private property owning system to move up the property owning ladder. The closest this country ever got to socialism (post colonisation) was by making property ownership as available as possible to everyone. However, it never challenged the property owning system itself. And now that at least 50 percent of New Zealanders don’t own and never will own a property, what the system is offering is a bounced check.
Matthew – “lest we awake the lava taniwha that lies beneath this city.” It’s happened before. Christmas Eve 1953.
Comparisons have been made between Ihumatao and Bastion Point. Among the triggers for Bastion Point was the mind-numbing cruelty inflicted on Maori at Orakei in 1952, when living people were evicted from their homes, and families were fractured off away into smaller houses, and their historical abodes and their marae destroyed – totally obliterated, because they were considered an eyesore which the visiting Queen should not have to see on her way in from the airport.
And the sleeping gods rebelled, and answered with the Tangiwai Railway disaster.
PM Ardern’s decision to invite Prince Charles and Camilla to NZ this year, especially so soon after Harry and his wife, has me wondering how dopey Ardern thinks the Queen’s subjects are. I am not anti-monarchy, I love the pageantry and rituals and pomp and circumstance of history – over there.
Ardern’s decision to visit Meghan Markle on her last trip to the UK, is Ardern’s prioritising – clearly Markle is important to Ardern, but there are things closer to home of greater importance than the royals – time permitting, of course.
But given that there is no clear solution in sight for Ihumatao, this may not be a good time for Prince Charles and Camilla to be visiting as representatives of the British Crown – the gods may not like it. I, a mere mortal, think this is an inauspicious time to put out more flags.
Just to be on the safe side, perhaps Prince Charles could be deferred to another time – or are we not allowed to hurt the royal family’s feelings ?
This excellent website of old photographs illustrates what an unveiled threat against Maori looks like. During the “Dog Tax War” of 1898, the New Zealand government was prepared to use a force of more than 120 men armed with rifles, two field guns, two rapid-fire guns and the British warship Torch on Northland Maori.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12234224
What do you expect when the government is just an empty slogan?
The struggle at Ihumatao has revealed a crisis which is penetrates into all levels of state and society.
At the political level this is expressed in the regime’s cry “With whom do we negotiate?”. That is a question which a sovereign nation state would never have to ask with respect to its domestic politics.
A nation state has set constitutional and legal processes by which to govern its people. It has no need and indeed no right to negotiate with its own people in whole or in part. However colonial regimes do need to negotiate with their native peoples and in doing so they need a representative body of the native people with which to negotiate.
That is the dilemma. If the institutions of the native people are truly representative then they have a legitimacy which inevitably gives rise to a claim of sovereign right. In other words, if Maori had an institution which fully represented them it would inevitably become a direct challenge to the sovereignty of the colonial state. On the other hand, if Maori institutions were totally unrepresentative, they would hold no sway over the people, and would serve no useful purpose for either Maori or the colonial regime.
So the regime, as a matter of course, attempts to set up and negotiate with Maori institutions which are semi-legitimate and partially representative. Quite often, however, the state gets it wrong and chooses negotiating partners who are so unrepresentative that they are ignored by the mass of people, and the settlements which they reach are deemed to be illegitimate, null and void.
This is what happened at Ihumatao. Out of its deep fear of genuinely representative Maori institutions, and its inability to make sound judgements about the mood of the community, the state chose to recognize a non-representative body which has failed to deliver the acquiescence of the people.
So we have a stand off at Ihumatao. Here again the regime overplayed its hand. It attempted to put a large number of police in the field to oppose the Maori occupiers of the land. Many police officers refused to serve at Ihumatao, and reinforcements had to be called in from the regions. These rural officers live with and among Maori and openly expressed their sympathy for the defenders of Ihumatao.
If a truce had not been in effect on July 28 and July 29, the police could not have prevented the protectors from occupying the entire 32 hectares of land at Ihumatao, and it is most unlikely that they would have even tried to hold their lines.
Of course the balance of forces at Ihumatao changes backwards and forwards day by day and the state forces are not always at a disadvantage, but in general they are under resourced to deal with a popular uprising on the scale of Ihumatao. In responding to this predicament the colonial regime has made another calamitous error, by drafting in First Security to provide backup for the New Zealand Police.
The First Security forces consist entirely of Indian immigrants, and thus in the image of Indian migrant workers in the service of the colonial state confronting tangata whenua defending their land, we are presented with a dramatic illustration of the purposes of state-sponsored immigration and multiculturalism which have never been made more explicit since the premiership of Julius Vogel.
But times have changed. Vogel could get away with stating that the purpose of immigration was to keep Maori in check. Jacinda Ardern cannot. She has to project immigration and multiculturalism as a humane project that will work to the benefit of all. First Security gives the lie to all that. At Ihumatao we have seen the true face of “multiculturalism” as the basis for the continued oppression of native communties, and the manipulation and exploitation of both natives and migrant workers. That knowledge will make Ardern’s already difficult task much harder.
Finally the colonial regime has lost its ideological hegemony. Virtually no one is convinced by the state’s neo-liberal argument that by building houses for profit at Ihumatao Fletchers will help to eliminate the housing crisis confronting working class Maori and Pakeha. And on the marae atea at Ihumatao, the consensus among the mainly religious kaikorero was the need for revolutionary change in this country. The colonial government and the British crown were frequently singled out as the problem, and there was unanimous agreement that rangatiratanga and kotahitanga offer us the best, indeed the only, way forward. The korero was of liberation, freedom, a new dawn and a new beginning.
It is not that everything is as it should be among our own people. Brian Tamaki was straight about the need to remove the scourge of crime, violence, drugs and alcohol from our personal lives as a precondition for our liberation as a people. But at Ihumatao there is a palpable sense that freedom is possible, that it is ours for the taking, and that God is truly on our side.
At Ihumatao we could see that taking the land back from the regime is actually the easy part, Holding it over the days, weeks, months and years ahead will be more difficult. To do that we will need to call on our strength, resources and initiative.
Ihumatao has the potential to unite across race and along the great class divide. This potential is enough to send spasms of fear down the spines of any neoliberal government. If Ihumatao doesnt just go away we can expect a ratcheting up in the response. This may well make for the end of this Labour government and the neoliberal amongst us will be hoping that we then turn back to National as we have always done in the past. Especially given the shift to the center with the Greens. But as always, there are other choices. When Labour disappoints do you look right or further to the left. Mostly overseas eg Greece, the further left has also disappointed but who knows maybe Hone or Pania can inspire the masses here. People are ready to look somewhere fresh. Its happening all over the world
Just throwing it out there, but what part do the Wallace family play in all of this.
Why were they “granted” the land in 1863.
Is it too much to expect, after 155 years of free “rights” to the land that they contribute something towards the Crown buying the land back as a reserve.
Because according to the Treaty of Waitangi, they obtained the land illegally, no matter how innocently.
People need to be wary about this Ihumatao problem. It should be remembered that Don Brash’s Orewa Speech nearly won him an election. The average Kiwi is not a deep thinker and is more racist than he likes to think he is. What he sees is a large tract of land on which hundreds of houses will be built. Houses that could be available to families sleeping in cars or shop doorways. They hear our beloved PM say that no houses are to be built on the Reserve “until the issues are resolved” which could mean one day, some day, maybe never, and then ‘run off to Takelau’. They see Maori turn up in their hundreds to take their cut. They hear Hone Hanewera talk in terms of civil disobedience and it sounds like ‘blood on the streets”. And they are anxious. It all sounds familiar and they dont like it.
Notice that the Opposition is not taking sides. All they are doing is stirring up trouble …. and that ‘s all they need to do. I cant think of anything that the Government can do without upsetting probably half the population. Not long ago the next election looked like a shoe in. Now its anyone’s.
So I will paraphrase a great quote from Billy T James.
When you’ve finished driving whitey into the sea, where are you going to go Martyn?
Trouble is that nobody ever cares to acknowledge the benefits that Maori gained from colonialism.
Yes, there was a war but this was the way of the world 200 years ago and it is ridiculous to project modern standards onto what occurred then.
If Maori were left untouched they would undoubtedly be worse off than they are now.
Look to the Sentinelese for proof of that.
jay we had huge sailing vessels in the 1860s both Tainui and Ngati Porou we were sailing around the globe trading flax, pork and wheat mostly we were entreprenuers and our Parihaka whanau had a bank so your talking crap to say we would be worse of nek minute war broke out and there goes our businesses do your homework mate yo sound like der der don rash
jay we had huge sailing vessels in the 1860s both Tainui and Ngati Porou we were sailing around the globe trading flax, pork and wheat mostly we were entreprenuers and our Parihaka whanau had a bank so your talking crap to say we would be worse of nek minute war broke out and there goes our businesses do your homework mate you sound like der der don rash
jay we had huge sailing vessels in the 1860s both Tainui and Ngati Porou we were sailing around the globe trading flax, pork and wheat mostly we were entreprenuers and our Parihaka whanau had a bank so your talking crap to say we would be worse of nek minute war broke out and there goes our businesses do your homework mate you sound like der der don rash
jay we had huge sailing vessels in the 1860s both Tainui and Ngati Porou we were sailing around the globe trading flax, pork and wheat mostly we were entreprenuers and our Parihaka whanau had a bank so your talking crap to say we would be worse of nek minute war broke out and there goes our businesses do your homework mate you sound like der der don rash
jay we had huge sailing vessels in the 1860s both Tainui and Ngati Porou we were sailing around the globe trading flax, pork and wheat mostly we were entreprenuers and our Parihaka whanau had a bank so your talking crap to say we would be worse of nek minute war broke out and there goes our businesses do your homework mate you sound like der der don rash
jay we had huge sailing vessels in the 1860s both Tainui and Ngati Porou we were sailing around the globe trading flax, pork and wheat mostly we were entreprenuers and our Parihaka whanau had a bank so your talking crap to say we would be worse of nek minute war broke out and there goes our businesses do your homework mate you sound like der der don rash
If our government can pay out 84 million for m bovis they can pay for that Ihumatao land to be given back and houses to be built there
Also sorry for the repeats above its not me its the system saying i am posting too fast when I am not
If our government can pay out 84 million for m bovis they can pay for that Ihumatao land to be given back and houses to be built there
Also sorry for the repeats above its not me its the system saying i am posting too fast when I am not
Great, and when do we become the next province of Mainland China?
Maybe do not ‘upset’ the white NZers too much, they may come back with a vengeance, Trump style? We would be close to civil war then, making Brash and his Orewa speech sound ‘soft’ and imbecile.
I had to laugh at scrolling down the page coming to the end “the question is who will try and trigger it now for their own political power?” then Collins smug face appeared biggest laugh-fest I had for a long time!! hahahahahahaha
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