We should be grateful this Waitangi Day for the Greens and the Māori Party for their gifts to the debate.
While Labour backpedaled, National describing everything as an experiment and ACT promised conflict policies in te reo, the Greens and Māori Party went beyond the trite and race baiting and stood bold ideas instead.
The Greens reminded us all of the injustice of perpetual leases that have been used against Māori landowners and sets impossible double standards of ownership.
Peppercorn rentals and the inability to buy the land back at market rates means Māori are perpetually locked out of owning their own land. 26,000 hectares are locked up like this and it is outrageous!
While the Greens were reminding us of that injustice, the Māori Party launched one of the most radical policy discussion ideas in recent times and it was utterly ignored by the rest of the Media!
The Māori Party argued this Waitangi Day to set the NZ foreign Policy position as neutral!
Rawiri Waititi stated, “In 1987 Aotearoa declared that we were nuclear free. Te Pāti Māori now declares that Aotearoa must be militarily neutral, a Switzerland of the South Pacific”.
New Zealand faces steep geopolitical challenges and with China our largest trading partner and America our political influencer, neutrality is a serious concept we should investigate.
Neutrality doesn’t mean pacifism, it will require a vast upgrade of our military as a defensive force, but the price of an independent foreign policy requires a jump in military spending from 1.5 to 3% of GDP.
The Greens and Māori Party brought serious and worthy ideas to debate on Waitangi Day while the other Parties simply used Māori as the usual political football for another year.
First published on Waatea News.
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