Realtor Janet Dickson facing five-year ban for refusing Māori values course
A real estate agent is facing a five-year ban after refusing to complete a compulsory short course on Māori culture and tikanga.
Janet Dickson labelled the course “woke madness” in a Facebook post and said that she was going to fight for her rights “to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else”.
Her refusal is based on concerns that an industry body can force its members to complete training “on a subject that is only peripherally connected to their job under threat of losing their right to work”.
As part of that fight she’s seeking a judicial review of the Real Estate Authority’s power to enforce cultural training for the country’s realtors.
As well as hiring a lawyer Dickson is backed by lobby group Hobson’s Pledge which is headed by former National Party leader Don Brash.
According Hobson Pledge’s website a judicial review could cost as much as $150,000 and is seeking donations of up to $50,000 to contribute to Dickson’s legal fund and to get the process off the ground.
Are we sure her name isn’t Karen?
What a Karen.
Look.
Realtor Karen Janet Karen Dickson Karenson should not lose her job for conscientiously objecting to fulfil a compulsory course on Māori Tikanga.
She shouldn’t.
It seems insane that she would feel so compelled to challenge this especially as she might be dealing with Māori land or Māori clients. Poutaki Mātauranga Māori adviser at Waipapa Taumata Rau (the University of Auckland) Bernie O’Donnell said…
“You can’t go into that profession blindly in Aotearoa … it’s important they understand the history of their country,” he said.
“Māori are the indigenous people of this land and in this new world we have to start making an effort to understand their worldview.
“And even though there’s a huge history to this land people just want to get down to business.”
…it is up to the Real Estate body as to what ongoing education and insight their members are obliged to undertake to remain operating, but I feel with this issue, shouldn’t;t there be a Conscientious Objector clause whereby someone like Karen Janet Karen Dickson Karenson can front and state why should not be compelled to undertake this culturally relevant program.
Allowing her to martry herself to the cause and force her expulsion is beneath the mana of the Māori culture.
For me the Māori language and culture is a gift.
I use basic Māori every day with my hellos and goodbyes and affirmations, but beyond a handful of words I don’t speak the language for fear of mispronunciation (which would immediately lead to a Woke Wellington Wanker screaming that I am racist), but I certainly believed it was my daughter’s birth right to know the Māori language.
She has been in Māori immersion education all her life and can speak it fluently.
When my daughter speaks it fluently it makes me feel more like a New Zealander than anything else in the world.
The Māori language and culture is a treasure and a gift, if you want that gift it will give you a deeper connection to this land than anything else can, but if you don’t want that gift, that’s ok too! It doesn’t mean you are racist or evil or bad, it just means you don’t want that gift.
That’s fine!
Karen Janet Karen Dickson Karenson shouldn’t lose her job because she’s a dick towards the Māori culture, and the Māori culture is big enough to not demand she lose her job either.
Give the Karen her bottle and forget people with such a narrow view of the world we live in like her exist.
We are a better and bigger people than Karen Janet Karen Dickson Karenson.
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“which would immediately lead to a Woke Wellington Wanker screaming that I am racist”
Sigh. No it wouldn’t. People mispronounce the language of all time but as long as they’re doing their best no-one says a dickie bird.
Yep, and now the Karen’s are in charge, buckle up.
karen Chhour ACT
Martyn – Does knowing tikanga Maori/Te Reo help in selling real estate? If yes, great…if no, why continue?
Sorry I Disagree.
If Janet isnt prepared to do what her profession requires to keep her license she should be sacked.
It is the same as a building apprentice or carpenter.
You have to renew your build safe certificate.
If you dont hold one a employer wont employ you .
Same with a baker or any other trade.
Nope why should she be able to refuse what is required to deal with Maori issues over Maori land sales.
So sorry on this one you are wrong.
Yes I agree with Geoff on this, Karen should be down getting in the queue for the benefit. Anything to do with Hobsons pledge is fundamentally racist.
I understand her application is to get a pass on religious grounds.
Seems like stupidity to make her a martyr
It’s not surprising to me that Janet Dickson is refusing to take part in the Te Ao Maori tikanga and culture course, which I believe is around 90 minutes in duration. I’m thinking she probably has views similar to many other Pakeha of her age group through a lack of knowledge in things Maori.
To me – No Big Deal, if she doesn’t want to know, let her stay ignorant, but sadly the Real Estate Authority are forcing this issue, and I am wondering why?
Will the course make her a better negotiating realtor? Probably not. Will she feel more confident when dealing with Maori? Again probably not.
I suggest make the course optional, let her retain her ignorance, she is showing her age, she is in the minority.
Te Reo Maori classes are thriving nationwide, (and not just 90 minute courses), thousands of Pakeha are enjoying learning about te ao Maori with their neighbours.
Let’s just focus on the important things. More affordable homes, rents, food and being kind to each other.
I think she’s making a mountain out of a molehill.
If these courses are run as they should be, then learning about different cultures at the least will help with understanding, and for anyone who is in sales it would be a definite plus.
Yes but she’s a real esnake agent so what do you expect.
They’re using real estate agents in lab experiments now because they discovered there were things that even rats or lawyers wouldn’t do. ( Robin Williams.)
I think we protest too much, especially calling her a Karen. That is not going to get us anywhere.
Let’s take a practical approach. If you force somebody into learning chances are they won’t take any notice of the message. Becoming letigious or compulsive, forget getting the message through. Has anybody thought about whether this course with help her get sales or provide any other benefits?
Quite right – forced courses rarely teach what they intend, instilling resentment more than anything. Since the subject matter is at best tangentially related to her job, it would be better to leave her in peace.
I understand that it’s not even a requirement this year so how important is it really? I’m on her side with this. No one has the right to impose their culture on others. Next it will be a trans inclusion course.
The lower income NZ/AO people are having the culture of the MUCows forced down their throats and are being forced out of their shelters and away from their kids. all the time. I think we have to argue that imposing the culture of the middle class like that on others is WRONG. But people of different cultures, different nationalities, different classes can co-exist happily if they are interested in each other and want each other to be happy and be part of a good society. So a bit of imposition to learn about each other’s ways is essential for a good, enjoyable society. Start now, it isn’t so hard when you shift a little in and gradually get accustomed.
Kim. It could be worse. Some government departments require staff to spend nights on a marae, which can be bothersome for busy mums with kids and routine household doings.
Other than this thing makes me “feel” a certain are you able to articulate a coherent argument for why it’s morally abhorrent for government staff to sleep on a marae?
Sam. Nobody said anything like that. Except you.
I didn’t just say something. I actually asked a question about your position. I’ll ask again.
Other than this thing makes me “feel” a certain way. Are you able to articulate a coherent argument for why it’s morally abhorrent for government staff to sleep on a marae?
(Note the question mark)
It is.
That’s this years compulsory subject!!!
I wonder how many women will sign up?
Uhhh…that’s a hard NO from me Karen!
Some Pub logic.
This involves the real estate industry and one of its mindless greedy apostles.
They are all parasitic wankers.
The Karen, and her ‘governing body’, can all go fuck themselves.
Seriously, who cares.
The Left should keep their fucking mouths shut, stand on the sideline and quietly keep enjoying the taonga of an amazing culture, and watch the Karen and other right wing nut jobs hang themselves.
The Right have weaponised culture wars – don’t get unnecessarily dragged into playing their game (a lesson the Green Party should have learnt btw).
The current full-on destruction of NZ should be our sole focus.
First, they came for the Real Estate agents, and I said nothing because I wasn’t a Real Estate agent.
Then they came for the taxi drivers to get re-educated in Te Ao, and I said nothing because I wasn’t a taxi driver.
Now they’ve come for my profession and do you think I can get any interest from Journalists? None, because they signed away their rights to object 20 years ago.
Great point Ada. I’m wondering if a “Cultural safety” module will be added to our Health and Safety training at work.
Don’t worry Ada, the zyklon-b showers are just for delousing. Oh the caust, the caust, the caust ..
Don’t throw that in as a quick point eh. It’s got evil behind every letter, so a secret code to hell. A seer would know this.
To me, this is a question of education. Would you go to a builder to get your house built of he or she refused to have anything to do with foundations? Would you take on an accountant who refused to do inventory analysis? Would you engage a lawyer for property conveyancing who refused to review LIM certifications?
While the rights of an individual must be respected, as is ALWAYS the case, when those individual rights endanger the welfare of the group, such individual liberties become constrained and restricted.
That’s unequivocally the case here. Karen either complies with the certified requirements of the position, or she doesn’t get to be appointed. Full stop. End of argument.
Its virtue signalling pure and simple.
By the real estate institute to make a buck.
All the commentary on this story has missed the essential point. Māori Tikanga and the real estate industry mix like oil and water. Te Ao Māori came out of a communal society where all land was held collectively. The real estate industry is based on treating land as a commodity to be bought and sold by private owners on a market. The idea that you can humanise the practices of the real estate industry, or any capitalist enterprise for that matter, by infusing it with traditional Maori values is fundamentally flawed.
How bout hiring more Maori agents instead of virtue signalling.
A classic example of corporate types doing the cultural equivalent of green washing to try and give themselves the edge. Somehow this will be the fault of left leaning politicians when it’s right wing corporate types that create the situation
More likely left wing corporate types obviously.
In the real estate industry? You mean the people who gave shitloads of cash to National?
Freedom of choice. Why should she be forced to do it?
You could apply that idea to many situations, it is the industry body and not the government that has the requirements so she should have known what they required. Why should it cost up to $150000 to review it would be my biggest question.
Because it is now a requirement of the real estate body that she works in.
If there is a legal issue with a land sale it needs to be sorted out by .lawyers a short course could not cover the separate situations so a little knowledge can be dangerous.
Personally I would enjoy learning extra details of the Maori concept of land but it should not be compulsory or trample on someone’s religious rights .It is not easy to get a license so good on her for sticking to her principles rather than bending for the all mighty dollar.
Trevor Good comment. And given that real estate agents tend to rank much the same as used car salesmen and politicians, legal input is essential in any transactions.
– In my large suburb most current home buying is by people from China, India, a few Thai. The local Maori history is largely lost, and that’s a shame as it is both interesting and practically relevant – looking at townhouses built hurriedly on swamp which once nested birds, and unsurprisingly, now generates rising damp, indoor mould, and the occasional flooded basement area.
I agree with Martyn, people should be able to present their point of view and say why they don’t wish to take Māori cultural classes, and real estate institute should be able to defend why they consider it compulsory. If a policy cannot withstand a good debate, then that policy was likely faulty in the first place.
Real Estate agent careers attract the entitlement psyche.
Minimal entry and training requirements, and handsome (some might say often obscene) remuneration in most market conditions.
It’s not fair to make it difficult for them.
Never got my heed around Woke, what a petty bourgious, or a petty, child phone contact. Today, our new minister, of our new totalitarian run over you, says, if they don!t like it, they can kick us out in three years. Confident in those non voters, is he, that kiwis like sheep will let their term run.
How, arrogant your opinion of us.
Street by street, they, this totalitarian, corprorate, will find us, every Motel ,every halfway home, WILL COME TO HAUNT.
Karen is a slur for women who speak up.
She shouldn’t have to do the course. She doesn’t want to it. It doesn’t directly relate to her job, which she has successfully done for 13 years. She sounds smart enough to know if she needs this course for her job
Do you agree that a “Karen” is someone who calls the police to enforce feelings based infractions? In other words they waste police time or in this case an authorities time. She’s just a time waster.
Reading the story about ‘Realtor’ Janet Dickson I am reminded of a real story of someone greater than she is or ever will be. And who ‘fought to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else’, including Ms Dickson who has had 30 years of doing what she wanted to do freely.
WW2 SOE fighter Odette Hallowes (Sansom) later Churchill was captured in France and tortured by Gestapo and had her toenails pulled out….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odette_Hallowes
…At Fresnes prison, near Paris, Sansom was interrogated by the Gestapo fourteen times. She was subjected to torture. Her back was scorched with a red-hot poker and all of her toenails were pulled out. She refused to disclose the whereabouts of Rabinovitch and another British agent, stuck to her fabricated cover story that Churchill was the nephew of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, that she was his wife, and that he knew nothing of her activities. The hope was that, in this way, their treatment would be mitigated.[18][19] The British had calculated that, if the Germans thought she was related to the British Prime Minister, they would want to keep her alive as a possible bargaining tool.[20]
Sansom succeeded in diverting attention from Churchill, who was subject to only two interrogations, and protected the identities of the two officers whose locations were known only to her.[21] Bleicher occasionally appeared and suggested that they might go to concerts and visit restaurants together in Paris, in return for which he hoped she could be induced to talk. Sansom rejected the overtures.[22]
In June 1943, Sansom was condemned to death on two counts, to which she responded, “Then you will have to make up your mind on what count I am to be executed, because I can only die once.” Infuriated, Bleicher sent her to Ravensbrück concentration camp.[18]
In Ravensbruck, Sansom was kept in a punishment block cell, on a starvation diet, and could hear other prisoners being beaten.[22]
After the Allied landings in the south of France in August 1944, on orders from Berlin, all food was withdrawn for a week, all light was removed from Sansom’s cell, and the heat was turned up. Despite a report by the camp doctor that she would not survive such conditions for more than a few weeks, after being found unconscious in her cell, she was placed in solitary confinement. Her conditions only improved in December 1944, when she was moved to a ground floor cell.[3][22] The cell was located near the crematorium and would be covered with burned hair from the cremations. At one point toward the end of the war, she witnessed an instance of cannibalism of a dead inmate by starving prisoners.,,
The fight for freedom from learning about others rights and history by a female/possibly, real estate agent soaked in Middle and Upper Class Obsession with Wealth (MUCOW), compared to that of Odette makes a stark demonstration of the poor values and mentality of the materialist class. They have abandoned the idea of a mature spirit and fairness in favour of juvenile scrabbling for wealth accretion and the acquisitive lifestyle for their own gain without any changes made, as society changes. So entitled is she that she cannot change and become bigger than the top of Maslow’ Hierarchy having worked her way through all the basic levels that humans need, but now we have to go further she and her type can’t pass the self-realisation part of the actualisation test.
What are the 5 steps of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?
There are five levels in Maslow’s pyramid. From the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs are: physiological (food and clothing), safety (job security), love and belonging needs (friendship), esteem, and self-actualization.24 Jan 2024
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – Simply Psychology https://www.simplypsychology.org › maslow
I know it was a while ago, but everyone over 30 in this country still remembers the State Highway 1 Taniwha, right? I vaguely recall a number of similar cases more recently.
It is a simple fact that if you are in any way involved in selling or conveyancing real estate in New Zealand, you should be very much aware- and be very clear in talking to a buyer- of the potential ill effects on intended use that a buyer of land could suffer as a result of buying land encumbered by customary rights. I very, very much doubt that the Real Estate Authority is full of people who think it’s deeply important to care about the history of the indigenous population of New Zealand.
Foofy academic speak aside, this will be solely focused on making sure that buyers aren’t screwed over because people like Dickson think that because they don’t believe in the Treaty, that it won’t have any legal impact on their land use.
Yes Mo I remember the taniwha. The beast was appeased when a suitable koha was produced.
This so called ‘absolute requirement’ has not legal standing whatsoever. Would even make past district court. Good on the lady for knowing this and calling out woke bullshit. This self appointed ‘industry body’ should apologize to her for threatening her. She should sue them for big money.
If severe humidity is not to blame you might want to add her hairdresser as a defendant
Harcourts made it worse. They fired her over this.
To be fair, when she joined she thought the organisation was called Haircuts.
I was recently looking at a real estate purchase. It was obvious it would have some cultural significance. I definitely wanted the real estate agent to be able to inform me if the land was subject to Treaty Claims and what the views of the local iwi were about the land. The agent in this case was well infomed.
Janet Dickinson has a duty of care to her clients. It’s good that the real estate institute is ensuring agents are able to professionally carry out their job. In addition if the agent is ignorant of a land rights aspect of their job and a deal goes awry then they could be prosecuted for negligence or be found disreputable.
Duty of care…its called a LIM report.
You would be running significant risk if you relied soleu on a LIM report for your due diligence in a property transaction.
What was the obvious cultural significance? A pile of pipi shells? Someone dug a hole to take a crap?
Obviously not a place where you K i m stopped and had a deep thought. Please provide directions where this has happened in NZ/AO so people can gather to honour you and your wisdoms.
Things like important maunga, river, pa sites urapara and as implied by your comment shell fish beds have cultural significance and impact on a purchasers ability to get on with their neighbours and the future use of the land block. Whether from a position of respect or self interested pragmatism you want much info prior to purchase.
Last year a real estate agent advertised for sale the piece of land next door which was in Maori title. He seemed oblivious to the ructions this would cause in a tight-knit community, believing that it would be a simple matter to go to the Maori Land Court and have the land transferred into general title. Well, things did not work out as he had intended. The land remains in Maori title, and ownership has gone to a whanau who had a claim over the land which was recognised by the court. I have no idea whether the agent had gone through the requisite mandatory course on “the Maori world view”. But the fact remains that in their own interests agents should do their best to understand how our communities work. Otherwise they open themselves up to a lot of grief and some financial loss. Should the courses be compulsory? Probably not in my personal opinion. But ignorance has consequences.
do we have compulsory studies for immigrants in ‘western values’ as norway does??? no thought not