Upon arriving in New Zealand in my 20s, my positive impression was of an egalitarian society where people of all backgrounds work, study, and socialise side by side.
I soon learned these inclusive values were hard fought. Māori were once segregated at cinemas and swimming baths. Indians like me were excluded from some barber shops until the 1950s.
But for all our progress, New Zealand’s academic sector seems to be doubling down on racial division.
Dr Parmjeet Parmar is the new face of right wing racism as she attempts to conflate segregation to include spaces for Māori and Pacifica students at Auckland University.
It is offensive and outrageous in the extreme for ACT, NZ First and National to call Women’s Space, Queer Space, Māori Space and Pacifica Space at Auckland University ‘KKK’, ‘Separatism’ or ‘Segregation’
ACT, NZ First and National are all competing for culture war bullshit rhetoric against spaces that have been at Auckland University for 4 decades FFS!
These spaces provide important resources for those students to access alongside support and counselling.
Efeso Collins helped set up Pacifica Space, Dr Ranginui Walker helped set up Māori Space, dedicated feminists helped set up Women’s Space and pioneering Rainbow Community helped set up Queer Space.
THESE SPACES ALSO ALL EXIST INSIDE PARLIAMENT FFS!
To denigrate these spaces on a University and threaten them is fucking fascism and the speed and ease with which this hard right racist climate denying beneficiary bashing
This Government has moved to start purging those their redneck voters despise and every Kiwi who is disgusted by these tactics need to wake up.
This ain’t a moderate Government and they will play victim so they can victimise.
They are openly vandalising the egalitarian state and calling it performance art!
Others have defended the separate spaces by pointing out the existence of women’s spaces. I reject the comparison. Separate spaces for women reflect inherent differences between men and women. I don’t believe races are inherently different, but this is the kind of thinking encouraged by separate spaces.
…oh so Women’s Space is different is it – what about Queer Space as well?
To attack Māori Space and Pacifica Space is to also attack Women’s Space and Queer Space, the only reason this ACT Party Clown has backed off Women’s Space is because she knows she can’t win that debate – get the far right out of our Universities!
Women’s Space, Queer Space, Māori Space and Pacifica Space are not comparable to the KKK!
Women’s Space, Queer Space, Māori Space and Pacifica Space is not segregation!
Women’s Space, Queer Space, Māori Space and Pacifica Space is not separatism!
They are spaces that have been available to support those students at University for decades! To attack them in the manner National, ACT and NZ First have done based on nothing more than redneck anger on social media shows how far we’ve allowed the extremes of this hard right racist climate denying beneficiary bashing Government have stooped to.
This is Redneck Fuckwittery 101. We should not allow these right wing fanatics to start culture wars on our Universities.
I called that out when the Left tried to do it with Trans debates on Campus and I’m calling it out now as the Right try a far more aggressive attack.
The final word comes to the man who helped build the very spaces that Dr Parmjeet Parmar is attempting to destroy…
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I suggest also looking at violence statistics by race if anyone thinks segregating Maori and pacific people away from pakeha and Asians will make them safer.
Yes, Maori and Pasifika are way more violent than Pakeha and Asians.
I guess we’ll just leave out the world wars etc?
The stars prove it:
https://thefacts.nz/crime/violent-crime-feb-2023/
Being one eyed is one of the criteria for being a dickhead ,,, and Jack sure is that.
As he’s a Zionist supporter he shouldn’t be wanking on about who is violent…..
If we came and stole Jacks home and property ,,, I bet he’d become violent…. and then we could call him a terrorist :0
eh jack ….
Different Jack, not the Zionist one
The stats show Pacific Islanders about twice as violent as Europeans and about 10 to 20 times more violent than Asians. Given they are ‘colonizers’ and not the colonized Maori, wondering how you explain that. Culture does have something to do with it.
The notice itself seems a bit confrontational, and perhaps an affront to well-bred people. I thought it the product of Micronesians, or one of the Harawiras.
Utterly p*** weak statistical analysis right there, accompanied by the most stupid of libertarian politics.
The most glaring evidence that these people are moronic, not just disingenuous, is the fact that there is not even an excuse mentioned for their failure to correct for the fact that Maori and Pacific Islanders are disproportionately younger than White New Zealanders. The idea that someone would ask a question as stupid as “How do we reduce the amount of violent crime in New Zealand, especially from overrepresented demographic groups like Māori and males?” but not qualify ‘males’ with ‘males, 14-29’ or some similar designator of age is ridiculous.
It’s also very ironic in the context that the founders of ‘thefacts.nz’ have called Maori “stupid” in the past. OK- so if we accept that premise, what on earth do they expect these people they call “stupid” to do, when the jobs that “stupid” people would have productively done in the past- jobs far more productive than those of the weird self-help gurus, the budget Jordan Petersons of ‘thefacts.nz’- have been systematically off-shored or undermined by cheaper labour under their insane neoliberal policies? These libertarian freaks should just come out and say that they expect their targets to die, because that’s exactly what their policy proposals are aimed at.
Who said a space with learning resources was about protection from physical violence?
Could do. Marama said that all violence is caused by white cisgender males. She knows what she’s talking about because she was Minister for Violence, and she is a political party leader.
I posted this in the wrong thread :0 ,,,, although it applies to their right to trash the environment as well.
Whose Is The Hand …. N8V child https://youtu.be/vZHoz0IRAyU
Who has the right? …. not the frigging ‘right’
Stop enlarging the issue eh. I am concerned that Indians wanting to congregate together and speak Urdu or one of many languages of India will be prevented from doing so by this smirking didactic woman and her kind.
According to the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, India has the second highest number of languages (780), after Papua New Guinea (840). Ethnologue lists a lower number of 456.
Languages of India – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Languages_of_India
In fairness, a lot of those are as much dialects as anything else. Urdu and Hindi, for example, are mutually intelligible when spoken, though they use different writing systems. Hindutva types like Parmar will generally promote Hindi to the exclusion of everything else however.
But she’s just horrible anyway, IHO.
Hey, isn’t Parmar the same woman who praised Modi and the BJP regime for releasing early the perpetrators of the 2002 Delhi pogroms who gangraped the pregnant Bilkis Bano in front of her relatives before killing her three year old daughter and thirteen of her other relatives?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-62574247
https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/a-new-era-of-development-and-progress-for-dalits-and-backward-communities-marks-pm-modis-governance-says-ravidassia-community-in-new-zealand-301814324.html
This is a person with a deeply disturbing sense of ‘justice’. I don’t think someone who supports gangraping and murdering people should be in New Zealand, let alone anywhere near the levers of power.
The same person who was a failed National MP wh jumped Waka similar to the failed Shane Jones.
Shane Jones is a Kiwi, born and bred, and smart, even if not always likeable. Parmar is an import from a socially chaotic country, who smirks, smugly.
Not too smart on the porn front Applewood. He’s the type Im right would love though, same personality type.
Coming from a country where a caste system has crippled lives for hundred of years, this woman is ridiculous citing alleged discrimination in New Zealand from 70 years ago. The universities in this country have always had spaces available for interest groups. I think that she must have sugar on the brain. Seymour is creating diversions, and she could injure her ankles if she keeps jumping on his band wagons.
as boys are failing in education(look at the stats) can we have a safespace for men and boys in ALL institutions—-NO THOUGHT NOT
Separate social spaces for women and queer people are universal, although they take different forms in traditional and modern or conservative and liberal societies. So they should not be a problem.
Separate spaces for ethnic or cultural groups do raise questions however, and one of the questions would be “If Maori and Pasifika have their own space, then why not Indians and Chinese, Dutch, South Africans, Germans and Ethiopians?”. Clearly there would be practical difficulties in allocating space to all national groups in a super-diverse society such as New Zealand. So perhaps no ethnic or cultural group should have their own space, not even Maori?
When questions like this arise the official narrative, which is normally about the need to cater for “diversity” turns on its head and becomes about the need for “unity” and “commonality” (which is not quite the same thing as a common national identity). What underlies this sudden inversion of the standard narrative of the colonialist state? Why these contradicting demands for diversity on the one hand and unity on the other?
Quite simply it is because a true national identity for Aotearoa, while in the process of formation and already present in rudimentary form, does not exist for the proponents of the colonialism, and it cannot come fully into existence until colonialism is brought to an end. Therefore a delimited Maori cultural space must be allowed in lieu of the entire institutional space becoming culturally “Maori” as it would be as the result of a thorough-going decolonization after which the term “Maori” will apply to anything which is definitively, authentically and innately of the land and people of Aotearoa without regard to whakapapa or ethnicity.
A Pasifika space is slightly different. It must also be allowed because Pasifika culture is a fraternal predecessor of Maori culture which will be seamlessly wrapped into the culture of a decolonized Aotearoa.
None of these considerations apply to the cultures of other lands, whether of Europe, Asia, Africa or America. They can have no special status in Aotearoa. The same applies to their languages. The colonial regime may make English an official language (which would be a spectacular own goal, effectively lowering the status of English in the colonialist state from the default language of state to a language which is merely equivalent to te reo Maori, and also opening up the admittedly unlikely prospect that English could at some future time be rescinded as an official language of the state) but it cannot make all of the 160 languages spoken here official languages.
So let us be frank. The only alternative to Maori spaces in New Zealand social institutions is an entirely Maori society. The only way to a unique and common national identity in Aotearoa is through Maoritanga, which has already exercised a decisive influence upon Pakeha culture, and that unique and common national identity will become a practical necessity as the social insufficiency of the colonialist ideal of “diversity” becomes more evident.