In fairness, that’s a reasonable fear, given some of the commentary in recent times.

“….they want apartheid; or a parallel justic system….”

If they are established, by-Maori for-Maori services will be indisputably segregated; apartheid is just the writing of segregation into law. I wouldn’t rule out the chances of that happening.

I spent much of my career working in the health services; claims of racism underlying differential health outcomes for Maori are simply not true. Racism is just an epithet, chucked about by people who want to shut down debate and dissent. See this:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/115930211/new-research-reveals-heartbreaking-cost-of-meth-and-a-growing-problem

“Smoking meth is putting more young people into hospital with bad heart failure, Kiwi cardiologists are warning.

The effects are far worse than alcohol and they’re seeing patients in their mid-30s and 40s – especially Māori males from low socio-economic areas.

Once these patients get out of hospital they tend to disappear, Middlemore Hospital’s Dr Jen-Li Looi​ said.

“We find it very, very hard to get them engaged into our follow-up healthcare because they don’t turn up to clinic appointments, they don’t pick up their medication, but they continue to use P.”

I was working in a different area of healthcare (and P wasn’t around then, anyway), but many of our patients were Maori. Failure to keep appointments or follow-up appointments was a persistent problem, as was failure to follow strategies aimed at preventing the incidence of disease.

Pretty much all of the differential for Maori has to do with factors related to poverty; it has bugger-all to do with health services generally.

The same is true in both justice and welfare. Both are a class issue, that is, class as defined by income.

I’ve heard increasingly strident commentary from Maori – and some liberal pakeha – on the subject of racism and the consequential need for by-Maori for-Maori services, along with the return of the land which was stolen or confiscated.

This commentary has disturbingly fascist undertones; I suspect that people either don’t realise the implications of what they’re hearing and seeing, or they don’t believe that brown-skinned people can be fascist. They need to go look at the recent history of a number of African polities which obtained their independence after WW2. That’ll disabuse them of the idea that non-white people can’t be fascist.

With regard to the situation here, see this:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10409060

And this:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10853668

And this:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=3580562

Many years ago, I was very critical of Elizabeth Rata’s views. In the current environment, I now see what she was getting at; I think that she’s right. We fail to take notice at our peril, I believe.

But Andrew’s concerns are well-founded, in my view, judging by what I’ve heard and seen to date. I do hope that the people writing the curriculum aren’t, as Andrew puts it, “ideologically driven”. The late Michael King, these people ain’t.

If it’s in the curriculum, the telling of pre-colonial history will depend upon oral histories, along with conclusions derived from paleobiological and archeological evidence.

It’s really the history since first contact that will be contentious, I’m guessing. It’ll take some fancy footwork to avoid leaving modern-day pakeha with the impression that what happened from the late 18th century through to the mid-20th century is all their fault.

Regrettably, Andrew has a point about the teaching of the Treaty. I’m familiar with both versions; since the Waitangi Tribunal was established in 1975, it has had intentions and meanings imputed to it that weren’t in the original documents. And wouldn’t have been, given the motivations of the parties to it at the time.

Let’s hope that the coverage is clear-eyed. I’m not particularly hopeful, if this is anything to go by:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/398912/captain-cook-replica-banned-from-docking-in-mangonui-during-commemoration

“”Cook never came into our rohe, he sailed by, and apparently cast his eye to the port and said, ‘oh, that’s Doubtless Bay.’ It’s a fiction for him to ‘re-visit’ us because he never came””

That’s not how Doubtless Bay got its name.

“”He was a barbarian. Wherever he went, like most people of the time of imperial expansion, there were murders, there were abductions, there were rapes, and just a lot of bad outcomes for the indigenous people.”

So: history as name-calling, is that it? The commentator needs to be careful, chucking that epithet around. Cook was most certainly not a barbarian: to suggest that he was, is deeply offensive to many of us, of whose heritage he was an integral part. He was – by any definition – the apotheosis of a civilised man, clever, well-educated and a superb mariner.

I’d add that, had it not been for Cook giving pigs (Captain Cookers, remember?), goats and chickens to the Maori – or had 18th century European explorers never arrived here, bringing the potato, cabbage and carrot – diminishing food resources would have brought about either a large-scale population crash, or even extinction of the Maori people. See this:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160258

Abductions, rapes, murders: what, over and above what was already happening here with existing inter-tribal conflict? Of course there would be tensions and violence, where two wildly different cultures clash. No surprises there.

“…..seek an apology for the atrocities brought upon their people when Captain Cook arrived on their shores.”

Atrocities? What atrocities would those be? Because NZ history has always interested me, I’ve read a good deal of it. I’m well aware of the worst events that happened in our shared past. But I’d like to know about the atrocities inflicted by Cook or his sailors: that’s news to me.

Much of what’s been broadcast here in NZ in recent times – including some of the above piece – makes 18th and 19th century Maori out to be more passive than they actually were; they had agency, and were much more active participants in the life of the times than contemporary commentators evidently want to believe.

“….where was the accompanying announcement that te reo Māori would also become compulsory in all schools? And our third language, NZ Sign Language.”

Compulsory teaching – even were it the case that there were enough competent teachers – is pointless. Ask the Irish; and the Welsh. Compulsion of that sort won’t save either language.

In this country, we’ve had Maori Language Week since 1975 (Maori Language Day since 1972), and in that time, te reo has fallen off a cliff. The kohanga reo system was established in 1982, but it hasn’t been any more efficacious, either.

The focus is wrong: Maori need to pay attention to what their elders were saying 100 years ago: speak the language to your babies, so that it’s the first and only language they hear and learn to speak as their first language. This is the definition of a native speaker: for survival, every language needs native speakers. This isn’t peculiar to te reo.

In the almost-50 years since I learned te reo, the decline in native speakers has been catastrophic. It’s very difficult to obtain accurate stats, but nowadays, it looks as if there are no native speakers remaining, or if there are any, their numbers are too few for language revival. A language without native speakers is classified as dead. Bilingualism won’t do it, I suspect, if the language survival is at such a crisis point.

We’d know that revival efforts were successful, if a significant number of Maori 5-year-olds, fluent in te reo, but unable to speak English, were to turn up to our schools. I’ve heard nothing to suggest that’s happening. Requiring non-Maori – whose native language is English or some other language – to learn te reo, is a waste of resources. No matter how keen they might be, they’d still be second-language learners. It is up to Maori to rescue their language: it’s their heritage, after all. And they have – have always had – the tools for doing so. Formal education in te reo isn’t critical. Or even necessary.

With regard to the issue of the native speaker: a family member is a native speaker of a language other than English. Said family member is of advanced years, came here as a small child, has spoken English (and when younger, also the native language) ever since. When we return to the country where my family member was born, it’s a miracle to hear: they sound exactly the same as everybody there, even though they’ve spoken English for many decades. And the language returns, even though their vocab. is a bit limited and some aspects of their usage hark back to the past.

This would be a different country altogether, were te reo Maori to be revived.