GUEST BLOG: Lizzie Cook – Māori seats in Parliament

Contrary to what Winston Peters has said about abolishing Māori seats in Parliament, the fact is that for a bicultural country we have never had adequate Māori representation in Parliament. The New Zealand Parliament is a Pākehā institution that in no way represents Te Ao Māori. For Te Ao Māori to be represented adequately in Parliament, we should be increasing the number of Māori seats to at least 20! (Hear the racist screams!) Why not even more seats? … I say. What is there to fear?

Peters is seeking votes by putting down a sector of society that is still marginalised. His personal political ambitions have nothing to do with representing Māori adequately in Parliament. His voters are the kind of uninformed white elders who bleat about Treaty settlements that in fact amount to less than 2% of the resources that were stripped from multiple Māori iwi identities by a deliberate historical policy of land alienation that continues into our own times with the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed alienation.

Peters is returning to the NZ meritocracy myth that everybody can have a go. New Zealand has always been a classed society and a racially organised society where the middleclass have always despised working-class values and relegated Māori to working class aspirations. If you dispute this, you are seriously ignorant of the history of Aotearoa. You need to read James Belich, Judith Binney, Margaret Mutu, Claudia Orange, Ranginui Walker, Te Ara online and follow up any of the writers acknowledged therein. I invite other bloggers and readers to recommend publications about working class and Māori struggles to survive in Aotearoa.

Peters is in no way addressing the social system that is failing an increasing number of New Zealanders. The suffering is not because of individual or personal failure, just like it is not the environment’s fault that it is getting trashed. The cruelty and trashing is being done to people and the environment. It is a society structured upon rewarding some and penalising those who do not fit into the current mode of operation identified as neoliberal ideology. The poor get poorer, not because of some failure they have, but because we live in a society that does not stop the cruelty of structured systems that allow amateur landlordism, unhealthy housing, not enough shelter or food or health care for all, that incarcerates people in prison because they break ‘our’ rules.

If we want social and environmental change, punishing is not a helpful or healthy philosophy. We require consultation through well-informed and democratic processes focused on the well-being of all people. Talking about abolishing Māori seats in no way contributes to this. It is a deliberate inflammatory device that has nothing to do with cultural literacy in Aotearoa.

Lizzie Cook is descended from White English, Irish and Welsh Settlers to Aotearoa in the time of Queen Victoria and the British Empire. She is a PhD candidate at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury. Her thesis has the working title: Pākehā Bliss of Cruelty.