You know it’s election time when National starts promising harsher and more punitive law and order policy, but I believe that Maori should be up in arms over National’s latest get tough on crime brainfart because the truth beneath the bootcamp headlines is that this is a remarkably racist programme.
Building Maori prisons is not the solution to a racist prison system, making society and the instruments of law and order less racist is.
King Tuheitia’s words of discouragement towards the Labour Party and NZ First have shaken the corridors of power and re-ignited…
The surprise by the mainstream media that the Maori Party won’t support Helen Clark’s bid for the UN says more about them than it does the Maori Party.
It’s good that digital technology will soon become a compulsory part of our education system so that students have digital fluency, but in the week where we celebrate the Maori language, when will our students gain cultural fluency?
I believe it is impossible to seriously critique the terrible miscarriage of justice against Teina Pora without revealing the naked structural racism still at the heart of our colonial justice system.
The launch of the MoU may have been rushed, clumsy and with little detail so as to avert a strategic change of position for the Greens, but Andrew’s performance helped prove that a union together was better than cross bench neutrality.
We are facing traumatic environmental change from global warming, our natural resources need a sustainable hand currently missing from the fishing industry and those charged with policing it.
Blessie Gotingco deserved better, her whanau deserved better and we as a society deserve better.
What went wrong and what can we learn?
The old hate in New Plymouth will only completely go when we realign the power dynamics between Maori and Pakeha. Only then can we step forward with pride at the ‘New Zealand way’ rather than fear collaboration.