The speech Jacinda needs to give at Waitangi Day 2023
Race relations are difficult in this country.
We have an entire generation of Pakeha Baby Boomers who grew up being taught NZ had the greatest race relations in the world and learning the truth that our colonial Government immediately abused the values of the Treaty of Waitangi and ended up taking 90% of Māori land in less than a century doesn’t sit well alongside our preconceived notions of egalitarianism…
A major Waitangi Tribunal report has found the Crown’s interactions with Māori between 1840 and 1900 breached the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi and caused “severe and lasting prejudice”.
…When Elizabeth Rata coined the phrase ‘Ethno-Nationalist State‘ to describe attempts to share power with Māori as promised by the Treaty, every right winger wanting to be racist found glee in the shielding of their bigotry by the pretence of intellectualism.
What is most hilarious about Rata’s claims of Ethno-Nationalist State is that she is 100% right, it’s just that she’s right in a way she doesn’t want to admit to, which is NZ is an Ethno-Nationalist State, it’s just a White Ethno-Nationalist State.
Our systems of power and control are all white, our dominant culture is white, our benefitting from colonialism is white, our purposeful laws aimed at taking more Māori land were white, our confiscations are white, our dominant narrative is white.
So sure, NZ is an Ethno-Nationalist State, but for white people.
Any attempt to rebalance the damage caused by taking 90% of Māori land in less than a century and any attempt to live up to the promise of the Treaty must be denigrated and appallingly decried as apartheid.
The two pillars of the economic success story that is NZ, is in stealing Māori land and never ever paying the full cost of that confiscation back.
NEVER!
We are a shallow juvenile settler country with all the cultural maturity of a can of day old coke, we are a low horizon people who lash out at others who see stars. Our imaginations are glued to cow udders, rugby and cars. To attempt a debate about identity when so many micro aggression trigger snowflakes are screaming is a feat beneath our collective dignity.
Co-Governance is the EXACT model that National and ACT developed, to now decry it because post covid stress has exacerbated economic anxieties isn’t leadership, it’s gutless capitulation to the lesser angels of our nature. What I find most hilarious is those screaming that Māori are taking over can’t name 3 councillors on their own local council.
3 Waters was an attempt to serve two maters, the Waitangi Tribunal ruling into water ownership triggered by Key selling 49% of the hydro assetsand the need to find a way for Local Councils to fund water infrastructure. The way it has been manufactured into a racial smear on Nanaia Mahuta and her family DESPITE DECLARING ALL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST is proof positive that the angry and confused trump any attempt at rational debate.
What its most egregious is how these small attempts at creating basic consultation between the dominant culture and the indigenous culture they signed a Treaty with is now portrayed as a giant attack on the values of Democracy!
We are too brittle a people for the challenges in front of us.
The issue of 27 000 on emergency housing wait lists, 200 000 kids in poverty and a million being spent daily to kettle beneficiaries into unsafe motels are still here begging to be solved. Our inequality, our damaging mental illness crisis, the underfunded health system and education systems – all these things are demanding attention from Labour and if the price to advance those is to cut off 3 Waters and co-governance progress, then cut them off!
A National ACT Government will be the most extreme right wing Government this country has seen since Roger Douglas, Labour can not afford to lose if those policy platforms have become welded to a toxic race debate that the Ethno-Nationalist Right are winning.
To this end, the Labour Government have already singled they are pulling back on co-governance…
Co-governance plan kicked down the road to 2024
The Government has slammed the election-year brakes on New Zealand’s plan for upholding the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
…this immediately provoked a sharp rebuke from the woke who clearly want Labour to lose the next election…
Dozens of groups urge govt to pick up pace on co-governance
More than 60 organisations have signed an open letter calling on the government to honour the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
It comes after Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson earlier this month said the government’s co-governance work might be put on hold.
…the middle class activist woke’s desire to put ideology before material well being is a recipe for disaster and we are seeing this mentality soak into almost all Left wing decisions so far.
When you go to the Emergency Department you don’t give a flying fuck that the back room is centralised or run by Māori, all you care about is you will be seen quickly, you will be safe and you will ultimately be healed!
Attempting to redesign power dynamics on how resources are shared at a time of economic anxiety and fragility is a stupid concept that will only reap electoral scorn.
Part of the problem here is Labour’s refusal to front foot the issue which has allowed a vacuum that the Right have exploited.
As Audrey Young pointed out this year, the only one attempting to debate and defend co-governance was Willie Jackson, the rest of Labour are too frightened to enter the debate because they don’t know how to balance the nationalistic desires of activist Māori who want a seperate Parliament and poor white people whose economic desperation sees everything they don’t get as separatism.
We constantly forget that there are numerically more white children in poverty than Māori, and we need far more universalism to bring everyone own board or these political attempts get hijacked by the Right as the end of Western Civilisation.
Jacinda MUST use Waitangi Day to put forward her actual vision and clearly define what co-governance is.
If she can’t draw a line under this on Waitangi Day, the Right will continue to dog whistle race baiting around the issue.
Jim Bolger has called for Jacinda to define what co-governance is to avoid this very threat.
I believe Jacinda must pivot from co-governance to co-operation.
We are one big family here, we do need a collectivist drive towards community values and I personally fear nothing from Māori having a strong identity with their own worldview, we must focus less on the injustices of the past and focus directly on the ongoing injustices here!
We need universal services that are fully subsidised that brings everyone along without generating resentment.
- GST off food.
- Free public transport.
- Free breakfast and lunch in every school.
- Free dental.
These ideas do more to counter the ongoing poverty and impacts of colonialism than giving Iwi more voting powers than white people.
We need to work together to overcome the challenges of the past, but that requires the courage to actually tax the wealthy more and redistribute that money.
If Jacinda can not clearly articulate a vision for moving co-governance forward and pivoting it to co-operation she will lose the middle and ACT/National will win.
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Unless the ED demands that your the ethnicity is as theirs ….
Unless the ED demands that your ethnicity is as theirs ….
Personally I’m over politicians whose reason for being is race, their race. I cannot think of a positive example of this ever working out. Ever!
And I’m over Maori being portrayed as ignorant backward imbeciles who need their hands held and their noses wiped according to their “representatives”. What an insult. The vast majority do fine, contribute positively and just get on with life like the rest of us without with the sniping and whining and shit stirring like some of their so called political leaders do.
Like the rest of us mere mortals, life has it’s ups and downs and it’s tough at times. Few of us want nothing more than this just pull ahead in one direction and get on with it. But clearly there are a noisy few who don’t. It’s not about “boomers” or “Pakeha” being the usual whipping boys, being the evil here, they don’t have the time or the inclination to be that evil but that bullshit certainly helps the victim narrative and every culture has it’s problems.
The never ending ratcheting up demands from the victim industry is a beast that cannot be sated and after 5 plus decades of it, the vast majority of us are over it. I see the Waitangi Tribunal has ruled that Northland Crown land must be returned, etc, etc, but don’t be fooled that that is an end to it because it ain’t. I see what Bolger means.
By kicking co-governance down the road to 2024 rather than either committing or ruling it out and after 3 then 5 Waters, Labour have cemented the chances of being reelected to zero. Even a biblical miracle won’t save them with that spectre hanging over voters.
FFS Xray are you really that dumb?
There has never been a settlement with the predominate iwi in Northland. This is not 5 plus decades you numb nuts, its over 160 years.
Oh and wait the land was stolen, it’s how and why most indigenous people around the world live on or below the poverty line.
Land is power, or does your limp dick racism making you blind to that also.
But sure protect the greedy and blame the poor once again.
You really are just a one trick pony.
What the actual fuck are you on about? And while we are playing the race card, real early to shut down the debate, what is this subject about? Race, you tool! It’s never ending in this country.
Quiz question :
What is the biggest business in the South Island
Which organisation is the biggest landlord in the South Island and owns the most rental properties?
The same group own the most land in the South Island.
Who are they?
Now look down the same size of group in the North Island.
NZ Government not included.
Apart from the NZ Government,
Who is the biggest land owner in the South Island?
Ngai Tahu does not have much land at all and I am ‘forgive me’ assuming this is what Alan M is driving on about.
I think he needs to do a bit more homework.
The facts are that the Yanks, Asians, Australian and Canadian companies own significant parts of the South Island. Way more than Ngai Tahu.
Bloody foolish to flog our country off to other countries.
100% X-ray
Yes to integrationism and working class internationalism, and no to racialist chauvinism!
The corporate donors and their lobbyists had a problem: rising strikes, a rejection of neoliberalism by angry workers, and strong anti-war sentiment.
The Clintonite solution was to divide the working class by reviving racialist politics. Wall Street has spread this poison far beyond the Democratic Party.
The inequality of the races must be solved by a return to integrationist policies: desegregationist housing projects, slum clearance, reversal of all state housing privatisations. Reinstate the Full Employment Policy, import substitution, free tertiary education, and zero-fee medicine.
Resume elections to the Upper House, with the seats named after the native tribes. Abolish the Maori roll and seats.
Each native tribe should be assigned to an existing province, with each province receiving an equal number of seats in the Upper House. The provinces may lobby Parliament for greater delegation of powers.
Outlaw the appointment of any official based on race or native tribe. Ban segregated facilities, organisations and government agencies.
Permanently conclude Native land settlements. Land to the tiller, regardless of race. Any funds for separatist government programmes to be diverted to historic building protection, and the promotion of the arts of the native tribes.
Native tribal nobility should be granted local titles of nobility and related rights, until such time as the British Empire abolishes the gentry and peerages.
Hey Martin, every time a Maori leader speaks and uses the term ‘our people’.
Eg ‘this will benefit / improve conditions for our people’.
There are many examples going back decades.
Is that inclusive, or exclusive language?
Does include my non-maori freinds, neices or nephews, or exclude them?
“taking 90% of Māori land in less than a century”
Does this figure mean 10% of land remains in Maori hands?
Was 90% of land “taken” from Maori or was it sold, freely sold, sold by chiefs, sold by iwi, sold by individual Maori, sold by multiple Maori, sold by Maori with no claim to that land, sold twice, coercively purchased, compulsorily purchased, confiscated, freely given to pakeha friends, freely given for schools, given under duress, given for protection as national parks, taken for public and military works, simply claimed by the crown. No doubt there was duplicity and great unfairness but it seems a stretch to say 90% of Maori land was “taken” as if Maori had no agency whatsoever.
Not to lesson the impact of land confiscations but I always wonder the same thing when I hear that figure quoted as well.
Problem for Ardern, Labour, Labour’s Maori Caucus, The Maori Party, Maori Leaders, National or Act, etc. cannot define what co-governace actually entails and that is the reason it has been kicked down the road.
Ardern cannot make a speech defining the indefinable.
Perhaps the biggest barrier is that there is no longer a purely defined Maori and Pakeha populace.
We have a melting pot of brown tinted people who have a genetic make up from every race under the sun. No longer is it Maori versus Pakeha boomers. The New Zealand people have moved on from your simplistic race divided narrative.
Many New Zealanders are “born of this land” and my grand and great grand children are various shades of brown due to Maori, Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, African and European genetic influences.
This racial genetic divide is a falsehood being engendered to divide New Zealander’s. Certainly not going to unite them as Aotearoan’s.
In my time left I wont see an Aotearoa emerge where (to quote Martin Luther King)
“”I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.””
Because even today that world famous and ideological pure statement is being debased for racial purposes by his own children.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mlks-content-of-character-quote-inspires-debate/
Seems like we simply cannot agree to be one people and as such there will never be co-governace or a vestige of what that entails. For co-governance must ensure it’s eventual own demise as the racial melting pot simmers to a buff coloured consistency.
Will we ever achieve a colour blind society?