Using Ethnicity in Health: Why being accused of racism in NZ is more important than doing anything about racism in NZ

There was a fascinating exchange during our Post Leaders Debate when Fran O’Sullivan challenged Simon Wilson to call having concerns about co-governance and 3 Waters racist.

The roar of white wealthy supporters surprised me.

I turn 50 years old in January and not once has any policy to help benefit Māori ever impacted me negativity in this country, so watching rich white people cheer their white fragility was as surprising as it was amusing.

Of course having genuine concerns about 3 Waters and Co-governance isn’t racist, but the rhetoric, framing and wilful historic ignorance is sure as Christ race baiting!

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 backbone of the economic success story that is NZ, is in stealing Māori land and NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! paying the full price back!

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.

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!

Watching the Right turn ‘one person one vote’ into a garrotte of majoritarianism is ugly!

Actually it’s one person two votes in NZ, and don’t evoke protecting the Westminster System when they have an Upper House & pretend NZ democracy is somehow at risk from ethno-nationalism just because co-governance demands an obligation to work together!

Calling that apartheid is obscene!

We are too brittle a people for the challenges in front of us!

Being accused of racism is a bigger issue than actually doing anything about racism in NZ as the Right adopt the Woke’s wounded feelings schtick.

It’s like you can just win an argument in NZ now just because you have the biggest wounded feelings!

We are all so raw and hurt by the experience of a post-Covid reality, the uneven sacrifice of which is exploding in a million different ways as Kiwis face the blunt reality that for the majority, life is far more grim and downgraded than what we had before and with far less hope on the horizon.

Into such a febrile psychological landscape  months out from an election drops news that the blunt category of ethnicity has to be added to the rationalisation equations of the health dollar.

Auckland surgeons must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations – some are not happy

Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.

Is such an equation ugly?

Fuck yes it is ugly, but it is also bone crunchingly honest you pearl clutching muppets!

Our health spend and public health assets have been so egregiously underfunded for such a long time that the people held responsible for considering all the elements of public health expenditure have concluded that in the interests of recognising State obligation to minority groups with terrible health outcomes embedded within an unjust system, that the blunt inclusion of ethnicity into the determinants of health provision are a cruel but necessary health spend rationalisation!

Don’t like the brutality of the equation? PUT MORE MONEY IN THEN!

And don’t even at me with ‘where are we going to find the money’, the IRD clearly stated the rich were gaming a rigged capitalism.

Tax. The. Rich.

We don’t just need more drs and nurses, we need new hospitals, we need new technology, we need new drugs, we need our own basic pharmaceutical industry.

We need a vast injection of new money for new Health assets and we need it now by taxing the richest and creating new taxes that capture their speculation.

What this inclusion of ethnicity as a determinant truly represents is an under-funded public health system forced into making this brutal equation because of grotesque and systemic underfunding.

To have ACT and National, who would privatise our existing health system if given half the chance, to hold up this example of what underfunding health really looks like as apartheid is intellectually fucking bankrupt in the most obscene way.

We are a better people than where the Trolls amongst us will want to drag the carcass  of this narrative into the dark echo chambers they wish to defile.

This is a symptom of an underfunded health system using blunt tools like ethnicity to attempt more equitable outcomes. It is an ugly treatment to a much more malicious disease, which is the underfunding of the public health system by starving the State of tax revenue from the wealthiest amongst us.

Don’t allow the manufacture of this into a culture war Klan Carnival make you miss what is really going on Comrades.

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