Waatea News Column: In a climate crisis future, Co-governance is a resilience, not a betrayal of democratic values
The speed, scale and destruction caused by global warming around the planet demands a response well beyond the colonization status quo.
This country’s wealth is built upon three pillars, confiscation of Māori land and never paying back any meaningful compensation, exploitation of migrant labour and 30 years of de-unionisation.
These three injustices combine to produce the vast wealth of NZ.
Compounding this is a climate crisis that is punishing the poorest on the planet while upending the agricultural calendar that so much of our economy is reliant upon.
In short, we face steep challenges that require new thinking.
This is why the hysteria over co-governance is so misplaced. In a rapidly changing environment, we need wiser voices and more of them at the decision making tables when it comes to protecting our water and our environment.
Co-governance is a resilience, not a betrayal of democratic values. More voices with experience of the local flax roots knowledge and sustainable values injected into decision making during such rapid change is an advantage, not an ethno nationalist state!
Our strength is in our partnership, it is in our recognition of the State’s obligations to protect all our rights and collective self agency while centering decision making for the many not the few.
This is the blueprint for our survival from the climate crisis, it is not the end of Western Civilization.
Western Civilization is doing a fine job of ending all on its own.
First published on Waatea News.
Experience of flax roots sustainability?
Burning 50% of New Zealand?
More bird extinctions than after white settlers arrived including Moa.
Biggest dairy farmers in Canterbury.
The noble savage routine is bullshit, people of all races experience the same human traits like love, happiness, anger or greed.
Co governance is an un mandated racial power grab for the tribal elites.
Co governance is not a Maori initiative or policy. It is John Keys policy. Why? Because selling income producing assets for cash = bad.
We expect the master servant relationship that our mother will always whisper sweet nothings in our ears while making our bed, fixing lunch and breakfast.
So when we don’t get that master servant relationship in other areas it is exactly that rejection that makes Wanabe alpha masculine beta orbiters lash out with emotional trauma.
“The noble savage routine is bullshit, people of all races experience the same human traits like love, happiness, anger or greed.
Co governance is an un mandated racial power grab for the tribal elites. ”
I agree with all the above and would add demonstrated competence is the only relevant metric required of those in power . Moreover these tribal elites don’t represent this ngati urban and I object to the presumption that they do represent the majority of Maori .
Agree Ra. Its not Maori vs Pakeha, it is unsanctioned elites vs democracy. And they do it by tapping into a Maori victimhood story which is really disempowering to Maori.
Maori have experienced many past wrongs and have been victimised but where we are today is due to politics, greed and Ardern’s hubris.
And can we quit calling it by the Governments Euphemism of ‘Co Governance’. Co Governance is something I saw a lot of when I was a kid and my Dad worked at Maori Affairs. He’d front up and say the Govts decided you can have X for your new Marae but you cant have the Y that you asked for too. Then the hapu or sub tribe would sit down with him and together they would find a way in which it could all be achieved, the government listening to Maori on the ground, the community stepping up (often providing land or labour or something to make it work) and my Dad ensuring everyone got as much as they could and everyone went away happy with a quality outcome.
That is Co Governance as is the Whanganui River, what the Govt is euphemistically labelling co governance is actually something else. Read He PuaPua. Particularly read the original before it got redacted about Dec 2020.
Yes. Easter Islanders were just bursting with grass roots knowledge.
I fail to see how making racist remarks, based in large part on ignorance of human history in all its glory could pass for “informed comment”.. This succeeds only in reminding me what a nasty bunch of arrogant bigoted blowhards the descendants of the British invasion still are.. And before you fall off your horse, I am descended from french/English aristocratic blood lines that go back two millennia, so I am qualified to make the above statement..
My bloodlines also go back many millennia, though since we we’re definitely not “aristocratic” I don’t know who they were earlier than the late 1600s.
I wouldn’t be too proud of aristocrat ancestry; the original nobles were just the biggest thugs in the village.
Isnt “co governance” a Middle Class Marxist wet dream?