WAATEA NEWS COLUMN: Mainstream Media have failed to explore Erica Stanford’s advisors and extremist ideology behind it
I am deeply worried that the Mainstream Media simply have not done their job when it comes to investigating who is advising Education Minister Erica Stanford on her radical decision to cut Māori from children’s books.
The decision has been driven out of the Minister’s Office and justifies this by arguing it’s an issue to do with phonetics but when you examine who is advising the Minister, educational activist extremists keep coming up.
These educational activist extremists have argued against ‘ethno-nationalism’ in terms of Māori, and are connected to far right think tanks who have a history of attacking indigenous rights.
Those far right think tanks see indigenous language as a radicalising feature within Indigenous cultures, cut off the language, and you de-radicalise those indigenous populations.
Indigenous communities have a cultural knowledge of exploitative capitalism because they have been confronting it for centuries.
Exploitative Industries target indigenous rights first because that’s who hold the remaining untapped assets.
By banning Māori words in new text books for Early Childhood Education, I am not seeing an educational policy, I am seeing the introduction of a deeply ant-Māori agenda aimed at robbing them of the language to articulate their identity.
There are educational activist extremists connected to far right think tanks who see the indigenous as a threat to their wider goals! These are the people the Minister has advising her, who they are and what they believe matters when we see new educational policy that robs our children of access to the Māori language.
Yes @ MB, msm should be on to this if only to point out the illegality of it all. What I can’t grasp is if Maori is an ‘official language’ of NZ- and with this status surely has some legal standing – how can the Ministry meddle with readers that contain a few Maori words. I haven’t been paying full attention to the blog discourse so am unsure of what the words are, but presumably everyday terms, aroha, kai, tamariki and the like. Nothing ‘political’ in these words to warrant their removal. Although social linguists would argue that all language related matters are political, and this certanly looks the case here.
So why isn’t msm being vigilant? Isnt there a case for a legal challenge under the Human Rights Bill? Isn’t it the role of msm to unpick this, and to interrogate the reasons for removing the words.
Perhaps however the term “official language” means bugger all – after all. I read that English isn’t an official language here, oddly enough.
Captured and sucked in by her Associate Minister of Education, Mr Seymour.
Thought you had more spine Erica. Clearly you don’t.
A grim outlook if she ever became PM and enters into coalition negotiations with ACT et al.
It would be Seymour’s Nirvana!!
MSM is a bloody disaster in NZ now .The only real reporting is on News Room who dig into the real issues facing NZ and dont bother with shit about Kim Kardasions huge arse or Harry and his selfish bull shit .