Maori

Jami-lee Ross has written a column in his local paper about his feelings on Waitangi Day. He couldn’t be as hardline as Paul Holmes but he clearly is not disposed to continuing Waitangi Day in its present form:

THIS year another Waitangi Day passed with the now traditional protests, screaming and posturing.

Sadly, the day has become more synonymous with newsreels of mud, tears and fists than it is about celebrating our identity.

Most New Zealanders have understandably come to see February 6 as a day of division and differences. Is that what we should be celebrating on our national day?

There is value in recognising and robustly debating our issues. Politicians and Maori leaders should be encouraged to come together and address the state of race relations on the spot where that relationship was formalised.

Waitangi Day, like no other, is a recognition of where we came from as a nation and so it ought to remain.

But I’m not sure it continues to be the best forum for celebrating our New Zealand identity.

Waitangi Day has lost any positive meaning for a great many New Zealanders.

On the same weekend as Waitangi Day, the Auckland Lantern Festival was attended by more than 100,000 people.

Friends and families descended on Albert Park en masse to show how accepting and inclusive we are as a people.

Meanwhile, at Waitangi, we had scenes of hikoi, megaphones and Prime Minister John Key shielded by diplomatic protection.

For everything that divides us, there are countless things that bring us together. While that may sound clichéd, I think it’s too easily forgotten.

New Zealand has a unique history and an understated pride. We should take a day out with our friends and family to celebrate that.

We should come together as a community and acknowledge what brings us together, not what divides us.

At a national level that message is being lost.

He is right in calling for a New Zealand Day. hough I suspect his views are not going to enamour him with the other members of the Maori Affairs Select Committee. Mind you he may just be the person who can hold the endless lines of troughers before the committee to account over the billions that are being spent on them.

The Maori Statutory Board at Auckland Council only want $295 million over ten years.

A Maori board is considering judicial action unless Auckland Council commits more money to Maori development.

The Independent Maori Statutory Board said the council’s 10-year draft budget provided less than a third of the $295 million needed to improve the position of Maori, Radio New Zealand reported.

The sum was needed to cover work and spending over the next 10 years to help with Maori facilities, significant land and sites, strengthening the culture and environmental work, the board argued.

The budget goes to a key committee today.

Len is promoting a massive grab bag of Jafataxes for his pet projects, I’m sure he’s happy with another Jafatax for Iwi and Urban Maori to get the almost $300 million they need for development.

Perhaps someone should ask him if he:

a) supports an increase in funding for Maori development as the Maori Statutory Board requests
b) would support another Jafatax to help fund it.

Len Brown could have avoided all this by agreeing to a referendum on Maori representation…he could still have such a referendum at the next local body election. Let the people decide…it’s called democracy.

Only 70% of Maori are unhappy with his leadership. Only 9% of Maori vote National so he could burn a few more off.’

The vast majority of Maori are unhappy with Prime Minister John Key’s leadership on Maori affairs, according to a new poll.

A Te Karere DigiPoll surveyed 1000 Maori voters last month and found 70 per cent of respondents did not think Mr Key provided good leadership on Maori issues, while 17 per cent did, and four per cent did not know.

Labour leader David Shearer fared slightly better, although Maori still appear to be weighing him up.

Of those surveyed, 28 per cent thought Mr Shearer provided good leadership on Maori issues, 16 per cent did not, and 56 per cent did not know.

Brian McDonnell is going to be in big trouble…for speaking his mind…something one must not do on issues Maori:

Ms Turia says section nine of the 1986 State-Owned Enterprise Act created a “pathway to nationhood”, but that pathway was already well established, built from a thousand different components, historical events large and small.

If section nine were changed by Parliament, that would be just another step in the constantly shifting pathway. She claims that one sentence of law formed a “prescription for a relationship which is central to our constitution”, that it is an “exquisite blueprint for a nation in which kawanatanga and rangatiratanga sit alongside each other”.

Tariana Turia explained and Brian McDonnell summarised her position which he then goes on to examine:

I agree that it is easy and understandable for members of any minority to feel vulnerable, defensive and even angry. However, instead of being seen as an object of historical study or as a source document for assisting contemporary formulations of ethnic relations, the Treaty has instead in recent decades been raised to an altogether higher status by some Maori activists and Pakeha sympathisers whom I (only semi-facetiously) term as “Treatifarians”.

These people would like it to be seen virtually as a sacred text and adopted unmodified as the pre-eminent foundation document of our nation: a compendium of Magna Carta, the Provisions of Oxford, the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Treatifarians approach the Treaty as Holy Writ to be subjected to exegesis by a high priesthood.

The Treaty, they assert, can help “unwrite” subsequent history and reinstate Maori back to the level of equality of power enjoyed in 1840. This project creates a redemptive history in which the elevated Treaty performs an almost messianic function: To save the country’s present-day population from the wrongs of its colonial past. Such wrongs are inarguably very real, especially in the loss of land, and I am all for specific cases being addressed fairly. But the process must not resemble a cargo cult.

That is pretty accurate at the point at which this nation has arrived and why people like Paul Holmes have had enough and are saying so, rather loudly.

One alternative view to this, conveyed somewhat intemperately by Paul Holmes in his recent Herald column, sees a need for Maori people to take more personal responsibility for their own present situation, and for improving the lot of themselves and their children. This involves Maori people putting the distant past behind them, clearing up genuine grievances, but eventually getting beyond grievance mode. It asks for the reality of the irreversible blending of ethnic groups to be acknowledged, instead of perpetuating the illogical and unhelpful ethnic essentialism which the Treaty as commonly formulated represents.

The two groups that met at Waitangi in 1840 no longer are separate. After 172 years of change, intermarriage, admixtures, merging, and the continual addition of new elements, there are no longer in New Zealand’s population two clear partners to the Treaty.

There are hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who blend a Maori ethnicity with something different: European, Asian, Pasifika. Ms Turia is one of them, as am I. When there is intermarriage, it is a bridge between ethnic groups, not a process in which one identity is sucked and absorbed into the other until it disappears.

People of goodwill are at the very least bemused by this continuing chain of events.

Even sympathetic, liberal and moderate people are getting fed up and do not want this to indefinitely be the tenor of New Zealand life.

The creation of treatifarians and the broracracy is now at a critical junction…we either continue forward creating a situation haves and have nots in Maoridom perpetrated the preference by government in dealing with formal iwi goupings or as the treaty grievance process winds up we find another way forward that brings all Maori into the fold of contributing citizens.Related articles.

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On the post about Argentina, some commenter got all upset because I called the Argies a bunch of pussies and then he slagged off our Maori and said we could hardly contain them so we could talk.

I made the comment back, somewhat flippantly, that the uppity Maori we have:

…used to be called the Maori Battalion and they and they went through the best the dagos, wops, and various wog countries could throw at them like there was nothing there. Even the Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, couldn’t make a dent in the Maori Battalion.

Maori also invented trench warfare and know a thing or two about dispatching the enemy, perhaps we might like to reconstitute them and run them through the Argies.

It got me thinking…perhaps this has a great deal more merit than a throw away comment on a blog. A quick look at their proud history suggests we should seriously look at reconstituting the

Maori Battlaion:

The battalion fought during the Greek, North African and Italian campaigns during which it earned a formidable reputation as a fighting force which has subsequently been acknowledged by both Allied and German commanders. It was also the most decorated New Zealand battalion during the war.

They could serve as a full battalion back up to the NZSAS and we could loan them out to the British is the Argies get a little more bellicose. If the British then sent the Ghurkas and the Maori Battalion to the Falklands then the Argentinians may well just surrender the mainland.

Flippancy aside, I think a reconstituted Maori Battalion could be useful for a whole lot more reasons. Notwithstanding the tremendous benefits of providing a disciplined and effective fighting force it would also serve to create a whole heap of positive role models to modern, urban Maori who would identify more with this than with traditional iwi based identities. It could provide a valid and honourable career path for young urban Maori along with a way of sorting out some of the more troubled youth in a Maori yet disciplined environment.

Anyway I think the idea has merit…what do readers think.

Paul Holmes is like a great many Kiwis…over Waitangi Day.

Waitangi Day produced its usual hatred, rudeness, and violence against a clearly elected Prime Minister from a group of hateful, hate-fuelled weirdos who seem to exist in a perfect world of benefit provision. This enables them to blissfully continue to believe that New Zealand is the centre of the world, no one has to have a job and the Treaty is all that matters.

I’m over Waitangi Day. It is repugnant. It’s a ghastly affair. As I lie in bed on Waitangi morning, I know that later that evening, the news will show us irrational Maori ghastliness with spitting, smugness, self-righteousness and the usual neurotic Maori politics, in which some bizarre new wrong we’ve never thought about will be lying on the table.

This, we will have to address and somehow apply these never-defined principles of the Treaty of Waitangi because it is, apparently, the next big resentment. There’ll be lengthy discussion, we’ll end up paying the usual millions into the hands of the Maori aristocracy and God knows where it’ll go from there.

Well, it’s a bullshit day, Waitangi. It’s a day of lies. It is loony Maori fringe self-denial day. It’s a day when everything is addressed, except the real stuff.

Yes real stuff like Maori bashing their kids to death, Maori incarceration rates, poverty despite billions in hand outs. It is high time that some responsibility went with the entitlements.

Never mind the child stats, never mind the national truancy stats, never mind the hopeless failure of Maori to educate their children and stop them bashing their babies. No, it’s all the Pakeha’s fault. It’s all about hating whitey. Believe me, that’s what it looked like the other day.

This is why we are over it….billions has been paid out in settlements and yet the whining continues.

Cactus Kate has a cracker of a post (no not the one about anal sex) about Maori selling land. You know, land, the taonga protected by the treaty. It seems that only Maori are allowed to sell land to ‘foreigners’ and only ’foreigners’ who aren’t Chinese.

Ngai Tgahu know all about asset sales so should be supporting National’s privatisation programme. Here are just two recent examples of Maori more than happy to flog off their assets to foreigners who need OIO approvals.

In 2010 they sold 1348 hectares in Kaikoura to an American couple for 7.5 million dollars. They paid 8 million dollars so made a $500,000 loss.

In 2011 they sold 18,000 hectares of forest to a Swiss owned family company for 22.9 million dollars. And continue to manage it. Alf Grumble reported it at the time on his blog noting the hypocrisy and lies of Tuku Morgan in relation to asset sales. Ngai Tahu sold this land under the euphemism of a “change in investment strategy”. National are having that same change in investment strategy selling stakes in SOE’s.

Maori and the left wing and assorted other whingers are now carping that the Mixed Ownership Model can be spiked via the Treaty of Waitangi. Cactus Kate pours them back in the bottle.

Now Maori wish to construct an argument that National’s privatisation programme cannot go ahead because of the SOE Act due to a conflict with Treaty Principles. More taking of the piss.

Selling assets to locals and foreigners seems to be completely in line with Maori principles of making profit or a loss when inept, for themselves. Ngai Tahu have proven that Maori principles are to sell when it suits them.

Another example of Maori completely taking the piss for their own commercial ends.

No one need think Maori are not immune from selling their precious taonga when required. And there is nothing wrong with this, just don’t hide behind the skirt of our Queen Elizabeth and some loosely interpreted Treaty principles when the Crown wishes to do likewise to pay for things like schools, health and a legacy of years of over-spending on welfare on a feral heaving pathetic underclass.

Looks like Maori and Labour shared the dux of the class in Hypocrisy School.

via the tipline, rules for some and rules for others:

Sitting in a corporate box at Heineken Classic.

Maori Sports Awards/Maori Tennis adjacent to us sitting courtside in the fully catered area having brought in and eating their own kai moana (oysters) in a large chilly bin.

When an adjoining box brought in hot chips purchased on site but not off the corporate area menu the officials told them loudly they weren’t allowed to eat them in the boxed area as these were not from the menu.

However when the hypocrisy of the situation where the oyster munching spectators were being ignored was explained a clearly embarrassed official slunk back to the outskirts.

Interesting!

First Hone, now this.

In an email to Mr Rankin, Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres said although he deplored Professor Mutu’s suggestion that New Zealand should discriminate against white-skinned people from certain countries, the Bill of Rights Act allowed people to speak their mind.

Mr de Bres also quoted the Education Act, which, he said, respected the freedom of academic staff and students, within the law, to question and test perceived wisdom, to put forward new ideas and to state controversial or unpopular opinions.

Professor Mutu, who is also head of the Department of Maori Studies at the University of Auckland, claimed Maori were generally supportive of

Or is the rule if you are Maori you can say what you like and get away with it?

Imagine if an academic had used academic freedom to say we should not allow jews, arabs, afghans or eskimo in because they didn’t play rugby. Joris would have had kittens.