Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Reaching for the logic | Feb 12, 2004 11:43

Gordy doesn't know why I'm "so obsessed with Act" and is taking extreme exception to the phrase "the big fella", which he regards as equally as "thuggish" as "black fella". I'm not sure if he'd agree with the big people's rights advocate who declared on TV last night that "there should be a law against it": "it" being, presumably, the use of the phrase "big fella". Far be it from me to start declaring "political correctness gone mad," but don't you think we're going a tiny bit far here?

(I'd point out that at times I have been less-than-svelte myself, but I can't escape the thought that I'd sound like one of those people who insist they can say anything they want because they're one-sixteenth Maori.)

PA reader Andrew Llewellyn said this in an email yesterday:

I reckon, if I went down to the six foot something PI guy I work with and asked him "How're you going big fella", I'd get a polite response. However, if I tried the other line, I might not get such enthusiastic cooperation in future, when I need his help.

Which is pretty much how I saw it. The fact that I needed to slip an asterisk into "bl*ck fella" (but not "big fella") to avoid this morning's mail-out being caught by over-excited corporate mail filters is as good an indication as any of the wholly different social impact of the words.

But I didn't hear Tamihere's earlier crack (about Brownlee casting a big shadow) and in that context I agree, he was, er, labouring the point. But none of the people currently in such dudgeon over alleged fattism rushed to the aid of Tariana Turia when Winston Peters was much nastier to her. On the other hand, Turia had a devastatingly dry comeback, and Brownlee didn't. I don't think Brownlee's a bad guy, or a racist (I'm very careful about applying the "r" word to people) and I'm sure he's sorry. But it's hard to deny that it was an astonishingly stupid thing to say for a brand-new Maori Affairs spokesman. And then the O'Regan woman appeared to make a ludicrous comparison between Don Brash and Hitler on Linda Clark's show yesterday. I think I'm entitled to the view that the "debate" has already become stupid and debased to an alarming degree.

And the Act thing? Well, I wouldn't say "obsessed". By my count, I've mentioned the party in four posts this year - in three cases in response to statements and releases that were inaccurate or misrepresentative of the truth. Part of me would rather not, but parties on the margin have more clearly defined principles and are more interesting to write about - readers will recall that I like to nag the Green Party sometimes too.

And it needs to be said that for a party that brands itself on intellectual rigour, Act has released some very shabby stuff this year. Franks makes arguments I don't necessarily agree with, but makes them well. But Muriel Newman's last missive was garbage whose production and distribution I object to funding. If she had recycled a racist myth about Jewish or Chinese New Zealanders, rather than Maori, might there have been more indignation?

BTW, Andrew also had this to pass on:

I sent feedback to the Muriel line mentioning the Moriori thing. I got a really bright reply back from a minion, thanking me for the feedback and links (to an NZ history site), and assuring me that (paraphrased because I can't be bothered opening it again) the tide is turning, the government is a disgrace, the racial divide is widening (is this a good thing do they think?) and Arthur will again be king. Or something like that. You should try it.

Nah. Too scary for me. I've had some sensible feedback on this, most notably from a self-described Labour-voting lawyer, who, in part, said this:

Brash is enunciating the classic liberal position on equality: people should be treated equally regardless of their race. If you believe, as I do, that race should not determine your rights to participate in your community or its politics, it is a difficult proposition to argue with. In the abstractly philosophical sense, it's the moral high ground. It's in the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights. It's what we fight for in South Africa and it's what we fight for in Zimbabwe. I just don't see a way around it.

In NZ, this proposition is met by the modern Treaty of Waitangi jurisprudence. Here is the great difficulty - because our situation is more complicated. We don't face a choice between right and wrong, we have a clash between two ideals:

1. That justice is achieved by treating all people equally; or

2. That justice is achieved by observing agreements justly made (ie: observing the treaty).

Both are true to some extent. But when upholding (2) means violating (1), which should prevail?

Sound points. And if Brash had acknowledged the dilemma in his speech, I would have been more favourably disposed towards it. But he didn't. And it's useful to recall that the foreshore issue would exist even if the Treaty didn't - as the Privy Council would tell you, it's dug deep in the common law. I think public access to the beaches is sacrosanct, and I'm tired of hearing from some Maori suddenly claiming they own all the beaches as of right. But I'm open to dialogue around it. If you asked New Zealanders whether there should be constraints on commercial development of some historically significant stretches of coastline - one valid way of looking at the government's foreshore proposal - you'd probably get an interesting answer.

Sometimes Brash appears to suggest that Maori should be denied property rights and recourse to the courts because they are Maori. The so-called "unlimited tangi leave" in the new employment laws referred to by Brash is (a) limited, and (b) available to all New Zealanders with cultural or ceremonial responsibilities, including kaumatua and lay church officials. Is Brash saying it should be available to no one? Or not to Maori? And anyway, his logic's poked: people who can show responsibility as kaumatua are a tiny, tiny fraction of the active Maori workforce. It is completely irrational to say that employers should avoid hiring Maori on account of it. Should they steer clear of Christians too?

Once unpicked, his attack on "racial" health and education programmes doesn't make much sense either. Those programmes amount to a tiny fraction of their respective budgets and - by his own account - Brash would actually maintain most of them, changing only the rationale. And if a "racial" health scheme targets an ethnic group because of a particular genetic vulnerability - sound public health policy, one would think - is it still bad?

Too much of what's being said isn't logic, it's dodgy populism. I'm seeing the other end of it in emails that make a similar angry noise when they land in my inbox to the ones I got last year from some anti-GE people (I wonder if Maori issues is the centre-right's GE?). There has been an emotional constituency available on this issue for years, but I believe that politicians who choose to tap it need to be wary about what happens next, and about what they can really deliver in response.

Anyway, I've just done an interesting interview with Jack Vowles on polls and public opinion in the wake of the Brash speech, which will air on Mediawatch, National Radio, 9.06am Sunday. Worth a listen, I hope. Toodle-pip.

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And it gets worse ... | Feb 11, 2004 10:27

Oh great. The first day back in Parliament and the National Party's new Maori Affairs spokesperson asks if he can call a Maori MP a "black fella". Ever get the feeling your country is being flushed down the toilet?

Gerry Brownlee has, of course, apologised, as has his party leader (although Brash's apology in an interview with Linda Clark this morning was so qualified and full of pleading for his own hurt feelings that it barely counted) but he knows damn well that, especially in the current climate, referring to someone as "the big fella", as John Tamihere did (it sounds almost chummy in the audio clip) is a world away from referring to a Maori MP as a "black fella". It was a sad example of how debased and stupid this so-called debate has become. Presumably, it'll get worse yet.

Meanwhile, Brash's headline-grabber last week - his claim that a rational employer would hire a Pakeha over a Maori under proposed new employment law because the Maori would be entitled to "unlimited tangi leave" - turns out to have no factual basis. He hasn't apologised for that. Could these people please for a moment put aside their excitement at having got themselves an issue and think a little more clearly about where this is all heading?

The local press has, perhaps understandably, missed one of the more interesting elements of the US-Australia "free" trade deal - the stealthy export of America's controversial copyright law, the DMCA. But it has attracted attention - and plenty of comment - over at Ars Technica. The Australian government's reference to the major shift on copyright - which effectively reverses legislation passed only last year by the Australian Parliament - is vague, but it appears to be along the lines I predicted in an Unlimited column last April.

The US press appears to have decided it's safe now to hold the White House to account on its WMD claims. A Knight-Ridder story headed Doubts, dissent stripped from public version of Iraq assessment outlines what it describes as "stark differences" between the classified version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and the one shown to the public in justification of the war policy. Oddly, both versions have been available to the public for months, but until now, no one seems to have been bold enough to compare them. The Centre for American Progress has links to both documents.

Meanwhile, FactCheck.org takes serious issue with Bush's claim in his TV interview this week that the growth of discretionary federal spending has slowed markedly since he took office: "In fact, annual growth has been in double digits for the past three years, far higher than in any year of the Clinton administration."

The White House continues to stonewall the commission investigating the September 11 attacks - and may face a subpoena in pursuit of the intelligence reports it is withholding. And the man appointed by Bush to head the investigation into intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war is one dodgy geezer.

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Better, faster, cheaper? | Feb 10, 2004 10:40

So I get some relief on broadband pricing - but only if I drop from full-speed JetStream to a 256k service. As ever, Telecom is inclined to do no more than meet the market. And for so long as the market remains tepid, so will the incumbent's offerings.

Certainly, the new deals - which include a flat-rate offering - are better than nothing, but still not good enough, especially in respect of their impact on competition (they make it even harder for anyone else to make a dollar reselling JetStream).

I'll probably step down from proper JetStream to flat-rate 256k, just so I can stop fretting about the bills, but don't expect me to be happy about it. Chris Barton also has a steaming great vent in today's Herald about the strange about-face on unbundling.

Don Brash was quick to declare Australia's "free" trade deal with the US a "tragedy" - which it is: for genuine trade liberalisation. This pork-barrelling deal runs counter to everything countries like Australia and New Zealand have been trying to achieve through the WTO - and the Trade Liberalisation Network is suitably appalled. They're already having their doubts in Australia, too.

Those sympathetic to the campaign against harmonisation with Australia's stricter regulations on dietary supplements should really read this story from the New Yorker, all the way to the end.

Ironically, if the business practices adopted by the US supplements industry - hard-to-trace shell companies, unacceptable use of flimsy research, emotionally manipulative sales pitches - were employed by a major drug corporation, many of the people currently opposing regulation would be up in arms.

The industry lobbyist Ron Law has been back in touch offering to set me right on the potential risks of the "traditional" herb brew K4 - I'll have a look at the evidence I guess, but the belief that somehow supplements are good and drugs are bad - m'kay - seems as flawed as ever.

Law can be found on various bulletin boards playing down the risks of ephedra - recently banned by the FDA for use in supplements - but granting that there have been "reports of side effects" from its improper use in dietary supplements. Actually, there have been reports of people dropping dead. But the problem is the vast bulk of ephedra - active ingredient ephedrine - wasn't being taken on prescription from kindly Chinese doctors but in off-the-shelf weight-loss formulas for people who really actually needed to eat properly. I should note that I occasionally use a supplement, Thompson's Immunofort II - and you can take when you prise it from my cold, dead hands, etc - but that doesn't affect my view that this is an industry that needs to be kept on a short leash.

Parliamentary pop quiz: who is Murray Smith? Give up? He's United Future's Maori issues spokesman, and he made a brief but sensible contribution to the Treaty debate yesterday.

And, in conclusion, over to Gordon Dryden (who'll turn up as a Speaker guest some time soon) with a nice comment on yesterday's Hard News:

Well put. However, a chance discussion while playing golf yesterday confirmed how easy it is to perpetuate myths.

For all my life I have believed the oft-stated English version of Governor Hobson's comment: "Now we are one people."

He was speaking in Maori, of course, and said (we believe): "He iwi tahi tatou".

My golfing companion yesterday was Dr Joe Williams, former Minister of Education in the Cook Islands (and the first student from Aitutaki to be granted a scholarship to come to New Zealand: at a time when he did not speak English). Said Joe yesterday: "That is not the correct translation. I would have thought that every New Zealander would now know that iwi means tribe. So the correct translation is: "Now we are one tribe."

And I have never once questioned the generally-stated version.

As I sit here, updating The New Learning Revolution, I have in front of me an American book titled "Lies my teacher told me", by James W Loewen, which debunks almost every major point about American history - as recorded in most US history textbooks. (Michener, in his autobiography, incidentally has some interesting sidelights on the role of Texas in distorting American history. As you probably know, Texas and California are the two biggest states with a state-dictated educational curriculum - and therefore the top textbooks get that way if they are accepted by Texas and Californian educational authorities. Michener originally worked as a textbook editor - and tells how, to be accepted in Texas, Lincoln had to be virtually eliminated from a textbook, but Sam Houston lauded and covered in great glory.)

And I recall that until Dick Scott, the best man at the Dryden's wedding over 47 years ago, wrote his two books on Parihaka, the name Te Whiti-o-Rongomai was never mentioned in New Zealand school history books.

Nor, of course, was the full story of the Maori musket wars which, as Michael King, in The Penguin History of New Zealand, now correctly writes: " . . . if any chapter in New Zealand history has earned the label 'holocaust', it is this one."

Coincidentally, as we talked yesterday at golf, we were playing the second, third, fourth and fifth holes of Remuera golf course, the original site of the Lake Waiatarua that separated the land once occupied by the Tamaki "branch" of the Ngati Whatua and the Ngati Paoa (whose massacre by Hongi's Ngapuhi in the area now known as Glen Innes-Panmure probably goes down as the greatest slaughter in New Zealand's history).

So let's all keep on putting the record straight. In all ways.

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Rushes of blood | Feb 09, 2004 11:21

Clearly, things got emotional at Waitangi this year, but we'd do well to remember that we have seen far more dramatic events in Waitangi Day's brief history as a national celebration.

In 1984, the last commemoration before Treaty claims were seriously addressed, 3000 people marched on the marae amid a police operation (which some still maintain was personally directed by the then Prime Minister Robert Muldoon) that dwarfed those of today. An historic meeting between Maori and the Crown (in the person of governor general Sir David Beattie) was sunk by a combination of tribal politics and remarkable duplicity on the part of the Muldoon government. Now that was dramatic. By the following year, things were different.

Nonetheless, there was enough in this year's encounters to suggest where we might be heading. Even those who normally possess some reserve became over-excited. Act MP Stephen Franks found what appeared to be somewhat of a rant leading the following day's New Zealand Herald.

Given the number of, um, colourful characters in his party, Franks ability to expound Act's core ideas in a considered and accurate way is valuable. But there he was, telling the Herald that the governor general's speech considering the meaning of the Treaty and the phrase "he iwi tahi tatou"- one which, as the representative of one signatory, the Crown, you would think she was entitled to make - marked her as a captive of "the separatist agenda". I hope he has calmed down on his return to Wellington, and might in future treat the Queen's representative with a little more respect.

Franks' ire was also directed at "disgraceful" and "preposterous" speeches by local Maori on the marae, many of which, he complained, where historically fanciful. Yes, as a follow-up story indicates, in some cases they were. But Franks ought to look a little closer to home before he goes to the papers to complain about the mangling of history.

Act MP Muriel Newman's latest weekly column (wittily named 'The Column') contains the following astonishing paragraph:

Leaders and academics that hark back to the pre-European days of Maori domination of New Zealand have driven this opportunism. They appear to conveniently forget that Maori violently conquered the Moriori, the original settlers, and their claims of tangata whenua status and demands for compensation for historical grievances appear to many to be ill informed.

It is difficult to understand how someone who knows so little can muster so much arrogance. So let us be clear: there was never any such thing as the Moriori as a pre-existing settler race. The idea never had any foundation in historical evidence and was finally debunked by ethnologists in the 1920s, although it hung on in some settings (notably school curricula) until the early 1970s. It is now limited to crackpot histories, usually in its evolved form as the Waitaha myth (distinguishable from the Moriori myth in that its lost tribe is pale-skinned, rather than Melanesian).

The Moriori story is discussed by Michael King in his Penguin History of New Zealand as a constituent of "the Great New Zealand Myth" and "a consequence of social Darwinist ideas current at the time of its invention":

This saga with its lurid allegations of Moriori physical and mental 'inferiority' was assembled from contaminated and unrelated fragments of so-called Maori tradition. It had no basis in history or ethnology …

Further, the very notion that Maori had displaced and colonised a more primitive people was both evidence of their superiority and an implicit justification for what Europeans, representatives of a still higher order or civilisation, had done to Maori in turn ('in colonising you and your country we did no more than that which you had already done to Moriori').

Unnervingly, this is precisely the context in which it is evoked by Newman. So history is being abused on all sides. But a rush of blood from the paepae is one thing: the publication of a racist myth by an elected representative - with the veneer of credibility that entails - is another. My vote did not elect Muriel Newman, but my taxes maintain her in her position and my children are growing up into a nation that she is in a position to shape. It simply isn't good enough.

Unfortunately, the rest of The Column bears the increasingly hysterical tone of Newman's recent speeches and statements:

Yet in a move that smacks of extreme racism, Labour has increased its relentless appeasement to Maori by drafting legislative proposals to transfer the control of New Zealand's future commercial marine development to Maori.

"Relentless appeasement"? Is she talking about her fellow New Zealanders or the Third Reich here? Apart from the obligatory nod to tame culture ("The recent renaissance in Maori culture has spawned a widespread fascination in things Maori and many progressive Maori are enjoying this renaissance") Newman seems happy to depict Maori as the enemy. There are little bits of pure talkback:

Meanwhile struggling taxpayers question why they should be compensating Maori descendants for land disputes that are 150 years old.

Because those "property disputes" - most of which are rather less than 150 years old - have been exposed to due process and compensation has been found to be due, and to be a politically more acceptable option than, say, the simple re-confiscation of raupatu land from its current private owners. Is Newman saying here that historical settlements should not have been made? And if not, what exactly is she saying?

She then goes out to outline an alarming characterisation of the government's much-delayed new regulation of marine farming ("Essentially, local Maori could propose marine farming ventures – in partnership with any other investor – in the middle of a popular tourist area and there will be virtually no way of stopping such a development") for which I can find no support in written material from Local Government New Zealand (whose November 2003 paper, while flagging concerns about regulatory burden, seems to say quite the opposite as regards the creation of aquaculture management areas), the Resource Management Law Association or Forest and Bird.

Ironically, her depiction of the foreshores proposal ("Labour intends to transfer billions of dollars of Crown-owned assets from the control of the New Zealand public to that of a racial minority") quite neatly meets the utterances of those in Maoridom who have lately been proclaiming their ownership of the entire coastline, when the Appeal Court said nothing of the kind. Thus, those on the extremes of the debate perpetuate each others' arguments. It's handy for them, but dangerous for the rest of us.

I do fear for the quality of the debate everyone keeps saying we need to have, both because it is falling to the extremes and because the facts appear to be receding into the distance. In yesterday's Sunday Star Times, Ruth Laugesen and Anthony Hubbard sought to determine the reality of the "racial" allocation of social services condemned in Don Brash's speech.

They discovered that Maori, who constitute 15.4% of the population, receive only 14.7% of the mainstream health budget (a function of the Maori population being relatively young). On top of that, about 2% of the total health budget, $158 million, goes on programmes specifically targeted at improving Maori health (and presumably saving the taxpayer money in the long run). All but $22 million of this money goes to Maori service providers, to which Brash professes no objection. In education, programmes aimed "primarily or solely at Maori" amounted to around $118m - or 1.5% of the total budget - in 2002. Brash's appeal to the politics of resentment might not have had quite the same resonance had he quoted those figures.

Anyway, I can see I'll have to have one more dart at this in earnest, but not today. It's too nice outside for one thing. And I have a little catching up to do after an entirely agreeable trip to Christchurch last week. I went down to record an episode of the comedy news quiz Off the Wire as part of the promotion for the launch of National Radio's 101FM frequency in Christchurch.

It was a chance to spend some time in the boisterous and delightful company of Joe Bennett, and to meet some people, including the mayor, Gary Moore, who, as it transpires, is a Hard News fan.

Christchurch - where I went to school but have rarely visited since - seems to be a place where as many buildings are removed as put up. It feels roomy, even with its crowds of tourists. Those tourists of course make the city's contemporary boutiquery viable, and they were certainly the bulk of the trade where we ate after the show, a place called The Viaduct (the irony!).

Sir Gil Simpson once told me that Christchurch's "cultural infrastructure" was a key element of his ability to hire good people from overseas. The mayor refers to a "cultural spine" running from the Cathedral to the museum. (It was nice to meet a mayor with a genuine passion for his city, rather than, as is the case with Auckland's incumbent, a passion for the sound of his own voice.) The spine includes, of course, the city's new art gallery, which is magnificent, and, happily, holds two of my favourite New Zealand paintings, Rita Angus's Cass and As there is a flow of light, we are born into the pure land by Colin McCahon. We have the McCahon in reproduction in our lounge, but the original is far, far more striking. Elements of the McCahon heritage - the manic Catholicism, the letters and numbers - pass me by, but some of his paintings have such an impact on me that they literally make me cry. I don't quite understand it.

Another highly agreeable element of the boutiquery is Whisky Galore, on Colombo St, just by the corner with Kilmore. I think this is the best whisky shop I have ever seen, and certainly one of the more reasonable in terms of price. I departed for the airport on Thursday with a bottle of the Finlaggan ($55) and the glow of a wee dram and a most pleasant conversation with the owner, Michael Fraser Milne. There are ways for me to be happy, and that is one of them.

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