With everyone talking about Haka O Pango it’s probably a good time to raise the spectre of the National Party’s Treaty policies. Now, people are probably expecting me to label them ‘racist’, but I don’t actually think they are. Stupid? Yes. Racist? No.
Thing is, I don’t actually see them as race policies. The do genuinely seem to be about Treaty politics, and the relationship between Māori and Brash’s mainstream. What I do see them as is assimilationist.
With the failure to get substantial traction with their tax policies, there seems to be a consensus forming in the media that Brownlee will be trotted out to have a go at ‘separatism’. Well, bloody good on you Gerry. Bloody good on ya.
Pity you’re aiming to drag New Zealand back to the 1960s, but bloody good on you all the same. Nice to see New Zealand can reconnect to its roots. Roots that should have been soaked with round-up, or dragged out of the policy environment and doused with petrol, but roots all the same.
As I say, National’s Treaty policy centres on the idea that ‘New Zealanders’ should be homogenised, and invokes the spirit of ‘equality’ to undermine many of the hard-fought gains made by Māori since re-establishing their political voice in the 1970s.
The main reason I don’t think that the policy is racist is because there isn’t any real reference to getting rid of Māori, or Māori culture, as was the case last century. Plus, even if there is that kind of mindset in the National Party anywhere, which I can’t guarantee, then it’s unlikely to get a run on the field in an actual Government.
But of course, you could say that about the entire National Party itself. Which is why this suspicion of Māori-bashing is being peaked.
Not racism, but a claytons assimilation is what National is proposing. They aren’t racist, Don is married to an Asian lady, as he likes to point out, but you don’t have to be outright racist when you can achieve the same ends by pulling to rug out from under Māori society.
And that’s the key. Māori society.
As it stands, Māori society has found its feet here in post-Colonial New Zealand, and did so around the time we, as a nation, shook off the shackles of our British past. I know that commentators like Tze Ming like to point out that New Zealanders are essentially Anglo, but I’d like to reply that we don’t think of ourselves as being such. Or, you’d hope not anyhow. Pesky damn whinging poms.
Anyhow, what we have forming in New Zealand isn’t a ‘racial separatism’. That phrase is utter bullshit. What we have is a Māori society sticking up for itself and making demands for a better inclusion in New Zealand society. The difference between these two things is both profound, and the core of the issue.
OK, so lets go back to Te Haka o Pango. Apart from the occasional wowser, people seem to love it. It baffles me then that people will actively support some parts of Māori culture, like this and the Te Rauparaha haka, while refusing to acknowledge that Māori culture, and the society that underwrites it, needs a public voice in the mainstream.
What current National Party policy seeks to do is to minimise this voice. By purging the Treaty from Brash’s mainstream, and by removing objectively Māori political institutions like the seats, National is removing the hard-fought gains of Māori society, and pushing Māori culture down into some form of ‘private’ identity with no public reflection.
The best way to compare this lack of ‘public reflection’ is to look at the example of migrants. Migrants have no public voice in New Zealand, and are effectively victims or political fodder for people like Peters. Migrants have, in reality, no real option but to assimilate into the mainstream.
And why? Because assimilation is the best way to shed negative attention from the mainstream. It worked for the Dalmatians, the Dutch, Italians, the list goes on.
Assimilation is a policy that failed 50 years ago, and will fail again today. Māori aren’t about to assimilate into that mainstream, have fought against negative stereotyping and statistics, and have shown actual, demonstrable improvements since the 1970s.
What I mean by public reflection is that Māori culture is today part of the fabric of New Zealand society itself, and should rightfully take its place as part of the systems of government. National however, may well deliberately seek to minimise that inclusion, and push Māori society out of governance and into a weakened private identity.
Let’s see what Brash has to say in Whangarei before we judge him, and what Brownlee says when called to weight into the argument in coming weeks, but any argument that seriously considers Māori society to be an object to be purged needs to be seriously criticised.