by Roger Childs
Today the vast majority of those involved in research on human variation would agree that biological races do not exist among humans.. Robert Wald Sussman, author of “The Myth of Race: The troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea”
The Polynesian link
Many Māori people today pride themselves on having a connection to the immigrants who came to New Zealand many centuries ago, from different parts of the Pacific.
Some of these folk are one eighth, one sixteenth, one thirty second …. Maori, but this is the ethnic link seems to be paramount for many of them. (It is equivalent to someone calling themselves French, on the basis of a great-great grandmother born in Toulouse.) Regardless, this is a personal choice.
Today to be Maori, whatever the amount of Polynesian blood, can be the gateway to rewards, riches and reputation. Some iwi leaders are far more Irish, English and Scottish than Polynesian, however it is the Pacific connection that has allowed them to become very wealthy, administering Maori trusts and businesses, often based on settlement money determined by the Waitangi Tribunal and paid for by the taxpayer.
Meanwhile at the other social continuum, far more numerous lower class part-Maori, struggle to get adequate housing, employment, health care and education.
Much difference?
Māori women were the focus due to their high smoking rate: 32.5 per cent, compared with the country’s total rate of 13.8 per cent. Stuff 6 May 2019
Does this comparison actually mean much? Picture a Wellington flat which Jenny and Hanna share. They are both smokers and their respective parents were born in New Zealand. Jenny has forebears from England, Scotland and Dalmatia, and Hanna has ancestors from Wales, Ireland and Dalmatia, but she also has a great, great Maori grand-father.
In the smoking rate statistics Hanna features in the Maori figures, but Jenny doesn’t. Make sense?
Democratic representation?
In October the nation’s adults will be electing people to represent them in local authorities.
Surely all the candidates should be elected, as this is the democratic way. We are all New Zealanders, immigrants or descended from immigrants, and belonging to a particular ethnicity should not entitle an elite group of people to be selected for councils, rather than be elected.
Equality and fairness are principles we should value above all else in society. Wherever we have come from and whatever our mix of ancestors, we should all be treated the same and no particular group should have special privileges.
Then we have the special seats in parliament for Maori… food for another article.
FFT are designed to challenge viewpoints and provoke discussion: comments are welcome. Discussions like this won’t be possible if Andrew Little gets his way — anything other than the Government view will be banned as “hate speech.”
A neo-Jacobin melting-pot in the name of ‘equality’ is hardly preferable to ethnic identities. The result is a rootless mass of producers and consumers in a globalized market, a globalized labour force that can be moved across the world as marketing needs dictate; what Pascal Zachary approvingly called the ‘Global Me’ in his book of that title.
In this case the ‘cure’ is worse than the malady.
No-one, to my knowledge, is proposing the banning of ethnic identities – merely that all identities be treated as equal citizens. What we have now is apartheid – rather a serious malady.
Dave Witherow