…. as there are no full-blooded Māoris in existence it indisputably follows that had it not been for migrants, mainly Brits, not a single Māori alive today … would have existed. —Robert Jones
Defining people by race
By Roger Childs
An article by Bob Jones in 2018 in the National Business Review (NBR) about a “Gratitude Day” caused offence in many quarters. Some said he should be stripped of his knighthood. However, in the statement quoted above from that satirical piece, he spoke the truth.
In answer to a question from Raumati resident, Andy Oakley, when he lodged his Te Pakeha claim, the Waitangi Tribunal defined a Maori as being a person of the Maori race of New Zealand. That is what the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act says.
But there are problems: just one: anthropologists reject the concept of race. As people who seek out their DNA background discover, all humans are physiologically the same regardless of their origins, and in terms of ancestry we are all essentially mongrels!
Part-Maori ethnicity
A couple of years ago, media reports on the possibility of expanding our prison capacity mentioned that more than half the inmates were Maori. But what does that mean? Tipene (Steve) O’Regan, for example, is one sixteenth Ngai Tahu.
Let’s look at two hypothetical prisoners sharing a cell — on the top bunk is George whose forebears are New Zealand born and back over the generations, English, Irish and Dalmatian.
On the bottom bunk is Fred. His ancestors are New Zealand born and back over the generations, English, Irish and Dalmatian; however he has a Maori great, great grandmother. So in the official statistics on the prison population Fred is classified as Maori.
Shouldn’t it be part-Maori if Fred wants to be called that?
Classifying people can be discriminatory
Classifications of population can be misleading and disastrous, and in the past have been used to serve the political ends of the rulers.
The Jewish pogroms in Russia, Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, discrimination against African Americans in the USA and ignoring Aboriginal rights in Australia until the 1970s are some of many appalling examples. Back in 1950 South Africa’s Population Registration Act was designed to exclude all non-Whites from voting and other basic civil rights.
It is ironic to note that if all Maori living today had been in South Africa in the apartheid era, they would have been classified as Coloureds.
Doing the last census
According to the Mainstream Media, Simon Bridges is National’s first Maori leader. He is in fact three sixteenths Maori, two up on Steve.
It would be interesting to know how he classified himself in question 14 of the last census. Will the 82% of his ancestors who are non-Maori have taken precedence?
Obviously, people are entitled to call themselves what they like, and Statistics New Zealand is keen to classify people by ethnicity. As readers know, they certainly made a right mess of the overall counting process.
Unity in diversity
Today we have a very cosmopolitan population and folk from China, India, Korea, Samoa, Tonga — to name but a few — are nearly all far more than 50% ethnically Chinese, Indian, Korean, Samoan etc… But if you ask those who have taken out citizenship, they normally see themselves as New Zealanders, while taking pride in their cultural roots.
However, the majority of people who call themselves Maori have less than 50% Maori blood.
Bob Jones exercising freedom of speech
Bob is suing a part-Maori lady for defamation over her vociferous objections to his piece of satire in the NBR. She wants him stripped of his knighthood, among other things.
We have to be able to laugh at ourselves and cartoonists are doing it all the time.
The legendary Billy T. James did wonderful send-ups of Maori “culture” and behaviour late last century. Would he be allowed on television if he was alive today, or would our Politically Correct Mainstream Media ban him?
Bob Jones is currently arguing his case in court (if he can find his hearing aids!), and good on him. He is merely exercising his right to free speech and long may people be able to do this, whether or not others like the sentiments expressed.
It is nonsense to state that there is no such entity as ‘race’, and that this has been settled by the science. I’ll cite one source who is local, the biologist Bob Brockie, a resident of Kapiti.
Writing his ‘world of science’ column for the Dominion Post (29 Jan. 2007) he took issue with those scientists who for political reasons and without scientific justification dogmatically claimed that the word ‘race’ is meaningless.
Citing a medical team under Prof. Neil Risch at Stanford University, he pointed out that while humans are 99% genetically related, it is gene clusters that form races, and that it is misleading to believe that skin colour is the only difference.
Risch and his team made the point that such matters have major consequences when determining susceptibility to diseases and other medical issues; therefore those who claim there are no races do a great deal of harm on many levels, behind the facade of humanitarianism. Risch stated that policy makers, doctors and others should acknowledge genetic racial differences.
Brockie concludes: ‘Call me old fashioned but I think we are muddying the English language by supplanting the precise scientifically justified word race with the woolly polysyllabic euphemism ethnicity.’
Sir Robert as a classical liberal indeed is far removed from being a ‘racist’. Classical liberalism only upholds the individual, and repudiates race as ‘collectivist’. On the other hand the Marxist and crypto-Marxist reject race as being a ‘social construct’ .
The claim that there are no races is the result of a century of penetration into the social sciences by Leftist academics, with the sponsorship of oligarchic wealth via the Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller and other funds, because both the Left and plutocracy have a common aim of socially engineering a nebulous mass humanity that can more effectively become part of an international economic tread mill, unhindered by such barriers as race; a process that Marx called ‘internationalization’; now called globalization. When meaningless expressions like ‘New Zealander’ are used, without reference to a specific organic and historic unit, what is that other than a description for so-called ‘brand New Zealand’ to be sold for export, where, as the poet Rex Fairburn pointed out, the only common ground is the ‘cash nexus/’?
As for the gratitude Maori must feel for their colonization, what is denied in our history in the eagerness to disparage the European settler, is that ,as the Labour stalwart John A. Lee said: ‘the Maori think the Pakeha won the land wars, but he only won the debt’. It is also forgotten that the British settler was often trying to escape the appalling conditions of Victorian England and industrialism, as documented by Engel’s in ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’, a text that Marxists, in their eagerness to condemn Europeans, seem to neglect.
It might be justly questioned as to how much gratitude the Maori should have for the imposition of a highly superficial, artificial, rootless lifestyle that was already at the extreme edge of decadence 200 years ago. This is the same notion that proclaims today that the Muslim, the Amazonian Indian, and the Russian should be grateful for the dumping of the excrescences of technology and welcome becoming part of a global economy, with its concomitant global consumer culture where the epitome of culture is expressed in MTV and American sit-coms.