by Karl du Fresne who wrote this piece for the latest edition of The Spectator Australia.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern promised, on the night of her general election triumph last October, to govern for all New Zealanders. But her Labour government is pursuing policies that will entrench racial separatism, undermine democracy, turbocharge the grievance culture and promote polarisation and divisiveness.
The immediate threats come from proposals to outlaw “hate speech”, however that may be defined, and bestow special privilege on people who identify as Maori by allowing city and district councils to create exclusively Maori wards. In the longer term, the government is likely to seize on climate change as justification for policies that could deliver a savage blow to the country’s most dynamic productive sector.
Add to that the politicisation of education, in the form of a new, Marxist-influenced history curriculum that portrays Maori as a race still oppressed by colonialism, and you have a perfect ideological storm. New Zealand sometimes feels as if it’s in the grip of a Year Zero cult similar in tone, if not in scale, to that promoted in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea (Cambodia), where everything that had gone before was renounced.
I’ve been bemused at the bizarre craze sweeping New Zealand at calling New Zealand Aotearoa. No reference to the fact that, as Michael King shows, Maori didn’t have a name for these lands, and only came to accept “Aotearoa” in relatively recent times. The media, (notably TV weather reports) call our country Aotearoa, a name unknown to most beyond our shores. The name “New Zealand” dates back to Abel Tasman’s visit in 1642. It is the name by which our land has always been recognized abroad. It won’t be long before the woke who are driving all this insist on officially changing our country’s name. There won’t be a referendum.
Instead of being New Zealanders, we’ll call ourselves Aotearoaians.
I’ve enquired. Apparently the Treaty doesn’t mention Aotearoa. Apparently Aotearoa was the name given to the South Island by the Westland based Waitaha tribe?
All very confusing.
Perhaps ‘Aotearoans’ which has fewer syllables? The Hard Left which is driving this neo-Marxist agenda have no time for democratic principles.
A few years ago, to ask any individual his ethnicity was offensive. After raging Nazism, with its policy of ethnic-cleansing, any inquiry into anyone’s racial origins reflected ‘racial discrimination’.
Now it has been reversed. The government – adopting Woke tactics – is pigeonholing the population into ethnic-groups – employing the Census to do so – while emphasising the evil of racial-divisiveness.
While laws against racial discrimination are essential, there should be no need to classify everyone like anthropological specimens. It ought to be that New Zealanders are all just humans, in a colour-blind society where everyone is treated equally.
One study after another claims some group by statistical analysis is under-represented in one particular or another, which by implication is due to prejudice.
For a Woke-like group to select a period of History to be taught in schools, solely to glorify one ethnic group with the intention of denigrating another, is to drive a wedge between races. It is an act of racial prejudice, and could probably be prosecuted.