The announcement is made in an article by Guru’s friend Joel Maxwell in Stuff today which asks in the headline, ”Do I scare them?’
We can answer that question quite easily: No. Annoy people big time? Yes. Like many activists in Kapiti, we supported his mayoral run in 2016 and were pleased when he won — but began to have significant doubts after a year and became increasingly critical to the point where we instead endorsed Gwynn Compton in 2019.
Most of the article is about skin colour and frankly we doubt whether anyone in Kapiti gives a Stuff about that — what they want is a mayor who represents the interests of the people who elected him/her and holds the management to account, not meekly sides with them in return for advancing his pet vanity project.
Any friend of Maxwells is no friend of mine
At the risk of stating the obvious, might I just say that if K. Gurunathan has been subjected to such allegedly pervasive “white racism” and neo-colonialism, how could he have been elected as a councilor and then to the mayoralty, myself being among those who voted for him on both occasions. Moreover, one could point to the large amount of public support he received when he was sacked from the Kapiti Observer, for the most part from despicable “whitey.”
Quite a bizarre and self indulgent article in todays Dominion Post announcing his decision, but not a peep about the highlights of his 6 years, choosing rather to focus attention on HIS own decision to pale – down his skin colour on his signs…..and then blame the public for his decision in some misguided rant about perceived racism. Face it Mr Mayor, the folk of Kapiti accepted you as mayor and let you do the job you were elected to, regardless of your skin colour. No fascism issue here.
Maybe and hopefully for the first time since Iride McCloy was at the helm people will realise that a fiscally competent person who will reduce spending is needed to run kapiti
The hyperbole was stunning in this article. White people have stood up for all people in this country regardless of skin colour. There were plenty of white people at the Springbok protests but this seems to be of no account. There is brown on brown or black on black prejudice around too. I work with a number of Chinese people and have been told that when a Chinese mainlander visits Hong Kong they are called crickets, which is an insult.
The line which states that the writer is willing to excuse accuracy regarding a beer can versus a rocks says it all. What else has been excused? As for plantation economics and education, this is not unique to immigrants but all working people as evidenced by George Carlin’s comedy act called the American dream, now many years old. The education system has been progressively dumbed down so migrants often speak and write better English than those for whom it is a mother tongue.
There has been a concerted effort for many years to drive people apart using race, economic standing, occupation and education. Use of sport, entertainers, sex and TV has been a useful distraction to stop people thinking about what is really going on.
If this country is truly so bad then people do have choices. NZers are leaving in droves for Australia and further afield because they believe they may do better elsewhere. I have read of a man who upped stakes with his wife and children and emigrated to Russia. Learning another language and alphabet would be no mean feat but this person has believes he can do better elsewhere so good for him.