by Mathew Horncastle

I do not support race based policies.

Let’s play it out: pretend the Maori Party worldview is correct.

Maori were the first people to New Zealand. The Maori Party speaks for all Maori people, somehow. Maori should govern the country. They receive the money. They set the laws. They favour their own people.

Where does that road actually lead?

We DNA test everyone.

Does the person with the purest DNA get the most power and the most privilege? How do we decide what counts as the benchmark? Do we pick an archaeological site and a body found in it and call that the standard? Which site? On what basis? Who decides? The oldest one we have found so far? The most untouched? The one most politically convenient at the time? And what happens when a new site is dug up next year that pushes the benchmark somewhere else?

Does someone with 20% Maori DNA get half the rights of someone with 40%? What is the gap in power between the most Maori, half that, and none at all?

Then it gets worse.

Does a person from Taiwan or Polynesia, who shares the same ancestral DNA but whose family never came to New Zealand, get the same rights here? If the answer is yes, this was never about New Zealand. If the answer is no, this was never really about DNA either.

Does someone with Maori DNA who has never set foot in this country have greater rights than someone with no Maori DNA whose family has lived here for six generations, paid taxes here, raised children here?

You can see how grotesque this gets very quickly. We are not used to talking about human beings this way.

This is how people were sorted before the Enlightenment. Rank by blood. Power rationed by ancestry. Rights handed out by category. Worth measured by who your great grandfather was.

The Western world broke that system. It said something radical for its time, and still radical today. You are an individual. Your dignity does not flow from your tribe, your bloodline, or your race. It flows from being a human being.

That is the foundation everything else stands on. You give it up the moment you start measuring people by their DNA.

I will not.

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This follows an Horizon poll which found only 13% of people support the Left bloc using racial comments to get votes.