SO, IN CASE YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND HE PUAPUA

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Love's Labour's Lost Maori caucus

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told Parliament this afternoon that the 'He Puapua' report should have been withheld in case New Zealanders didn't understand it.

Oh, we understand it all right, Prime Minister. We understand that it's about dividing our nation along lines of Maori and non-Maori, and about handing most of the power over not even to part-Maori but to a handful of elitists who know an opportunity to grab the upper hand when they see it.

We understand that "He Puapua would divide our society into Maori who form 16% of the population on which 50% of political power would devolve by 2040, while the other 170 ethnicities in this country who constitute 84% of the population would share the rest. The 16% would enjoy their privileged position because they possess a drop or more of Maori blood. Without that drop, the rest of us are destined to become a rather crowded group of second-class citizens." https://www.bassettbrashandhide.com/post/national-labour-and-he-puapua?postId=ba28789e-bec5-4e7d-bdb2-ad86dc204713

“The Prime Minister is patronising New Zealanders," says ACT Leader David Seymour.

It sticks in my craw to quote Seymour, who approves of killing babies and old people. I'd rather quote Her Majesty's Opposition, even though their leader's no better - but where is the 'Opposition'?

Well, at last Judith Collins seems to be finding her old 'Crusher' form.

"Judith Collins and David Seymour both appear to have found the same wedge issue," writes the barely literate Stuff reporter Henry Cooke today. 

. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/300292463/whose-race-card-is-this-anyway-judith-collins-and-david-seymour-both-appear-to-have-found-the-same-wedge-issue

'Stuff' complains that "Seymour and Collins are playing from a similar deck of cards"

Excuse me, Mr Cooke, if I point out that it didn't take much finding. This Labour Government handed your "deck of cards" to the opposition parties on a plate. 

Cooke describes this smoking bomb as "an obscure issue ...  Collins has seized on the report as the foundation to a wider argument she's been making about the “separatist” agenda of the Government ever since Little proposed setting up a Māori Health Authority; a skeleton key to the Government’s plans that has been hiding in almost plain site (sic, my emphasis) this whole time." 

And if, Mr Cooke, it has indeed been hiding in almost plain sight this whole time, whose fault is that? Yours, and the rest of Ardern's media toadies whose job it is to clarify such issues for the public.

"Nanaia Mahuta carefully selected her group of advisers to produce a vision of how New Zealand could be brought into compliance with the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. When the report came to ministers in 2019 it wasn’t released publicly, probably because the Labour government realized that it might be unpopular.

Such perspicacity ...  

"No mention was made of He Puapua at the time of the 2020 election. Instead, once re-elected, ministers seem to have decided to implement its separatist recommendations in dribs and drabs. Mahuta has given us Maori wards in local authorities, over-riding public opinion, and shortly Andrew Little will establish a separate Maori Health Authority. It will exercise power in the area of Maori health and also enjoy some rights - yet unexplained - to interfere in health decisions relating to the rest of us.

"He Puapua proposes separate court and justice systems and contains a timetable for the establishment of a Maori Parliament. We know, too, that the government intends to inflict a disgracefully one-sided history curriculum on our schools, pushing the notion that only Maori values have been important to New Zealand’s history, and that the values of the colonizers who brought reading, writing, arithmetic and a system of justice to a country ravaged by the musket wars in the early nineteenth century are of no historical importance.

How come He Puapua has now emerged as a political issue? It seems clear that some people with Maori ancestry perceive in the UN Declaration (on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) an opportunity to propel themselves into elite status over and above the rest of their fellow Kiwis.

Ancient Maori society, as Mahuta well knows, was very hierarchical with its own royalty, chiefs and slaves; the modern He Puapua Maori agitators aren’t happy with equality that is everyone’s current lot and want to entrench themselves in superior positions.

Whether all of Ardern’s cabinet share this aspiration for Maori isn’t yet clear, although they haven’t denied it, and we are entitled to suspect they do.

One thing is clear: when Judith Collins gave her very carefully worded speech to the Auckland National Party conference last weekend, no minister denied that He Puapua was the Labour government’s long-term intention. Speaking for the government, Kelvin Davis’ only contribution was to abuse Collins. Shouting “racism” at anyone who questions anything to do with Maori seems now to be a universal comeback, no matter whether a sensible answer is needed or not.

 

self-explanatory

The fact that this government is contemplating entrenching racial divisions in New Zealand society reminds us how young and inexperienced the current ministry is.

The New Zealand Labour Party invested a lot of energy forty and fifty years ago fighting on behalf of those subjected to racial oppression in South African society. The Third Labour Government opposed the planned Springbok Tour to New Zealand in 1973 because its players were selected on the basis of race, and the entire Labour caucus in 1981, the year after Jacinda Ardern was born, protested vigorously against the arrival of a Springbok team in New Zealand, again because it was selected by race. Few if any of the current ministry seem to have any memory of what was once a key article of Labour faith: all people, irrespective of their racial origin, have a right to equal treatment."

https://www.bassettbrashandhide.com/post/national-labour-and-he-puapua?postId=ba28789e-bec5-4e7d-bdb2-ad86dc204713

Let's leave the last word to Stuff's erudite reporter Henry Cooke:

"It isn’t the end of the world for Collins that ACT is making the same argument as her. "

A better last word is this; a petition from former MPs Michael Bassett, Don Brash and Rodney Hide against two-government, tribal rule for New Zealand:

https://www.bassettbrashandhide.com/post/sign-petition-to-stop-two-government-tribal-rule?fbclid=IwAR3Gn4do5xneKdii2l7twq_AF0ySNkUdp7Li1hv5ACXp-RTSN1_aSw7ag-8