Our rituals aren’t comic

I have been reading with interest about the new speed limits for SH6 between Blenheim and Nelson and I have to say that I support them, based on the dollar figures alone. The plan stacks up.

The Ministry of Transport says the social cost of each death is around $5 million and the cost of a serious injury close to $1m. According to NZTA, in the 10 years between 2009 and 2018, 20 people lost their lives and 92 were seriously injured in crashes on the highway between Blenheim and Nelson.

Therefore, deaths on this road have cost our country around $100m and serious injuries around $92m in just 10 years.

People are crying over an extra few minutes travel time and truck drivers are complaining about the impact on the economy. It’s about time that we looked at the bigger picture and accept the fact that the road toll is already affecting our economy and that there is something we can do to change that quickly and cheaply – slow down.

It could save our loved ones’ lives, and even if they are not impacted imagine what else we could do with that much money.

We’re only beginning to face colonisation and its lasting negative effects on Ma¯ ori. There will be brawls ahead over what we teach our kids in schools, having taught them, until now, almost nothing of their own country’s history.

In my day we learned it from Weet-bix cards.

I was shocked to learn Ma¯ ori women were raped at Parihaka, the Taranaki stronghold of pacifism invaded by armed settlers and the English military, bent on grabbing tribal land they weren’t legally entitled to in the 19th century. They thought they’d scored a triumph, I guess, but it was theft.

There were thefts like it all over the country, and we grumble when Ma¯ ori are compensated – in money – when what was stolen was not so much money as identity, heritage, self-respect, a complex, lived culture.

The thought of rape along with everything else is sickening. I was naı¨ve. I thought the women would have been spared that humiliation, but I should have known better. It was war after all.

We used to call them Ma¯ ori Wars. More truthfully, we now talk about Land Wars. If this was America we’d have made westerns glorifying ourselves, but we didn’t. Geoff Murphy eventually made Utu, which gave a

Ma¯ ori perspective on history.

That’s a thing about New Zealanders that Farrell and the many Poms like him don’t get. We don’t denigrate Ma¯ ori culture here. We’ve learned better.

I relate more to the haka than to any English ritual I can think of.

The Changing of the Guard? Don’t make me laugh. We still have the comic opera traditions in Parliament, we still have their Queen, but that will end one day, and we’ll be ourselves, a hybrid of cultures with their own histories, in which English will be just one of many.

Farrell will live to play many more games of rugby, and will inevitably be beaten.

I hope he’ll face loss with dignity.

But that’s a bit much to ask of a young man of 28 at the height of his powers. The smirk said it all.