DON BRASH RESPONDS

Bill Ralston accused me and supporters of the Hobson’s Pledge Trust of being members of the Ku Klux Klan ( Life, October 15), and urged us to “put away [our] torches and [our] hoods and help heal old wounds that hold our country back”. I utterly reject the notion that we are encouraging racism in New Zealand.

How on earth can pushing for equal political rights for all citizens, irrespective of their ethnicity, be racist? It is the very antithesis of racism.

Yes, as Ralston argued, there is a rich vein of racism in New Zealand, but nothing is more likely to foster that racism than the steady march to create different political rights for those who happen to have a Maori ancestor (usually among many others). That is surely what is happening, with more and more local and regional councils having unelected tribal appointees imposed on them.

Ralston puts up two straw men. First, he argues that “positive discrimination towards disadvantaged groups is an internationally recognised concept that has been applied in this country since the Liberal Government of the 1890s passed laws to assist the poor, the industrially disadvantaged and women who were until then disenfranchised”.

Hobson’s Pledge doesn’t contest that principle at all. Governments have helped, and should help, those who are disadvantaged, but that surely applies whether the people have a Maori ancestor or not. Although Maori incomes are, on average, below the incomes of other New Zealanders, that is also true of Pasifika and Asians. In absolute terms, there are almost certainly more poor New Zealanders of purely European ancestry than there are poor Maori. Being poor doesn’t constitute a reason for different political rights.

Second, Ralston argues that “it’s clearly desirable to redress past grievances”. Indeed, and those involved in Hobson’s Pledge don’t disagree with that, either, even though some of us have misgivings about the basis on which some Treaty of Waitangi settlements have been made. We make that quite explicit on our website.

What we do argue is that once historical grievances have been addressed, it is imperative that New Zealanders move forward with equal political rights. That is clearly what was envisaged when the Treaty was signed, and why Governor Hobson said, as each chief left his signature, “we are now one people”.

Suggesting that Maori New Zealanders need some kind of constitutional preference has no basis in the Treaty and is utterly patronising to Maori, implying that they can’t quite make it without some kind of special dispensation. With more than 20 Maori members of Parliament – only seven of them elected in Maori electorates – Maori have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are perfectly capable of making it without such a constitutional preference.

Is it racist to urge the abolition of separate Maori electorates? If it is, then the Royal Commission on the Electoral System, which recommended those electorates should be scrapped if MMP were adopted, is racist. So too is the National Party: Bill English committed a future National Government to getting rid of the Maori electorates in 2003, as did I in 2005, as did John Key in 2008.

The only sure path to racial harmony in New Zealand is for all citizens, irrespective of when they or their ancestors arrived in the country, to have equal political rights.

Don Brash (Eden Terrace, Auckland)