Is Ardern’s ‘bridge’ more of a tightrope?
AGREAT deal can be learned from the metaphors politicians choose to illustrate the challenges they are required to overcome. At the recent gathering of Maori and Pakeha leaders at the Maori King’s Turangawaewae marae, the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, gave us the metaphor of te Tiriti o Waitangi as a bridge. Somehow, she suggested, New Zealanders must be brought safely across this fragile structure. Her job is to lead them.
Listening to the Prime Minister, I was reminded of the compelling final scene of the movie The Man Who Would Be King, in which Sean Connery strides bravely towards safety across a swaying rope bridge. Behind him, enraged tribesmen hack away furiously at the anchoring cables. Beneath him, a yawning chasm waits to swallowup the foolhardy Scottish soldier.
Certainly, it is difficult to escape the notion that the prime minister perceives this present moment to be one of considerable historical danger.
Behind us lies the old society of colonial New Zealand. A society based upon assumptions
TODAY is Friday, August 26, the 238th day of 2022. There are 127 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
— Roman forces under Julius Caesar invade Britain.
1346 — A cannon is used for the first time in a European battle as Edward III of England defeats Philip VI of France at the Battle of Crecy, during the Hundred Years’ War.
1768 — James Cook departs Plymouth on HMS Endeavour bound for the Pacific, in order to observe the transit of Venus in
1769.
1866 — A telegraph cable links the North and South islands for the first time as the first message is sent from Lyall Bay, Wellington, to Whites Bay near Blenheim.
1878 — Christchurch and Dunedin are linked by rail.
1884 — A patent is granted in the United States to German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler for the linotype machine, which allowed mass production of newspapers.
1894 — The second Maori king,
Tukaroto Matutaera Potatau Te Wherowhero Tawhiao, dies.
55BC
of racial superiority. A society founded upon the dispossession of Maori. A society riven by multiple inequities and injustices. Ahead of us lies Aotearoa — the new bicultural nation in which a “partnership of the races” will expunge the inequities and injustices of our racist past.
Across this perilous gap between yesterday and tomorrow, the prime minister has suspended the Treaty. She offers us her hand — and bids us cross.
The problem with Prime Minister Ardern’s metaphor is that far too few New Zealanders believe the Treaty is strong enough to carry them across the chasm. They fear the chaos into which their country will be plunged if the bridge proves unequal to the burden imposed upon it. They simply do not share the Maori people’s unwavering confidence in a document once referred to by a Chief Justice of New Zealand as “a simple nullity”.
Even those enthusiastic about a bicultural future for AotearoaNew Zealand are beginning to express their doubts about the “official” interpretation of the Treaty as a “partnership between races”. Dame Anne Salmond, for example, writing for the Newsroom website, reminds us that race is “a colonial idea with an ugly history, associated with slavery, genocide and the dehumanisation of others, and utterly inimical to respecting [New Zealanders’] ‘tapu and mana’.”
1911 — New Zealand gets its first national coat of arms.
1914 — More than 30,000 Russian troops are killed during World War 1 as they are outmanoeuvred by German troops at the battle of Tannenberg.
1920 —The 19th Amendment to the American Constitution is ratified, giving women the vote.
1936 — A treaty ends the British
Pakeha conservatives, on the other hand, listen to what they judge to be the exaggerated and essentially selfserving claims of Maori historians and lawyers who would have us believe that te Tiriti o Waitangi is Magna Carta and the United States Constitution all rolled into one unchallengeable fragment of holy writ. Their reading of New Zealand history and New Zealand law simply cannot be squared with what is fast becoming the “official” explanation of the Treaty.
For far too many New Zealanders the prime minister’s invitation to step on to her bridge to the future is an invitation to catastrophe.
Perhaps there would be a higher level of confidence in the Treaty’s strength if the prime minister was better able to explain its corollary — “co
occupation of Egypt, except the Suez Canal zone, and Britain and Egypt form an alliance for 20 years.
1937 — The first televised major league baseball games are shown in the US, a doubleheader between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
1942 — Japan attacks the village of Isurava in Papua New Guinea in the first major battle in Australia’s Kokoda Track campaign.
1945 — Japanese envoys on board the US battleship Missouri receive surrender instructions at the end of World War 2.
1952 — Floods caused by monsoon rains inundate 90% of Manila, causing at least eight deaths.
1957 — The Soviet Union announces it has successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile.
1959 — The British Motor Corporation introduces the Morris MiniMinor. Designed by Alec Issigonis, it was only 3m long but seated 4 passengers; Chinese troops cross into India’s northeastern territory after a border dispute.
1967 — Andreas Papandreou, the former Greek cabinet minister and son of expremier Georgios Papandreou, is indicted on treason charges and accused of leading the Aspid (Shield) army conspiracy.
1978 — Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice is elected as Pope John Paul I.
1985 — A special French investigator issues a report clearing the French socialist government and the intelligence service of governance”. So eloquent on other subjects, Jacinda Ardern becomes uncharacteristically tonguetied when invited to “sell” the concept behind what her critics characterise as Labour’s raciallycharged and electorally unmandated policies — most particularly Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s Three Waters project.
This inability to explain cogovernance is not restricted to the prime minister. The attempt by her Maori Development Minister, Willie Jackson, to reassure New Zealanders that they have nothing to fear from this “new” variant of democracy has succeeded only in frightening the bejesus out of them. If this is what lies on the other side of the chasm bridged by the Treaty, then the Sixth Labour Government should not
involvement in the sinking of the Greenpeace protest vessel Rainbow Warrior at
Auckland on July 10.
1996 — Former military strongman Chun Doohwan is sentenced to death after being convicted of mutiny and treason in South Korea. His successor, Roh Taewoo, is also found guilty and sentenced to 22 years in prison. They are pardoned a year later.
2005 — A fire races through a crowded rundown Paris apartment building housing African immigrants, killing 17 people, mainly children trapped while they slept.
2012 — At just 15 years old, New Zealand golfer Lydia Ko becomes the youngest LPGA Tour event winner and the first amateur winner since 1969.
2016 — Ranfurly’s main street is blocked for about an hour in protest at the threatened closure of the town’s Westpac bank.
2020 — The ANZ Bank announces that it will begin winding down the Dunedinbased Bonus Bonds scheme at the end of October and will no longer accept new investment into the scheme. The scheme was launched by the New Zealand Government through the Post Office in 1970 and had been managed by the ANZ’s George St branch since 1996. The winding up process is expected to take up to two years. be surprised at the number of Kiwis declining to make the journey.
In the wise words of Dame Anne: “Rather than seeing the Treaty as a ‘bridge’ across a chasm of misunderstanding, in the spirit of ‘pernicious polarisation’, perhaps Te Tiriti can be visualised as a meeting place where different groups of New Zealanders come together in a spirit of tika/justice, pono/ truth, and aroha to share ideas, resolve injustices and seek peace with one another.”
There is no shortcut from our colonial past to a bicultural future. Surely, following this floodravaged fortnight, the prime minister realises that, when the waters rise in fury, bridges get swept away.
John Gildroy Grant, New Zealand recipient of the Victoria Cross in World War 1 (18891970); Richard Alexander (Dick) Henderson, medical serviceman WW1 (18951958); Mother Teresa, Catholic nun and missionary (191097); Neroli Fairhall, New Zealand Commonwealth Games and Olympic archer (19442006); Angela D'Audney, New Zealand television news anchor and actress (19442002); Ross Meurant, New Zealand politician (1947); Bernardine (Bernie) Portenski, New Zealand longdistance runner (19492017); Gary Knight, All Black/New Zealand Commonwealth Games wrestler (1951); Nancy Martinez, Canadian pop singer (1960); New Zealand netballer (1962); Angus Fogg, New Zealand V8 supercar driver (1967); Adrian Young, US musician (1969); Melissa McCarthy, US actress (1970); Peter de Boer, New Zealand curler (1971); Karl Kippenberger, New Zealand rock musician (1973); Aaron Gilmore, New Zealand politician (1973); Macaulay Culkin, US actor (1980); Chris Pine, US actor (1980); Dylan O’Brien, US actor (1991).
Quote of the day:
IF I had advice for anyone right now, it would be to not become elderly or seriously ill.
Waiting times at emergency departments are frightening, ambulances are queued down hospital streets, very unwell people are being treated in tents and that resthome your children have their eye on for you is probably on the brink of closure.
Covid19 has turned existing cracks in the system into yawning chasms and the sad fact is people are dying unnecessarily.
At the heart of this crisis is the lack of nurses and everyone acknowledges this. NZNO estimates at least 4000 nursing vacancies across the health system (including jobs such as healthcare assistants and midwives) and in a recent survey, about 72% of our members said they are thinking of leaving nursing. They’re burnt out and exhausted and feeling like they just have nothing more to give.
All governments over the last two decades are to blame for this. We have warned of the looming nursing shortage repeatedly, and the problem has never been seriously addressed. So how do we fix it?
In the short term, the Government has announced plans that are right out of NZNO’s Maranga Mai! campaign. They’ve removed financial and administrative barriers to overseas nurses having their qualifications recognised and they’ve put financial incentives in place to attract exNew Zealand nurses back into the profession.
That will help, but it is not a longterm solution. We need to grow our own robust nursing workforce and, equally important, we must address why they are so intent on leaving.
Growing our own workforce will take time, but how to do it is not rocket science. Why not make the training free like we do for trade apprenticeships? Starting a lowpaid job with a massive student debt is not a great incentive.
Another barrier is the hundreds of unpaid work placement hours student nurses must do. Sometimes they are working 40hour weeks for nothing, which is costly to them and simply unfair. It’s also why more than a quarter drop out during their first years of training.
Lastly, we need to guarantee that every student nurse will be given a good job when they graduate. If we remove training barriers and guarantee meaningful employment, more young people will want to become nurses and hopefully fewer will want to leave.
Employed nurses are pretty clear on why they want out. They’re repeatedly asked to work long hours even when extremely fatigued, yet their workplace health and safety concerns often seem trivialised by their employers. They feel desperately unfulfilled at the end of a working day because they have not been able to complete basic cares.
They fear coming into work because a mistake under pressure could cost them their careers and they worry about the wellbeing of their patients when they go home after a shift. Lastly, they are disillusioned with a Government that doesn’t seem to hear them or understand why they feel so devalued.
It would help enormously if the Government would work with us to get the pay equity backpay dispute settled so nurses can start receiving the new agreed pay rates. To its credit the Government has been ungrudging in its commitment to paying nurses these new rates so let’s get on with it.
The next issue the Government must address is pay parity, in which every nurse, everywhere in New Zealand, is paid the new rates regardless of where they work.
A nurse working in primary healthcare (e.g. medical centres) earns 1020% less than a nurse working for Te Whatu Ora Health NZ (previously the DHBs) for work of equal worth. A nurse working for a Maori health provider earns about 25% less. You can imagine the pressure this places on primary healthcare employers to recruit and retain staff — and the pressure it puts on the diminishing number of workers who remain.
Again, to its credit, the Government has said it sees the sense in pay parity and how it will help stop smaller and more marginalised providers such as Maori and iwi losing staff to public hospitals where wages are better. So let’s get on with it.
Lastly, there’s the problem of aged residential care facilities closing like falling dominoes because they cannot find enough nurses and caregivers. The Government has introduced some immigration policy adjustments to help get overseas staff but, again, why aren’t we focusing on growing our own caregivers, who require less training than nurses, instead of taking them from other countries where they are also needed?
The solutions aren’t difficult, but they will cost time and money. Nurses are the backbone of good health. Literally, we cannot live without them.