A wake-up call to try harder
managing partner of law firm Chen Palmer, and chair of the Superdiversity Institute for Law, Policy and Business
What happened in Christchurch is a wake-up call. We now have well over 200 ethnicities in New Zealand who speak more than 160 languages and, if we do not take deliberate acts to understand the challenges (as well as the benefits) and to remediate (and to celebrate) them, then this violence may happen again.
Sikhism, Hinduism, and Islam are now the fastest-growing religions in New Zealand.
We need to understand we are already a superdiverse, multicultural country with a bicultural base. Auckland already has half of its population as Ma¯ ori, Asian and Pasifika. By 2038, Statistics NZ is projecting 51 per cent identifying as Asian, then Ma¯ ori and then Pasifika, although 65 per cent will still identify as Anglo-Saxon due to intermarriage. On the facts, indigenous and ethnic minorities are becoming a majority.
We need to think through what these demographic changes mean for the hope of all migrants for a better life. We all love New Zealand’s second ranking on the Global Peace Index (coming in after Iceland), but we cannot take that for granted.
Building social capital and community cohesion requires hard work, analysis, policy and planning. How do we measure the cost of the Christchurch massacre to New Zealand’s wellbeing as we head into our first Wellbeing Budget this May? The issues are not just about culture, identity and belonging. We need to systematically apply a superdiversity framework to our thinking around the Treasury’s living standards and human, social, natural, and financial/physical capitals, which together represent our economic capital.
Legislating to ban assault weapons is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. There are many other actions needed to prevent violence, such as making hate crimes easier to prosecute and to take account of citizens and permanent residents who do not speak English or come from different cultures and religions, so they do not become marginalised and angry. We have 330 pieces of legislation that apply or refer to multiculturalism and ethnicity, but it is ad hoc, reactive and not joined up.
Most urgently, we need to make visible and take proactive steps to stop the illegal racism experienced by some New Zealanders every day. Muslims with their visually different clothing are at the forefront of those most vulnerable to discrimination, as shown by Human Rights Commission statistics. Ma¯ ori, Pasifika and Asians also commonly experience discrimination.
These New Zealanders are not getting the same access to jobs and services, as well as not being physically safe. Discrimination in employment is the most common complaint, as a recent study of the experiences of nurses of Filipino, Ma¯ ori, Chinese, Samoan and English ethnicity attest.
While discrimination is a lesser degree of violence and hatred than being shot and killed, even verbal abuse and mistreatment is an assault on dignity and respect – a death of the spirit by a thousand cuts. So that is why those who have experienced discrimination because of their different ethnicity or religion are not surprised by what has happened in Christchurch.
They live at the coalface and they have to be supersensitive to discrimination as a protective mechanism to stay safe. Ironically, their protective mechanism against intolerance is often to tolerate discrimination in silence. They should not feel they have to suffer in silence any longer.
We need to listen to what they have to say. Finally, the Muslim community has our attention, and their warnings are being listened to. We should all worry if it takes a massacre of their families to give their concerns credibility.
If we had more decision-makers of different ethnicities and religions, would the Muslim community have been listened to sooner?
New Zealand already has some champions against discrimination. We all need to become champions by taking active steps against conscious and unconscious bias to different ethnicities and religions, and getting educated.
What is the difference between Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism? We all need to build our CQ (cultural intelligence) as the World Economic Forum Report on 21st-century skills confirms that focusing solely on IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence) is not enough.
We need to apply a superdiversity framework to what we do every day and adopt a fresh lens.
If we try and minimise the Christchurch shootings as the act of a lone gunman, then we will fail to do the hard work needed to ensure it does not happen again.
After the grieving for the 50 victims, and their funerals, the real acid test for our values as a nation is what we do in our everyday relationships. This is not a future thing. This is what we need to do right now if we want to stop a repeat of this grotesque bloodshed.