We need to talk about racism

It is highly commendable that the prime minister and all of the important political parties are calling for a unified response to ensure the terror attack in Christchurch is never repeated.

Within this collective response is a forthright change to firearms law and a royal commission into the possible failings of the security services. The third leg of this agenda appears to be a review of hate crimes and the need for new laws in this specific area.

While the first two initiatives should be welcomed, the third is falling short, although it is possible that the well-focused royal commission may conclude, among other things, that extra work is needed on the wider contextual questions related to the Christchurch attack.

To my mind, to ask the bigger questions is necessary because hate laws would not have stopped the murderer doing his heinous acts in Christchurch. By the time he started killing, he was already fully radicalised and putrid with racial hatred.

This means that if the goal is to stop the emergence of such evil in future, it is necessary to see if there was a swamp that nurtured him from which he emerged, or whether he was just an aberration.

This is not to argue against the need for specific legislation on racist hate speech and hate crimes, beyond what already exists on the statute books.

The need for New Zealand to work harder in this area has been repeatedly highlighted internationally, by the bodies that already monitor this country’s responses to its treaty obligations on this topic.

The failure of New Zealand to have more than a couple of prosecutions in this area, despite law existing on this topic for nearly five decades, is almost unbelievable.

Even within New Zealand few

would argue that a new law on hate crimes should not be created.

However, many will argue about how to define ‘‘hate’’. While most would agree that physically threatening and obscenely abusive language based around racism should be prohibited, any consensus will fall apart when debating whether simply offensive and/or insulting speech linked to different ethnic groups should also be considered ‘‘hate’’ and therefore prohibited.

If the country is about to descend into the debate foreshadowed in the above paragraph, and that discussion will replace a wider examination about racism and discrimination in New Zealand, then a serious mistake is about to occur.

This is not the time to divide the country. This is a time to place the needs for hatecrime legislation within a much larger basket of issues and responses that are needed to improve this country on the

particular consideration of racism overall, of which new laws on hatespeech, despite being important, are only one part of the puzzle.

For that to occur, I believe a public inquiry, or royal commission, on racism in New Zealand is necessary.

Despite the distance between the 19th and the 21st centuries being large and the clear progress that has been made, despite the laws which look good on paper, and despite the good work done by our Human Rights Commission, this topic needs to be re-examined afresh – critically and independently – away from the hands of politicians.

Between the colourful comments of Taika Waititi, the fact that one in three complaints to the New Zealand Human Rights Commission are about racial discrimination, and the horror of the attack in Christchurch, we have serious questions we should be brave enough to ask about our own society.

Others will disagree with this proposition, and deny we have a general problem of racism that needs to be examined. The truth of the matter is that neither side really knows definitively if there is a problem, and if so, its scale.

The only way to find answers to this is to have a public inquiry on racism. This needs to take stock of where we have come from, where we are, and where we are going. It needs to cover racism and discrimination, wherever it is found – or not – in the past, and in the present (from the street, to the workplace to the internet) –for any New Zealand citizen.

Any such inquiry then needs to show how these problems are avoided or created. Successes need to be showcased, as much as failures. If failures are found, then the direct and indirect consequences of them need to be shown.

Finally, and most importantly, if more work is required to defeat the scourge of racism, exactly how this should be done, such as via targets and indicators which could be incorporated directly into law and policy, needs to be clearly set out.

We have serious questions we should be brave enough to ask about our own society.