English: Kiwis ‘cringe’ over Waitangi Day
Prime Minister Bill English has defended his decision to skip this year’s Waitangi Day commemorations at the Treaty grounds, saying many Kiwis ‘‘cringe a bit’’ at the protests that take place on New Zealand’s national day.
English has accepted an invitation from iwi leaders to lead a delegation of ministers to Waitangi meeting ahead of the Waitangi Day celebrations but has announced that he won’t attend the annual powhiri at Te Tii Marae.
The attendance of New Zealand’s prime minister at Waitangi is a vexed issue each year, with John Key making the decision not to go in 2016 after being refused speaking rights and threats of protests.
English said he had written to marae officials after being appointed prime minister and been told he would not be able to speak at the powhiri, a decision which he didn’t believe was appropriate for the leader of the country.
‘‘The marae committee has decided that the prime minister can’t speak on their marae, and that as far as I’m concerned is not respectful of the role.
‘‘We have the right to decide [whether to attend] . . . protocol is I don’t have to go onto that marae if the arrangements aren’t respectful for New Zealand and New Zealanders.’’
While protests at Waitangi had been ‘‘nationally relevant’’ 15 to 20 years ago, that was no longer the case.
‘‘Political discussion at Te Tii Marae is now really about Ngapuhi issues and their own concerns in Northland, but it’s a national day – a day for New Zealanders to be proud of their whole country.
‘‘A lot of New Zealanders cringe a bit on Waitangi Day when they see the way that the ceremonies are being conducted, the ceremonies and welcomes, the type of protest there has been in recent years, and I’m pretty keen that we have a day when they’re proud.’’
English said he had not yet decided what he would do on Waitangi Day, although he would be in Auckland.
While English has made his decision not to go, his reasons for doing so were news to Waitangi Organising Committee chairman and NZ First MP Pita Paraone.
‘‘Not being able to speak wasn’t the tenor of our discussions that we had late last year and early this year . . . it’s news to me.
‘‘If the prime minister of our country can’t see a way clear to attend commemorations at Waitangi – the signing of our founding document – then you can understand why some Maori are quite cynical about the Crown’s approach to Waitangi issues.’’
English was offered the same conditions as Key last year, which included speaking rights in a political tent following the powhiri but not being able to speak freely on Te Tii Marae.
Deputy Prime Minister Paula Bennett will lead a Government delegation to the dawn service in Waitangi on February 6.
Labour leader Andrew Little said English’s decision to skip the Waitangi commemorations was disappointing and ‘‘a mark against him’’. ‘‘He’s a new prime minister; this was his opportunity to stamp his mark on the national day of celebration, and he’s obviously declined to do so.’’
Little said he was committed to attending Waitangi commemorations if elected prime minister, whether or not he was given speaking rights.
Maori Party co-leader Marama Fox said English should go regardless of whether he had speaking rights or not. His decision not to go was probably about avoiding being ‘‘embroiled in controversy’’ so early on in his new job.
Not attending Waitangi was a ‘‘missed opportunity’’ for both English and Maori, she said.
ACT leader David Seymour said Te Tii Marae’s ‘‘continued failure to respectfully host the Government on Waitangi Day should prompt the prime minister to visit a different marae each year’’.
‘‘Let’s take this show on the road.’’
‘‘A lot of New Zealanders cringe a bit on Waitangi Day when they see the way that the ceremonies are being conducted.’’ Bill English
It’s hard to take issue with Taranaki’s top road cop Sergeant George White, who asserted on radio last week that Kiwis are among the world’s worst drivers.
White compared our litany of defects to his own recent experiences road tripping the United States, where the traffic can be chaotic but driver courtesy and common sense reign supreme.
During my last roadie in the American Southwest, I clocked up over 3500 kilometres and didn’t see one crash.
Boil it down to pop psychology and what continues to baffle me is that, on one hand, Kiwis are universally lauded for being among the nicest, friendliest people on the planet.
But behind the wheel, a fair proportion of us behave like natural born killers. It’s on the road that Kiwi DNA goes rogue.
The sharp upswing in the summer holiday road toll, and the annual road toll, has understandably unleashed a wave of anxiety. The Christmas toll is up 40 per cent year-on-year, while the annual toll has risen 25 per cent compared with 2013.
Thankfully, the holiday period hasn’t been blighted by the hype, hysteria and key-grabbing histrionics surrounding tourist drivers, as have plagued previous years.
Conveniently excusing the glaring imperfections of Kiwi drivers, some people are all too keen to point the finger at foreigners in rental cars for our road toll.
Yet, they haven’t been a headline-grabbing factor this holiday period, underlining that our road crash record is one of the most shameful in the developed world.
Excessive speed, drink-driving and drug-driving continue to loom large in the fatality count. As does the horrendous refusal by so many road users to wear a seatbelt.
Police data indicates that the failure to wear a seatbelt accounts for 30 per cent of road fatalities.
But what about high-visibility road policing?
The Opposition’s police spokesman (and most likely next Labour Party leader), Stuart Nash, has sheeted the blame for the rising road toll on the Government.
Nash argues the reduction in road-policing personnel is coming home to roost, with over 100 road cops being reassigned from traffic duties to crime-prevention activities.
I commuted extensively between Christchurch and South Canterbury over the holiday period and the level of highway enforcement was noticeably erratic.
Some days the police were out in force, yet most days I could travel 200km on State Highway 1 without seeing one officer.
Perhaps most roading enforcement resources had been prioritised for the Lewis Pass, but the conspicuous absence of police south of Christchurch certainly emboldened the lunatics.
And I had never seen such unwavering volumes of heavy road traffic on State Highway 1 through Mid-Canterbury.
Maybe many Cantabs had swapped their customary annual pilgrimage to Nelson and Marlborough for a swing down south in hopeful search of some holiday sun.
If there’s one thing that really gets my goat, it’s the tailgaters – those feckless bull-at-a-gate lunatics who hoof up right behind you as if they have unsavoury designs on your exhaust pipe.
Whatever happened to the twosecond rule? Stuffed with selfimportance, they always seem to be in a stir-crazy hurry, and only too willing to roll the dice with their entire carload of loved ones’ lives to perform a kamikaze overtaking manoeuvre as oncoming traffic breathlessly bears down on all concerned.
I quickly lost count of how many times this particular roulette wheel was spun by the highway hogs.
But it’s that reckless, impetuous and supremely selfish mindset that sets so many of our motorists apart from the world standard. I can only assume they all have seriously pint-sized appendages.
The same mentality manifests itself on our city streets at traffic lights.
Last week, the Christchurch Transport Operations Centre released data illustrating that redlight running is rampantly increasing. Year-on-year, injuryrelated crashes from red-lightrunning have jumped 50 per cent.
At the city’s top 10 worst intersections for crashes, traffic cameras detected nearly 5400 redlight runners ploughing straight through intersections in a single day.
That’s more than three times the number of tickets the police issued all year. The traffic camera data indicates an annual increase in red-light running of 31 per cent, and a 64 per cent hike since 2014.
Perhaps those traffic-monitoring cameras should be upgraded to double as furtive enforcement tools, too. Fine the lot of them.