Yes, the apology from Stuff was necessary

I’ve read a lot of letters this week. As a member of Stuff’s opinion team, that’s a standard part of my working week. Though the reality has been anything but standard, as you know if you’ve spent any time on Stuff, or read any of our papers.

The launch of the Our Truth, Ta¯ Ma¯ tou Pono project, with an apology to Ma¯ ori for the prejudiced, inequitable, nature of our historic coverage, meant that was always going to be the case.

It’s rare to have been confronted with so much strong electronic emotion. Not just in the letters, but the messages too. We don’t normally get as many of those as we did in the early days of this week.

Many have been gracious, grateful, supportive, an increasing number as the week has gone on. Thoughtful, mulled over, their words painstakingly chosen, and gratefully received.

Some that weren’t supportive have been just as carefully considered, polite, constructive. Those have been gratefully received too.

But many I’ve read have been brutal, abusive and final. People exercising their right to say what they think, and fair enough, though not pleasant reading, let’s be honest, and not fit for general consumption.

Some, frankly, have been racist. Missives essentially setting out to tell us why Ma¯ ori have deserved to be framed the way they have, perhaps even treated the way they have. They’re wrong.

I’m writing this as a 50-something Pakeha male, born in South Africa. This is not a perspective I’ve always held, I freely admit. People like valued colleague Carmen Parahi and my friend Teariki Tuiono, a teacher and Canterbury University PhD candidate, have helped me change it.

A reasonable proportion of writers have made the point that the way media have historically treated Ma¯ ori was a reflection of social norms at the time, and we therefore have no need to apologise. The first part of that argument is largely true, though I’ve read of some instances where the media slightly lagged behind society on issues.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not aware of anyone who has advanced that argument this week who identifies as Ma¯ ori. I may be wrong, but for the most part it seems to be those who haven’t experienced being on the downside of discriminatory coverage who use that convenient line.

But as I think about that perspective, I can’t help but to keep coming back to a simple realisation. Prevailing societal norms or not, unfair, unequal coverage always has victims, just as unfair, unequal policy does. Our apology is to them, not those unaffected by the historical problem, who think it’s woke, lame, virtue-signalling.

You can say we were reflecting the society of the time, which, at least at the start, really meant reflecting only settler society. But if that’s the case, we were reflecting a deeply divided society, one in which Ma¯ ori were invariably on the losing side of the equation, and sometimes completely ignored. Our coverage was reinforcing that division. That’s not OK.

Which is why, as an argument against the need for an apology, I don’t think this holds water. We know better now, so we should do better, but we won’t do the best we can if we try to sweep a problematic history under the carpet.

There are those who’ve critically suggested we’re now according Ma¯ ori “favoured status”, when what we’re trying to do is correct a historical imbalance. As the saying goes: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

There’s been deflection in the inbox too. What about Asians? What about, indeed, any number of other groups of people, based on ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation etc, who have historically been discriminated against? Shouldn’t we apologise to

An apology is not an end so much as it is a beginning. It’s a commitment to being better, and what matters is not so much the apology itself, as what comes afterwards. That’s what we absolutely should be judged on.

them too?

They have a valid point, although that point has seemed to me at times to be about diminishing the relative importance of Ma¯ ori in this context. Yes, each of those groups deserves to be treated equitably, but Ma¯ ori are tangata whenua, the people who were here long before I was, and that seems to me like the right place to start.

An apology is not an end so much as it is a beginning. It’s a commitment to being better, and what matters is not so much the apology itself, as what comes afterwards. That’s what we absolutely should be judged on.

There are plenty of strong voices against discrimination on multiple fronts within Stuff, as you’ll know if you read our columns. That won’t change. But this first step was important.

It’s taken the immense courage of Carmen Parahi to set the ball rolling, and to do the mahi, along with those who’ve looked back to shine a light on our history, required to make this project a reality.

And it’s taken the courage of our senior leaders to make this an organisational commitment, as it should be.

Here’s to being better.