When the statues come down, where do we stop?
The City of Hamilton, by any other name, will still be Hamilton but those who demand a name change and for statues to be taken down should be careful what they ask for.
Along with a name change will come a significant cost for ratepayers and businesses in the change of signage, stationary, maps and GPS location data.
More importantly they risk driving yet another wedge between an already overly divided society. That division is driven by a sycophantic attitude to all things Maori at almost all levels of government to the point where we are on the brink of creating an informal duality of citizenship that can only have a bad outcome.
Those people who issued threats to pull down or damage the statue of Captain John Hamilton make Don Quixote look like Mother Teresa and demands to change the name of the city to Kirikiriroa are just as foolish.
Is it any wonder that there is so much ill-feeling among the wider community towards Treaty of Waitangi and Maori issues when we have this nonsense erupting from a few ill-advised activists from time to time?
The attack on the statue of Captain Hamilton raised a furious tornado of ill-feeling, accusation and counter accusation but, it seems, nothing was learned from that.
Captain Hamilton, commander of HMS Esk, was killed at the Battle of Gate Pa at Pukehinahina near Tauranga on April 29 1864. Four months after the battle, when hostilities in Waikato had all but ended, the British military camp about five kilometres away from the seasonal fishing village of Kirikiriroa had grown into a European settlement.
On August 24, Colonel William Moule named the little village after Captain Hamilton and the two communities co-existed for several years.
One of the reasons given for the attack on the statue was that the British forces had been murderers.
While the use of military force in Waikato in 1863 was subsequently found to be illegal by British authorities the actions of frontline fighters on both sides of the conflict were not illegal.
A number of official inquiries have established that the British soldiers and sailors were acting under military orders and Maori fighters were not in rebellion against the Crown but legally defending their homes against a hostile invader.
As in all wars there were atrocities and acts of gallant humanity on both sides but the British and Maori combatants were not murderers.
To claim otherwise is to engage in myth making.
This latest set of demands to rewrite history, or erase those parts some people don’t like, has grown out of the Black Lives Matter slogan presently sweeping the world. The mistreatment of African Americans, from the era of slavery to the present day, is something only America can correct.
Showing moral support for the victims of such mistreatment however is commendable and typical of mainstream New Zealand more so than most other countries.
Attempting to translocate that cause to New Zealand and then demand name changes for cities and the removal of statues and memorials on the spurious argument that they represent everything from slavery and oppression to murder and racism might convince a few politicians, out of fear of being labelled racist but most people will simply disengage at best or retaliate with equally ill-informed demands.
It should not be forgotten that the initial economy of almost every nation in the world, including New Zealand, was built on slave labour. From the Roman Empire to early Britain slaves, serfs and peasants were a massive forced labour source.
Even the Australian economy was initially built on the forced labour of transported convicts. The 1830s flax industry of Wellington, commanded by Te Rauparaha, and the kauri timber trade in Hokianga, commanded by Tamati Waka Nene and others were both totally reliant on thousands of slaves.
When Maori invaded and conquered the Chatham Islands in the same era the resident Moriori, who survived the initial conflict, were enslaved. It was simply the way things were done back then by all nations.
If we were to pull down the statue of every person involved in or who might have benefited from slavery there would be very few statues anywhere in the world and that may not be a bad thing.
New Zealand has, with doubt, a serious issue with racism which few are prepared to admit let alone address.
But it needs to be resolved by an intelligent, well-informed and honest discussion.
Changing names and removing memorials to the past will just make that task harder as the majority of people will simply continue to turn their backs on it.