Context is king in fixing Ma¯ori unemployment
I’m sick and tired of hard truths. They are, without exception, deceptive. For too long, we’ve lived in a nice clean world of effects, where actual causes are for suckers.
Take Ma¯ ori unemployment: at first glance, Ma¯ori make up a wildly disproportionate number of those receiving a benefit while able to work.
We are 40 per cent of those on work-ready Jobseeker – but make up only about 17 per cent, tops, of the population. For years, decades even, Ma¯ ori were asked to justify ourselves against these cold, hard and apparently inarguable statistics.
Once you understand the causes, however, then you see the numbers weren’t disproportionate at all.
They were the logical endpoint of the recent historical Ma¯ori experience in Aotearoa: waves of land loss, forced urban drift, economic slumps and cultural alienation.
I say all this because we need to find the right approach, in the time of Covid-19, to making more Ma¯ ori jobs.
Perhaps looking past empty numbers and examining context, the Government appeared to hand over some autonomy to Ma¯ ori to fix this with its Ma¯ ori Trades and Training Fund, launched last year.
It allocated $50 million for grants to fund by-Ma¯ ori, for-Ma¯ ori training to rapidly support employment in response to the impacts of Covid-19.
After eight months there were only four jobs from the $11.4m committed, $1.8m paid out from the fund.
I’m all for the purity of the mission for self-determination, but did we do the right thing here?
Should we have eased back on the ‘by-Ma¯ ori’ approach, given the 2020 plague, and focused on the ‘for-Ma¯ ori’?
The Government probably needed to move more quickly – take a short-term bite at the pandemic and throw money at whoever could deliver results for Ma¯ori the quickest. Indeed, money was tagged from the pandemic response fund in Budget 2020. Even National is attacking the Government on this one – asking why, given the number of Ma¯ ori unemployed, it isn’t moving more quickly.
This must hurt for a Government with its biggest ever Ma¯ ori caucus, and five Ma¯ori Cabinet Ministers – especially coming from National, which if we recall, dumped its last Ma¯ori leader, Simon Bridges, just to shake things up before the election.
National might have a point, though. The Government’s own Ma¯ori employment action plan won’t be completed till the end of the year – nearly 24 months after the first Covid-19 case in Aotearoa.
This is a Government focused on pragmatism – the political as the art of the possible – with all the risk-taking sexiness of a tin of Fisherman’s Friend. In the end though, it recognises the context, which is probably the most important thing.
When writing this, I couldn’t help but notice the perfect thematic alignment with controversy over culture war artefact, Police Ten 7.
Graham Bell, former presenter and cop, appears to be melting
down under the sheer impertinence of woke opinion blasting the show as racist. There’ll be nothing left of the poor man soon, except his bedazzled retirementtaser and a gruff blue puddle.
Dragging (literally) mostly Ma¯ ori and Pacific island people in front of the camera for entertainment is of course entirely repulsive. But worse, it shows only the effects of intergenerational poverty, cultural deprivation, health disparities – none of the context.
Bell says it simply reflects the cold, hard truths of how things are.
Without context, reality becomes a sitcom. Fake, formulaic and with the same old jokes on endless repeat. Pure escapism.