Hobson’s choice to silence Maori voice
What is it that’s so threatening about a Maori voice? Is it the emotive urgency of the karanga, the old kuia’s voice trembling with passion as she welcomes people on to the marae?
Is it the deep beauty of whaikorero, when poetry, proverbs, politics, the past and the present collide in the soaring oratory of the elders?
Is it the laughter of Maori children, singing waiata at kohanga reo around the country?
Or is it the raised voices of protest that have delivered my people from the brink of destruction to the opportunities for revitalisation that we have today?
Why are so many Pakeha so scared of hearing what Maori have to say?
Over the past few months, a war has been raging in provincial New Zealand. On one side, a Pakeha majority has argued that allowing the indigenous minority to elect representatives from their community to represent them is undemocratic.
On the other, a Maori minority has continued the battle for rights and representation that we’ve been fighting for over 200 years.
Five towns and cities around New Zealand have rejected Maori wards recently, influenced, no doubt, by the right wing lobby group Hobson’s Pledge, which poured resources into campaigns to encourage voters to vote against seats for Maori representatives.
By a racist quirk in our legislation, if a mere 5 per cent of voters present a petition to a local authority, it is bound by law to hold a referendum on Maori representation. It’s a loophole not available to anyone who opposes a specific ward for farmers.
And we have plenty of those. Around the country, rural wards feature prominently on many councils. Their existence means that a minority — farmers — have an outsized influence upon public decision-making.
Funny, isn’t it, how democracy picks and chooses who it favours?
Funny too how Hobson’s Pledge isn’t railing against the clearly undemocratic rural wards.
When it boils down to it, this argument is about hearing each other, and those who vote against Maori wards are in essence voting against listening to Maori opinions.
They’re voting against having a few people around the decisionmaking table who can say, “I’ve followed the tikanga (protocols) of my people, I’ve spoken to the key stakeholders, and this is the view that they’d like to add to the wider conversation on this issue.”
Maori wards will not mean that Maori have the power to make decisions about issues that affect the whole community.
They will no more bring about tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) than the Maori seats in Parliament could bring about any power wielding mechanism for Maori selfgovernance.
Indeed, a significant criticism of Maori wards is that they don’t allow for any real shift in the balance of power. Which is why this conversation really comes back to being heard.
Maori hear Pakeha all the time. With the greatest respect to my Pakeha colleagues, it doesn’t escape me that I am one of very few regular Maori columnists in the print media. I suspect that, along with my colleague John Tamihere, we might be the only Maori columnists currently writing a regular opinion column for a national newspaper. A couple of Maori voices among a newspaper commentariat of a significant number are not enough. And the underrepresentation of Maori voices continues throughout much of the mainstream media.
The media can be seen as an interesting parallel in this situation.
I wasn’t given a column because I am Maori. I am not employed to write about Maori affairs in a way that a specialised Maori issues reporter might be.
I write columns about all kinds of things, and as a result, I inevitably miss writing about many of the important issues that affect Maori.
I also don’t speak te reo Maori (although I’m learning), and I wasn’t raised in the Maori world. So I do not have the level of understanding required to be able to represent the happenings of Te Ao Maori adequately. I do my best, but it’s not enough.
The same can be said of Government. It is true that Maori do sometimes get elected to general seats both in local and central government, (although representation at a local government level is particularly low) but as generalists, they aren’t able to represent Maori in the way that a councillor elected in a Maori ward could.
A significant number of Maori in local and central government also have little engagement with Te Ao Maori — they may be on their own journeys to understanding their whakapapa and Maoritanga — so some of them don’t have the skills or experience to act as a bridge between the Maori and Pakeha worlds.
Which is where the Maori seats come into their own.
MPs elected to Maori seats are expected by their electorates to know Maori issues inside out. They’re expected to be at hui, to speak kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face) with the people they represent, and they’re expected to then take the knowledge and the views of their people back to Parliament, so they can be heard and factored into decisions made by the house.
It’s much the same logic that I’m sure was followed when rural wards for farmers were adopted.
And that’s without even going into the fact that much of the land that is included in rural wards was stolen from Maori.
And while I’ve avoided going there in this column, because I know that if I bring up our problematic history a slew of letters will land on my editor’s desk before you could say “colonisation”, we all know, deep down, that this double standard for farmers makes a farcical mockery of the Treaty of Waitangi.
Does the majority have the right to vote on whether or not the minority should be heard? Should a large and powerful group be able to deny a small and less powerful group the opportunity to be represented in public decision-making?
Apparently, if you’re a farmer, no. If you’re Maori, yes.