A duty to educate
This process is relatively inexpensive, especially when compared with theobscene profligate spending of local government.
All race-based hogwash should be consigned to the trash can — it has no place in New Zealand, yet just look at the inane Labour Party and Greens’ current Maori policy manifestos and the recent utterances from Ms Mahuta, the Minister Local Government and Maori Development, which, incidentally, are clearly incompatible portfolios with conflicting roles.
Ms Mahuta floats raising Maori (only) incomes by about 20 per cent by 2021 over and above general wage rises, while countenancing legislation to foist elected/ unelected part-Maori representation on to local authorities and other boards.
It is very easy to see where this fanaticism is heading, so deputy prime minister Peters and New Zealand First MPs stand up and be counted by railing against these aberrations and actively opposing any race-based legislative interference.
The apathetic silent and irrelevant majority of Kiwis (80 per cent) also need to get off their butts and speak out, because time is running out for common sense and reality checks.
As Thomas Jefferson said”If any law is unjust a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.”
Civil disobedience on all race-based nonsense is long overdue, because it is like a creeping cancer, making incompetence, unproductiveness and unearned entitlements the hallmarks of these abhorrent preferential racist programmes. Having read the ‘Inside an Iwi’ column (The reasons why, Anahera Herbert-Graves, Northland Age February 27) I must commend Ms A H-G on her eloquence and creativity by managing to portray a discrete collection of warlike pre-Treaty tribes as an enlightened society sharing in some sort of superior social structure.
Ms A H-G states: “Prior to 1840 there was in fact a vibrant political order, that like all human polities was sometimes discordant and disputatious, but always grounded in the importance of whakapapa.”
I particularly liked, “a vibrant political order that . . . was sometimes discordant and disputatious”. Now there is a nice way to describe Hongi Hika as he set off with his musket-bearing warriors down the coastline with the intent of exterminating any and all Maori tribes that had the misfortune to come into his sights. It would appear that the ‘vibrant political order’ was based upon the premise that might is right.
Did that same vibrant political order also include sanctioning the practices of slavery and cannibalism?
There is nothing to be gained in either condemning or praising the morals and social practices of those who went before us, but we do have a duty to educate our present generation with the truth about past events in our nation’s history. Sugar-coating reality with rhetoric is a crime against our children.
One astute old fellow who could write pretty well (and no, it wasn’t Shakespeare) once wrote, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” Today we have a new name for it — fake news.