Days of future past
Millionaire ACT party supporter Louis Crimp created a furore recently, complaining about what he sees as undue indigenous influence in the country and pull on state purse strings. Crimp’s criticism extends to any cultural practice that falls outside European tradition.
Such attitudes sound like something out of the 19th century. In fact, they echo sentiments in a 1905 newspaper article. An editorial published by the Observer took on the Seddon administration along much the same lines and with strikingly similar turn of phrase as Crimp’s rant, beginning with an assertion about ‘‘King Dick’s scheme for the Maorification of New Zealand’’.
At issue was the formation of the Taumarunui township. The formal designation of the King Country as ‘‘Maori Kainga’’ had implications for the emerging town, effecting the rules under which any sewerage system was to be potentially built and financed. For the Observer this state of affairs was objectionable from both a bureaucratic and a cultural point of view: ‘‘The idea that the residents of a town in this civilised/ up-to-date twentieth century colony should have to appeal to the Government for permission to keep themselves clean sounds a little absurd, and the notion that they should be restrained in the realisation of their laudable desires by the circumstance that the Government has imposed upon them the status of a Maori pa is not only absurd but idiotic . . . King Dick has . . . concocted a scheme by which the inhabitants of other places cannot dig a drain without the consent of a Maori Council’’.
Employing a logic that Mr Crimp would be proud to call his own, the newspaper argues that ‘‘the only just and sensible course to pursue in the case of Taumarunui . . . is to place them on the footing of all other centres of population, giving the native owners and residents exactly the same rights and privileges as their European fellow citizens’’. Seddon’s efforts at a system of governance sensitive to cultural difference is deemed grounded ‘‘in his consuming idea to hand over the government of the colony to the Natives’’ and ‘‘his intense love and admiration for Maori nomenclature’’.