Democracy at work

I read Vaughan Bidois’ opinion piece (NZ Herald, Dec 27) with some scepticism. In my view, he seems to have considered only one side of the argument.

The “world view” ignored is this: In a democratic society, policies put up by political parties are evaluated and voted upon by the people of that country. In this instance, the significant majority of our population voted for the parties that stood on a platform of correcting the imbalance that had existed.

Many New Zealanders of nonM¯aori ethnicity choose to learn to understand and speak M¯aori — and good on them.

However many had no idea what most of the government departments (local and central) did or the services they were delivering given that their names were meaningless when shown in a language that approximately 84 per cent of the population didn’t understand.

Place names in Ma¯ori are not now — and never will be — an issue. But others make no sense at all — the ministry for digitising government being one obvious example (great idea by the way).

New Zealand has, through the “pendulum dynamic,” corrected the excesses of the past six years — and now the spoken and written language that New Zealanders understand has made a most welcome return — thanks to democracy.

Perhaps Bidois might now choose to think the whole issue through with a determination to explore the concept of “balance”.

The recent change to government policy to use English as the primary language is not a retrograde step, rather it is pure logic and common sense. Roger Hawkins, Auckland.