There was a fascinating exchange during our Post Leaders Debate when Fran O’Sullivan challenged Simon Wilson to call having concerns about co-governance and 3 Waters racist.
The roar of white wealthy supporters surprised me.
I turn 50 years old in January and not once has any policy to help benefit Māori ever impacted me negativity in this country, so watching rich white people cheer their white fragility was as surprising as it was amusing.
Of course having genuine concerns about 3 Waters and Co-governance isn’t racist, but the rhetoric, framing and wilful historic ignorance is sure as Christ race baiting!
When Elizabeth Rata coined the phrase ‘Ethno-Nationalist State‘ to describe attempts to share power with Māori as promised by the Treaty, every right winger wanting to be racist found glee in the shielding of their bigotry by the pretence of intellectualism.
What is most hilarious about Rata’s claims of Ethno-Nationalist State is that she is 100% right, it’s just that she’s right in a way she doesn’t want to admit to, which is NZ is an Ethno-Nationalist State, it’s just a White Ethno-Nationalist State.
Our systems of power and control are all white, our dominant culture is white, our benefitting from colonialism is white, our purposeful laws aimed at taking more Māori land were white, our confiscations are white, our dominant narrative is white!
So sure, NZ is an Ethno-Nationalist State, but for white people!
Any attempt to rebalance the damage caused by taking 90% of Māori land in less than a century and any attempt to live up to the promise of the Treaty must be denigrated and appallingly decried as apartheid.
The backbone of the economic success story that is NZ, is in stealing Māori land and NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! paying the full price back!
We are a shallow juvenile settler country with all the cultural maturity of a can of day old coke, we are a low horizon people who lash out at others who see stars. Our imaginations are glued to cow udders, rugby and cars. To attempt a debate about identity when so many micro aggression trigger snowflakes are screaming is a feat beneath our collective dignity.
3 Waters was an attempt to serve two maters, the Waitangi Tribunal ruling into water ownership triggered by Key selling 49% of the hydro assetsand the need to find a way for Local Councils to fund water infrastructure. The way it has been manufactured into a racial smear on Nanaia Mahuta and her family DESPITE DECLARING ALL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST is proof positive that the angry and confused trump any attempt at rational debate.
What its most egregious is how these small attempts at creating basic consultation between the dominant culture and the indigenous culture they signed a Treaty with is now portrayed as a giant attack on the values of Democracy!
Watching the Right turn ‘one person one vote’ into a garrotte of majoritarianism is ugly!
Actually it’s one person two votes in NZ, and don’t evoke protecting the Westminster System when they have an Upper House & pretend NZ democracy is somehow at risk from ethno-nationalism just because co-governance demands an obligation to work together!
Calling that apartheid is obscene!
We are too brittle a people for the challenges in front of us!
Being accused of racism is a bigger issue than actually doing anything about racism in NZ as the Right adopt the Woke’s wounded feelings schtick.
It’s like you can just win an argument in NZ now just because you have the biggest wounded feelings!
We are all so raw and hurt by the experience of a post-Covid reality, the uneven sacrifice of which is exploding in a million different ways as Kiwis face the blunt reality that for the majority, life is far more grim and downgraded than what we had before and with far less hope on the horizon.
Into such a febrile psychological landscape months out from an election drops news that the blunt category of ethnicity has to be added to the rationalisation equations of the health dollar.
Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.
Is such an equation ugly?
Fuck yes it is ugly, but it is also bone crunchingly honest you pearl clutching muppets!
Our health spend and public health assets have been so egregiously underfunded for such a long time that the people held responsible for considering all the elements of public health expenditure have concluded that in the interests of recognising State obligation to minority groups with terrible health outcomes embedded within an unjust system, that the blunt inclusion of ethnicity into the determinants of health provision are a cruel but necessary health spend rationalisation!
Don’t like the brutality of the equation? PUT MORE MONEY IN THEN!
And don’t even at me with ‘where are we going to find the money’, the IRD clearly stated the rich were gaming a rigged capitalism.
Tax. The. Rich.
We don’t just need more drs and nurses, we need new hospitals, we need new technology, we need new drugs, we need our own basic pharmaceutical industry.
We need a vast injection of new money for new Health assets and we need it now by taxing the richest and creating new taxes that capture their speculation.
What this inclusion of ethnicity as a determinant truly represents is an under-funded public health system forced into making this brutal equation because of grotesque and systemic underfunding.
To have ACT and National, who would privatise our existing health system if given half the chance, to hold up this example of what underfunding health really looks like as apartheid is intellectually fucking bankrupt in the most obscene way.
We are a better people than where the Trolls amongst us will want to drag the carcass of this narrative into the dark echo chambers they wish to defile.
This is a symptom of an underfunded health system using blunt tools like ethnicity to attempt more equitable outcomes. It is an ugly treatment to a much more malicious disease, which is the underfunding of the public health system by starving the State of tax revenue from the wealthiest amongst us.
Don’t allow the manufacture of this into a culture war Klan Carnival make you miss what is really going on Comrades.
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That moment irked me as well. Simon strikes me as a deeply thoughtful soul who wouldn’t knowingly hurt a soul. I used to like Fran as well, for her thoughtful comments, but… “Let’s talk about it without pointing fingers” (paraphrased). Meh. Fran was out of line on that one. Simon cares, Fran doesn’t. That’s the “message” I got.
Vote TPM to stick it to white fragility.
Nicely put Martyn and just back to the taxpayers debate when Frans O Sullivan began clutching at her pearls on her high ivory tower evil eyeing Simon who dares bring up the subject of race went snowflake mode and when the crowd erupted in cheers of her condemnation I thought were your middle income beer drinking white folks instead they’re the well to do pakeha!!
Fran admitted to not wanting the Greens or Māori parties in Government. She is a stooge for the right and another who was happy to put her slippers under Keys bed.
Fran is a true-blue Tory through and through she also has underlying racist and discriminative tendencies. She might think she isn’t a racist and doesn’t discriminate but its inherent in many of our older colonials like her.
To frame Maori history in schools solely on Colonisation and conveniently leave out pre-European NZ and the musket wars is a subverted form of history more commonly referred to as misinformation. Mahuta and the entrenchment clause was a means to subvert democracy. Also, we are repeatedly told that Te Urewera Co-governance is a shining positive example. Please explain what is positive. He Paupau demands that the conservation estate be returned to Maori management and ownership. Will several thousand backcountry huts be burnt to the ground to de-colonize the conservation estate?
We could also add the dog tax standoff up north in the 1898, the Māori land courts, perpetual leases, No Māori allowed in the public swimming pools and picture theatres and hairdressers, the housing policies of pepper potting and making sure Māori didn’t get homes in the nice housing areas, bank discrimination gee there is so much where do we start.
I suppose you blame everyone else but Hongi Hika fo statrting the Musket Wars.
Sorry, can you repeat that sentence, so it makes sense affafaf?
R, clearly another ignorant soul!!? The Te Urewera co governance isn’t the best deal for Tuhoe either. The govt dept D.O.C. since have deliberately underfunded the projects needed to keep up the maintenance of Huts and other projects. Also when returning stolen land to Tuhoe that area doesn’t have european settlements and is mostly populated by Tuhoe people.
And here’s the stick? Even though the Nat govt returned tuhoe control ova their own lands and resources, within those clauses specifically states that public access is guaranteed. So in essences it’s not overall control by Tuhoe who’s property that was stolen still has to abide by the theifs demands. And He Puapua was a discussion document in conjunction of the National govt signing the UNDRIP. It never was govt policy.
Fran is a tory through and through and the only time she makes a thoughtful comment is when she has to admit they have made a mistake and even then, she downplays it.
We ALREADY have co-governance ,,, that’s what the TPPA was/is ,,, where AoNz can be sued and challenged in overseas “Tribunals” ,,, and what sort of laws our Governments pass are constrained by these overseas over-lords and Their ‘tribunals.
For accuracy sake if we are talking about increasing Maori representation in our pseudo-democracy ,,, then we are talking really talking about tri-governance ,,,, and if ordinary citizens got more of a say and influence,,,, then we would have quad-governance.
I’m all for (four) quad-governance .. 🙂
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/ldr/498468/shattered-maori-health-board-head-says-national-plans-a-huge-step-back
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/498394/the-falsehood-christopher-luxon-was-allowed-to-repeat-in-the-leaders-debate
The numbers for worse outcomes in health for Maori tell a definite picture. The obvious conclusion is that the current universal system delivers less well for Maori despite any efforts to change that. In that case if Maori call for a separate focused Maori health delivery system is that racist? Or is it a rational response?
“Delivers” less well for Maaori. Is health really something that can be “delivered”? The big assumption of your post is that poor Maaori health is the fault of our health system, rather than being attributable to well-documented upstream factors (high rates of Maaori poverty, family dysfunction, and truancy; low educational achievement).
It’s seems quite obvious that Nick J was referring to equitable access to health treatment that our health system has failed to deliver for over 150 years.
But to Pope Punctilious II credit at least he did not bring his cultural marxism/neo-marxism (they are the same thing) rotten quackery into his biased reasoning/arguments….
I suspect he really want’s too ,,,,, but Tarrent & Brevick have tarnished his superiority belief system’s brand ,,,,, they being THE Experts on cutural marxism/neo-marxism.
A brilliant blog Martyn, speaking true words that need to be spoken.
Don’t get mussed up about 50. The centrality to life is doing things, the spine you can cling onto.
Yeah, I’m going to mention my socialist g. grandfather again, He was 70 in 1935, Savage was 68, They took separate messages from late life success. The Labour Party didn’t want ‘to go on its travels again’. My violent gent ancestor thought it confirmed his violence for the people. No real recognition of him, just soft-arse petty offerings to keep him quiet.
Here in Gisborne, with 58 % Pakeha and 51 % Maori (census multiple identification) any of my customers not directly related to Maori I assume they have a dim view of them.