The only way out is through
Allow me to stay on the theme of demographics for another week. This has been on my mind as I will be taking a break from writing and on holiday for a month visiting Japan and Korea, both of which are dealing with this scenario: low birthrates and a declining population.
New Zealand faces the same situation, but we have replaced the second ingredient with a more dangerous one: mass migration.
The idea is to take existing Māori land (already defined in legislation) and create a local council for each iwi or hapū that wants to take this model. The largest bits of contiguous land any iwi or hapū own would be sufficient.
People are different, and that’s both entirely OK and entirely the problem.
We need to get the Ministry of Culture to fund some kind of dance development project.
We can have democracy or we can have indigenous sovereignty. We can’t have both.
