It’s an old truism that bullies are cowards at heart and Christopher Luxon has just proved it. Luxon doesn’t have the guts to stand by his own policy of cutting back on the tedious proliferation of te reo in NZ official communications. So, instead, he hides behind smarmy jibes at Australia.
New Zealand’s prime minister has denigrated the intelligence of Australians in a joke during question time in parliament.
The National party leader Chris Luxon said “in my dealings with Australians it always pays to be incredibly simple”.
To which Australians are entitled to retort, Get your dick out of the ewe’s arse and have the courage of your convictions, you bald-headed tit.
Just be honest and admit what everyone knows: this ludicrous fetish for sprinkling University Māori over everything is fatuous virtue-signalling at best; at worst, it is openly dishonest. One only has to read a government report that’s half-written in a language the writers know that almost no one speaks or reads to realise that.
And if hardly anyone speaks it in NZ, be assured that no one, not even the most assiduously trend-following, man-bunned, leftist, elsewhere does. As Mum always taught me, it’s extremely rude to talk around someone when you know they can’t understand you.
Anthony Albanese responded that “We do speak a different language” to NZ wokesters. That’d be English.
However, Mr Luxon’s comment fell flat in parliament, with foreign minister Winston Peters showing indifference and other MPs gasping or sounding notes of outrage […]
The Maori words included the greeting “tena koe” (meaning hello), the sign-off “naku noa, na” (which became ‘yours sincerely’), and the removal of the widely-accepted Maori name for New Zealand: Aotearoa.
The Australian government’s draft response allegedly included such cryptic phrases as, ‘Fair suck of the sav’, ‘Get yer hand off it, gronk’. and “GFY, ya DADS cunt’.
The media, naturally, can’t help but try and spin their usual horseshit about Te Gibberish.
Te reo is an official language of New Zealand, along with sign language and the de facto English, and increasingly spoken by Maori after decades of decline – in part due to hostile government policies.
Yet, still less than a quarter of Māori – themselves only 17 per cent of the population – claim to speak the language well. Less than seven per cent of New Zealanders in general do.
Mr Luxon’s right-leaning coalition – of the conservative National party, free-market libertarians ACT and populist NZ First parties – has reduced its use in government since taking office last November.
The government has issued edicts to public servants to stop communicating in te reo, and asked government departments to rebadge with English names, scrapping or de-prioritising Maori names given more prominence during Jacinda Ardern’s government.
With so few people actually speaking what is, in fact, a mostly made-up modern fantasy of a long-dying language, the government is correct not to force the use of what amounts to a woke newspeak. Even the “widely accepted Māori name for New Zealand” is a colonial construct for something that never existed.
One might also question what the point of trying to keep a dying language on life support actually is. Instead of learning international lingua franca, New Zealand’s elites seem determined to keep its people as insular, backwater, hicks that jabber away with no one in the world able to understand a word of it.
It’s all almost certainly pointless, anyway. Consider the determined push to revive the Welsh language, Cymru. Despite decades of top-down forcing, its number of speakers remains in steady decline. Even traditional strongholds of the language are in decline.
Unless ‘Allahu ackbar!’ is a traditional Welsh greeting…
