The founder of the British SAS was a Scots aristocrat called David Stirling. After WWII he found peacetime a bit boring – after having personally killed 43 Germans with his bare hands – and so he engaged in various mercenary activities in Africa and the Middle East. One of those mercenary engagements was the war in Yemen in the early 1960s. To cut a long story short, Stirling and his people had the war won but the handwringers in Whitehall in London didn’t like the idea of a private army fighting wars in a sensitive area and told Stirling to pull out, abandon the fighting and return home (or else).
The problems in Yemen today – called ‘genocide’ and ‘humanitarian crisis’ by the same handwringers – is the direct result of not finishing the job circa 1963. By preventing Stirling and his team of mercenaries from deciding a ‘winner’ 60 years ago, there is a far greater problem in 2024.
Closer to home: in the mid-1970s at a couple of National Party conferences (back when they were fun), there was an amusing remit that said words to the effect of, ‘Māori should be prevented from living in cities’. I haven’t been able to ascertain whether those submitting this remit were serious or playing a wee joke and whether it was simply done to antagonise the left wingers into a frenzy of outrage. Certainly Muldoon never let an opportunity to annoy left wingers go by.
Fast forward to today and these two matters were what popped into my head when I was watching Speaker Gerry Brownlee unsure of what to do when parliament descended into chaos last Thursday.
But what it demonstrates is that if you fail to take action early – and for no other reason than it upsets the sensibilities – you are asking for big trouble down the track. Imagine a New Zealand where Māori were not in cities during the last 50 years. No pleasant suburbs destroyed by gang pads, fewer murders, rapes, armed robberies, ram raids, etc. Or, at least, not taking place where most people actually live. We also would have far fewer people pretending to be Māori or speaking fake, made-up, gibberish.
You need to weigh up the effect on New Zealand’s reputation – a five-minute wonder, just as the 1976 Olympic boycott was a five-minute wonder – with the long-term benefits.
How many people reading this have been angered in recent days at the traffic chaos in Auckland and the chaos in parliament and are wondering if the barbarians have moved from the gate to the inside and will soon be coming for them? How many of those same people would have been handwringers going along with the smarty-pants crowd had Muldoon taken the remit at the National Party conference seriously and implemented it?
You can’t have it both ways. The only reason Māori people feel they can behave as they have in recent days is because Keith Holyoake’s policy of simply ignoring everything Māori was abandoned. And now Gerry Brownlee and others are wondering: ‘How is this possible? How is this happening?’
