Shane Te Pou has an article in the NZ Herald questioning whether we can have politics without division. He suggests we can all learn how to do politics from Maori. Naturally, he begins his article by attacking those who oppose the Labour Party.
So much politics seems to be about trying to get one group of people to feel angry about another. Whether it’s Chris Luxon pledging to “crack down” on beneficiaries, who he has called “bottom feeders” or David Seymour trying to scare Pakeha about Maori. Or Winston Peters blaming immigrants for our woes.
If it’s not bashing on someone else, it’s playing the victim: farmers so hard done by they can take time off during spring to drive their tractors the length of the country, landlords threatening to sell up if they don’t get tax breaks, small businesses complaining about the cost of paying people the minimum wage.
There’s one corner of politics in Aotearoa New Zealand where we don’t see politics as a constant confrontation and debates are about what’s best for the people, not about who can score the most points off the other side.
I wish more politics could be like the Maori electorate debates I’ve hosted over the past few weeks.
NZ Herald
He seems to have forgotten that the most divisive government in our history has been led by the Labour Party: first by Jacinda Ardern, then Chris Hipkins.
They brought division to this country.
Let’s start with the division sowed during Covid when they demonised and ostracised the unvaccinated, then brought in segregation on the basis of whether or not you’d received an experimental medical treatment of indeterminate safety. Vaccine passes and mandates caused massive division in society, and all the then Prime Minister could say when confronted about it by a journalist was, “Yip, yip, that is what it is.”
Then we saw the demonisation and attack on a peaceful protest at Wellington, where the strong arm of the state forcibly removed peaceful protestors on the thinnest of evidence. The elites squatted in Parliament and refused to meet their constituents who were camped out looking for politicians to hear their very real grievances. They refused, and then sent in the jackboots, batons, tear gas and grenade launchers. That sowed real division.
Shane Te Pou seems to have forgotten that in his article, which is really a shabby and racist hit piece against people he disagrees with politically.
He forgot, of course, the Government’s He Puapua document created an absolutely heroic re-write of what the Treaty of Waitangi says, which forced division on the basis of race through Parliament to segregate health services and steal the water assets of Kiwis to gift them to unelected iwi elites, all in the name of co-governance.
He also forgot that this same amazing Labour Party he supports also attacked Kiwis with Chinese-sounding names. It’s amazing he has forgotten that because he loudly condemned it at the time…now a dark and distant memory.
Now he waxes lyrical about how grand Maori politics is, in a rather motherhood-and-apple-pie view of the whole heaving mess that is Maori politics.
He forgets that Debbie Ngarewa-Packer likes to call Kiwis of European descent, which also ironically includes herself, colonisers, as some sort of sneering and derogatory insult. Those insults are as far from what he claims as is possible.
The insults certainly aren’t “about people and values”. They’re not “conversations about what is the best path forward, how we make progress towards common goals – rather than vilifying the other side and accusing them of wanting to take the country to hell in a handcart”, are they?
No, they are about promoting a looter mentality, where Maori are superior and the “colonisers” can go hang.
The constant claims that Maori never ceded sovereignty, and believing the heroic assumption that Queen Victoria agreed to co-manage New Zealand with Maori, is hardly “respectful and honest”, is it?
Shane Te Pou just ignores the overt racism of Te Paati Maori, Willie Jackson and many other Maori MPs and clearly supports the denigration of other Maori voices like David Seymour, Winston Peters and Shane Jones because they are the ‘wrong sort of Maori’.
The Maori way of politics has a lot to teach the wider political discourse in Aotearoa. The best leaders are those who don’t want power for power’s sake and are willing to do anything, say anything, promise any nonsense to get it.
NZ Herald
Oh really? I don’t think so. The naked greed from the looter class and the iwi elite is unbecoming, but, I guess, when you look at life alternating between red- and brown-tinted glasses, you’ll readily believe such articles reflect the reality of the situation we face, as people like our corrupted media, who grabbed millions in taxpayers dollars with the proviso that they promulgate the lie that Maori did not cede sovereignty.
Shane Te Pou and his ilk are part of the problem, not the solution. They want, hanker and agitate to head New Zealand towards an ethnostate, riven with dissent, racism and separatism while telling us all that is our problem if only we did things the Maori way…
No thanks, Shane. That’s not the New Zealand I want to live in.
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