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Michael Bassett
Political historian Michael Bassett CNZM is the author of 15 books, was a regular columnist for the Fairfax newspapers and a former minister in the 1984–1990 governments.
These days, when reading statements from Te Partly Māori it’s often hard to trust one’s eyesight. A few days ago, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi Clarke, who faces suspension from the House for participating in the haka against David Seymour in opposition to his Treaty Principles Bill, was reported to be proposing legislation that would require MPs to learn about the Treaty and uphold its principles. What’s that again? Uphold its principles? She had a chance earlier in the year, but she ripped up her fellow Māori Seymour’s bill rather than contribute to the debate, or make submissions on it. But TPM dances to its own music, and only its own, it seems. Why won’t she tell us what she has been reading that led her to disagree with Seymour? And, why won’t she and her colleagues engage in activities that really could improve Māori lives?
These days, irrationality is one of TPM’s biggest hurdles. Their persistence in asserting that Māori are so deprived that every aspect of Māori life needs special assistance that is available only to them is a key example, until one realises that it is the well-paid jobs that go with special assistance that they are really chasing. By themselves, and without help from the holders of those jobs, many Māori have over the last two decades increased their life expectancy and lifted their educational achievements. Thanks to Treaty settlements and a bit of honest get-up-and-go, most Māori household incomes today are close to Pākehā standards.
Nor is there any evidence that Māori are conspicuously less well treated by any aspect of the health system. No wonder the new government after 2023 abolished the separate Māori health authority. According to fellow columnist Tony Vaughn, its racially-selected bureaucrats “produced a mountain of consultancy invoices, a glossy logo, and a thriving cottage industry of diversity experts billing taxpayers for sermons on cultural safety”. It didn’t, and couldn’t, reduce the length of hospital waiting lists for either Māori or Pākehā. And when Māori so-called education specialists got anywhere near schools where Māori were enrolled in significant numbers, all that happened was that their bureaucrats insisted on kapa haka in the mornings and te reo lessons in the afternoon. Little wonder that many young Māori leave schools in an unemployable state, move on to welfare, and then drift off into crime and to prison. Māori, who are 17 per cent of the total New Zealand population, are 51 per cent of today’s prison population.
Why are the likes of TPM not concentrating on the real causes of the problems experienced by growing numbers of their people? If the likes of Maipi-Clarke, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa Packer concentrated their energies on encouraging their tribal kinsmen to take a personal interest in the 30 per cent or so of their number who are consistently falling behind because of the cultural racism they insist on inflicting on Māori, the lives they lead would inevitably improve. There is no future for those who immerse themselves in resentment, call for race-based hiring quotas, or denounce Captain Cook, colonialism, or Pākehā standards of education.
Instead, what has benefited Māori over the last few decades is self help. Knocking off smoking was good for their wallets, and for their health. Encouraging young Māori to select long-lasting sexual partners would do wonders for the huge numbers of children who are fecklessly conceived and left with minimal support in their early years. That only 18 per cent of new born Māori babies arrived into married households in 2024 is a national disgrace. I’m yet to hear of any steps TPM is taking to improve this situation. The budget’s restraining of access to welfare for school leavers and encouragement from Māori leaders for those children to avail themselves instead of the plethora of trade training and other forms of higher education will always produce better results for young people than constantly organising rent-a-crowds outside parliament to shout and roar against issues like the principles of the Treaty, especially since some Māori leaders like Maipi Clarke say they believe in them. Confusing your followers seldom produces good political outcomes.
Another area where TPM might produce a spectacular improvement in the standing of Māori in the wider community would be if they put some real energy into encouraging their disaffected young into greater participation in sport. Why has it been left to Pacific Islanders? I come from a generation where Māori figured largely in the All Blacks and League in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Those sports provided goals for young Māori men whose aimlessness these days leads to welfare-created chaos, with catastrophic results.
Modern failure on so many fronts of Māori society points to the worthlessness of their leaders. The continuing damage they inflict on their people by preaching nothing but racial division, victimhood, absurd assertions about the Treaty, and a desire to push Māori, who are all more Pākehā in their ancestry than Māori, into belligerent, ignorant racial separatism is having no positive outcomes. So many things bind us all together. But the likes of Maipi Clarke, Ngarewa Packer and Waititi refuse to acknowledge them, preferring the pursuit of needless legislation and goals that have ‘dead end’ stamped all over them.
This article was originally published by Bassett, Brash and Hide.
