Tani Newton
Te Pati Maori’s call for a separate Maori Parliament may sound treasonous to some. To others, it is just another episode in the long and mildly sad story of a basically happy country that longs for a unity it can never quite achieve.
Hobson’s promise, “We are one people”, floats in the air like a wistful echo.
Today the population that New Zealand tries to unite is many times more diverse, varied, rootless and transient than it was in 1840. We remain mildly disunited because we don’t have common values and therefore cannot have common goals. A generation ago we could at least agree that we all wanted our families to be safe from violence and to enjoy a reasonable level of material prosperity. Now we don’t even share that goal, as a sizeable minority – not just the woke elite, sadly – truly believe that we must forgo family, prosperity and comfort in order to ‘save the planet’.
On top of that, we have the sinister (and powerful) pressure from international and globalist forces to recruit us to their agenda, seen most recently (and graphically) in the WHO’s pandemic treaty.
But the idea of a Maori Parliament is nothing new. There was one, officially, from 1892 to 1902, following on from the Maori King movement and all the other failed attempts to bring about kotahitanga or unity of all the tribes. Efforts have been underway for over 20 years, currently, to resurrect this parliament: ironically, two rival groups are working on it – the Wakaminenga in Waitangi and the even more controversial Ko Huiarau. Both are still struggling to get their membership to one per cent of the population. But, crucially, both have abandoned the hope of uniting all Maori (a ridiculous idea today in any case, with such an intermarried population) and instead are serving to unite people of diverse ethnic backgrounds who agree in their rejection of the globalist agenda.
Which brings us to the question of whether any of this is genuinely about ‘race’ (a concept I personally don’t agree with), or more about culture, or really about political philosophy, or actually just about the money. It’s hard to see how ethnicity can have much to do with it when the leaders of the Maori Party have to resort to heavy tattooing to disguise their pasty complexions.
Personally, I think Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer should be given a large island to go to, with anyone who cares to join them, and invited to show us the paradise they can create for themselves. That would fairly quickly clarify whether or not they have any useful skills or any goals other than funnelling money from the public purse into a small number of private pockets. Though it’s unlikely that they will ultimately do much except cavort into obscurity. Meanwhile we can get on with making the best of our slightly disunified lives in the mildly chaotic but extremely beautiful country we can all agree to love.
