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.
After the mass Māori Party madness over David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill comes more extreme Māori make-believe. Some are now calling the 83 per cent of New Zealanders who aren’t Māori, ‘guests’ or ‘visitors’ to the country where they are citizens. Many of long standing. According to some radicals, the 83 per cent are “manuhiri”, a word traditionally used on marae to describe someone visiting from another tribe. So puffed up are they by their recent hīkoi, that several Māori leaders have taken to treating every non Māori as a foreigner to the country that an overwhelming majority of us were born in.
This, of course, is intended to be the ultimate insult to the vast majority of Kiwis. In fact, all it does is invite the rest of us to examine the Māori credentials of the Māori Party loudmouths. Here are a few relevant facts. For more than half a century after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, European migrants to New Zealand were disproportionately men. It wasn’t until after World War One that the number of women reached and then surpassed the number of men in the country. This meant that the preponderance of young virile male immigrants arriving to settle in New Zealand sought out available Māori women in large numbers. By the 1920s a substantial proportion of people with Māori ancestry also contained Pākehā blood in their veins. They were people of mixed race. If a half-caste Māori married another person with even less Māori blood – and huge numbers did – then by law their progeny lost the right to call themselves a Māori. They couldn’t enrol on the Māori electoral roll. That was what led to a law change in 1974. It re-defined who was entitled to call themselves a Māori. From the mid-70s onwards, a Māori was “a person of the Māori race and any descendant”. No mention any more of half-castes or quarter-castes. Any one with a drop of Māori blood could claim to be a Māori. Many choose Māori. Many choose not to claim Māori ancestry.
The result of the legislative change in 1974 has been that today’s Māori have a lot paler skin than I remember when I was young. Many women have taken to tattooing their chins as a reminder to others that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, they wish to assert that they are Māori. That’s fine. They are entitled to state their chosen cultural affiliation. Nobody should deny them their choice.
Where these developments become farcical, however, is when persons who are largely Pākehā, as most Māori in this country are today, start calling those who have no Māori blood, ‘guests’, or ‘visitors’. Their Māori ancestors didn’t shy away from mating with manuhiri, thereby contributing to the multi-cultural society that most sensible Kiwis are proud to be part of today. Why are they fighting themselves? The reality is that Māori Party loud mouths are only slightly less foreign than those of us with no Māori ancestry at all. Look at Debbie Ngarewa-Packer for instance. Her ancestry is at least three quarters European. Like the rest of us, she lives in a country made up of manuhiri. It’s been New Zealand’s strength for nearly 200 years. Since before 1840, people with a multiplicity of ancestries began calling New Zealand home.
The Māori Party should drop their crusade to try to push ahead of other New Zealanders, using blood as their only claim to superiority. The Treaty didn’t give Māori any special right to lord it over non-Māori. If they are worried, as they should be, about the declining educational and health status of too many young Māori then they ought to start working out why this is the case. They’ll find it has nothing to do with colonialism, nor blood. Rather it is the result of years of their leadership overlooking sub-standard parenting among too many of those who choose to call themselves Māori. Today, all other ethnicities in New Zealand do a better job at looking after their children’s health, getting them to school, monitoring their homework, teaching them to look after themselves, and encouraging them to aspire to improve themselves by being law-abiding, working citizens. Trying to pull others down while doing nothing to build up your own side won’t solve anyone’s problems.
Is it too much to expect that the Māori Party might decide to join a New Zealand in which they and we are agreed that we are all to varying degrees manuhiri? A world where every parent is responsible for the efforts, conduct and achievements of their children?
And might we be able to expect that our leaders, our schools and our media all commit themselves to unify the country rather than encouraging separatist approaches to all of life’s challenges?
This article was originally published by Bassett, Brash and Hide.
