With the end of Winston Peters’s political career, we have shone a light on the fact that we have had at least one Maori in parliament for 42 years. He is not the only one of course. The first Maori MPs entered parliament in 1868. The list of Maori MPs is so long it does not need repeating, but thinking back to the 1990s, we had Tau Henare, Tuariki Delamere and the famous Tuku (underpants) Morgan. As of Monday, we now have 13 non-white ministers (although most of them do have at least some European ethnicity). But none of this is anything new. As Winston Peters’s career proves, we have had non-white MPs consistently for more than the last 40 years.
Ditto women. The new government has 42% women, which apparently is a Great Leap Forward. But the universities in the 1970s had about 50% of their students as women. Not in all subjects, of course; there were not a large number of women engineers in those days, and to be fair, there are still not many. Could it be that women choose which careers they want to pursue, and that engineering, or politics, may not be high on the list of preferred career choices? No, that’s not possible. We have to have 50% of women in every quarter of society, otherwise we are being misogynistic.
Except when it comes to sewage workers. Apparently, it is OK for women to shun that as a career.
But the bit that finally got me is the fact that our new government is the most diverse in the world in sexual orientation. Yes. It is.
I have to ask why this matters to anyone, and indeed why it is being discussed at all?
Isn’t the question of someone’s sexual preferences an intensely private one? Does anyone have the right to ask? Does a person not have the right to keep their sexual orientation to themselves? Why are we brandishing a big sword to celebrate the fact that parliament is full of gay people? Why does it matter, and to be honest… who cares?
Homosexuality was ‘legalised’ in 1967 in the UK, and in 1986 in New Zealand. It seems a bit crazy to me that it was ever outlawed at all, but we should never judge past times with a modern perspective. Ever since then, gay people have become part of the fabric of our society. Actually, they always were, but they had to keep their sexual orientation under wraps before that. Now, we all interact with so many gay people, it is just part of the average day. No one cares. No one bats an eyelid. And while they probably do encounter some bias and resentment at times, nowadays, for the most part, they are just a part of life for most of us.
And while being transgender might be the latest trend, let us not forget that Georgina Beyer entered parliament in 1999, having been mayor of Carterton for four years prior to that. And Beyer did not just ‘identify’ as a woman. She went through the entire medical process to change her gender.
So forgive me if I feel a little weary with all these world firsts, but we have been doing this diversity stuff for years. Did the world stop turning on its axis when Margaret Thatcher or Helen Clark was elected to power, in 1979 and 1999? Was New Zealand cut off from the rest of the world when our first transgender MP entered parliament? No. The earth never shifted at all. So why, decades on from these events, are we making such a big deal out of diversity now?
As it is the media that always point these things out, is it possible that they are being patronising? Are they in fact saying: “Look at all those clever little girlies who have made it into parliament? Look at all those Maoris who have actually done something with their lives? Isn’t that amazing?”, when of course, it is nothing of the sort.
Is that what the media are saying? It certainly seems that way to me.
I grew up in a world, and an education system, that said girls could do anything, and I believe it to be true. But I would like to rewrite that phrase for modern society. Girls can do anything they choose to do. But why this is a surprise to anyone when the battles were all won in the 1970s is a complete mystery to me. This applies to women, to non-white people, to gay people and to transgender people. In the modern world, these people can do anything they want to, so long as they apply themselves and do the work necessary to get them to where they want to be. There is nothing very surprising about any of it.
Let’s start holding people to account for what they actually do (or don’t do) and stop focusing on race, gender or sexual orientation. After all, our Prime Minister is a woman, as are the Leader of the Opposition, the Governor-General and the Chief Justice. The role of Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party has been held by a Maori person since 2017. What more do we have to do to prove that none of this is remarkable any more? The world is already a better place than that and has been for a long time.
Let’s concentrate on competence. It doesn’t matter if an MP is a man, woman, Maori or gay. What matters is that they can do the job. So many of these ‘diverse’ people cannot do their jobs. We need to stop awarding key roles on the basis of diversity, and start appointing people who are competent… whatever their race, gender or sexual orientation. The country would be so much better off for it, and so, correspondingly, would we all.
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