John Robertson
Let’s talk about sex. Not the fun kind – unless your idea of a good time is imagining your great-great-great-great-grandmother getting it on with a stranger in a bark hut during the Bronze Age.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: nobody knows who our ancestors were shagging 10,000 years ago, let alone 100,000. For all we know, your bloodline includes a goat herder from Persia, a cave painter from France and a drunk Neanderthal who tripped into the wrong tent.
Yet somehow, here in New Zealand, we’ve enshrined in legislation the idea that a specific group of people – who arrived here by boat, mind you – have some kind of sacred birthright to legal privileges and special treatment, based on the assumption that their ancestors never mixed, never moved, never moaned under the stars with someone from another tribe. Absolute fantasy.
Let me be even clearer for the politicians still sucking on the teat of identity politics: you cannot build a 21st-century nation on a myth. Especially when the myth is that one group of humans magically popped out of the Earth here like turnips, and the rest are ‘visitors’. Māori came here by boat. BOAT. That means they migrated. That means they came from somewhere else. That means – wait for it – they’re not indigenous. You can’t be indigenous to two places, just like you can’t be a virgin in two cities. Pick one, mate.
Anthropology 101: all human beings share mixed origins. We interbred, migrated, conquered, fled and, yes, had wildly unrecorded sex for hundreds of thousands of years. Trying to trace ‘pure’ bloodlines is like trying to piss in a tornado and stay dry. Modern humans have been mixing since we stood upright. Any idea of ethnic purity is a wet dream for racists and a crutch for the entitlement class.
So why the hell is our legal system littered with the words bi-cultural and bi-lingual like some colonial guilt hangover that never sobered up?
New Zealand isn’t bi-cultural. It’s multi-ethnic. In fact, it’s post-ethnic. We’re 260-plus ethnicities deep and counting. Walk down Queen Street and you’ll see more diversity in 10 minutes than a woke diversity seminar could handle in a decade. And guess what? Nobody gives a toss about your whakapapa when they’re paying nine dollars for a head of broccoli.
Yet we have politicians too scared to say the obvious: race-based policy is racism. Full stop. I don’t care if it’s wrapped in tradition, tikanga, treaties or tears – if your laws treat people differently based on their ancestry, it’s not justice: it’s apartheid in a flax skirt.
And let’s not pretend this is about “honouring history.” It’s about power. It’s about carving out permanent entitlements for people who claim ancient privilege but live in modern privilege – benefiting from the exact same hospitals, roads, schools, supermarkets and cell towers as everyone else.
We don’t need ‘co-governance’. We need co-responsibility. We need one law for all, one citizenship, one nation – not a bureaucratic buffet where certain surnames get first dibs on the gravy.
And the Treaty? It was signed in 1840, when the world was still using leeches as medicine. Beautiful as it may be, it’s not the bloody constitution. It was an agreement between people who are all dead now. Let’s honour it by growing the hell up and moving forward, not backwards into race-based hierarchy.
So here’s the prescription: Cut every race-based clause from our legislation. Replace it with a single principle – equality under the law. Not equity. Not partnership. Not sacred ancestral privilege. Just plain, boring, unsexy equality.
Because there’s only one race that matters – the human race.
And if that’s too spicy for your delicate political palate, then maybe it’s time you got out of the kitchen. Or better yet, out of parliament.
