This casts significant doubts on talk of “linguistic oppression” at local authority meetings.
An RNZ report today has highlighted a widely-accepted council rule requiring members to give two days’ notice before addressing meetings in Te Reo Māori.
Incorporated in standing orders across the country, the rule is being criticised as an “oppression” of “the official language”.
But it serves a very practical purpose: it gives councils time to arrange interpreters or translators if necessary.
That’s not silly, surely. Chances are every councillor can speak English.
If one of them is bilingual and opts to speak in Te Reo, only a rare few of the others will know what is being said. Translations into English will be necessary.
But University of Otago Professor Emeritus Lachlan Paterson said council requirements were an unfortunate reflection of the status of Te Reo Māori in local government.
“We have an official language that it is people’s right to use for all purposes, including official ones, but this has to be done in a constructed manner rather than organically,” he said.
A constructed manner?
Social engineering, in other words.
Paterson then fancifully proclaimed:
“If councillors or council staff were fluent in Te Reo this would not need to happen.”
And if all New Zealanders were law-abiding, there would be no need for prisons.
“The reason why notice is generally required for Te Reo Māori is because of a history of sustained linguistic oppression,” he said.
In the professor’s linguistic dream world, translations should not be necessary.
In the real world, the great majority of councillors and council staff do not speak much Te Reo.
That’s why – according to Local Democracy Reporting – standing orders at 20 authorities across New Zealand require at least two working days’ notice from members wishing to speak in Te Reo when the meeting was normally conducted in English.
Taranaki Regional Council required five days’ notice; Palmerston North City Council required three days; and Hamilton City Council extended the rule to presenters, while saying notice should “ideally” be no less than two days.
Two Southland councils responded to criticism of the requirement.
Invercargill City Council said it recognised Te Reo and New Zealand Sign Language as official languages of New Zealand.
The provision had been included to ensure members could engage, understand and communicate during the decision making process, council manager governance and legal Michael Morris said.
Morris hoped the official languages would be “valued and visible” at the organisation and noted the rules did not apply to members of the public.
“Te Reo Māori is spoken freely throughout council, including in chambers, by staff, elected members, and our mana whenua partners,” Morris said.
Southland District Council said it did its best to accommodate Māori language speakers and those using New Zealand Sign Language.
The clause was in place so the council could seek support for translation and interpretation if necessary, it said.
A reverse provision is common in standing orders, where English speakers are required to give notice at meetings held in Te Reo.
University of Otago associate professor Paerau Warbrick pitched in to support Paterson.
“There’s no room for these provisions in standing orders in this day and age,” he said.
“The only thing that is standing in the way is the attitudes of the mayors and councillors themselves.”
Warbrick referenced policy from Denbighshire County Council in Wales, saying all members and staff are expected to conform with Welsh Language Standards.
That’s a left-leaning council which has been run by a Labour and Plaid Cymru coalition since the May 2022 election. It has a cabinet comprising six Labour and three councillors from Plaid Cymru, a centre-left to left-wing Welsh nationalist political party which supports Welsh independence from the United Kingdom.
Social engineering plainly is part of the council’s agenda.
A workplace policy enacted by the council’s cabinet sets a target to double the daily use of Welsh in the office among both staff and elected councillors.
All internal communications are to be bilingual with Welsh first and staff will be encouraged to take up the language.
The council maintains a central database tracking the specific Welsh competency levels of all staff members to align them with role requirements.
PoO was not surprised to learn that a council cabinet meeting was told the five-year plan had been “misunderstood”.
Speaking at a cabinet meeting earlier this week in which councillors voted to approve the policy, councillor Julie Matthews said it had been reported negatively.
“What it is actually doing is offering an opportunity to staff to upskill,” she said.
Matthews said she believed some of the negative coverage may have come from the fact that some people thought speaking Welsh would be “compulsory” for those working for the council.
“But this isn’t what the policy is doing. It is just trying to encourage staff and members to use Welsh as widely as possible.”
In his efforts to foist this sort of policy on New Zealand councils, Warbrick said the Denbighshire language policy recognised that many staff and residents spoke Welsh, and that the council was committed to promoting it in the workplace.
“That’s the problem with Te Reo Māori in most councils in New Zealand, it’s viewed as a secondary language,” Warbrick said.
“It’s all about attitudes.”
But there is a big difference between New Zealand and Wales.
Less than 5 per cent of New Zealanders can hold an everyday conversation in Te Reo Māori, according to Stats NZ census data. While it is the second most widely spoken language in the country, fluency levels vary from basic conversational skills to complete fluency.
Around 97.2% of people in New Zealand can speak English well enough to hold an everyday conversation.
The majority of adults who cannot speak English are migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, particularly older family members who moved here later in life. For instance, census records indicate that 14% of the Asian ethnic community and 8.5% of the Pacific Peoples community in New Zealand do not speak English.
In contrast, according to the official 2021 Census, 538,300 people aged three and older in Wales (about 18 per cent of the population) reported being able to speak Welsh.
The more frequent Annual Population Survey estimates a higher self-reported ability of roughly 27% to 28% (around 830,000 to 850,000 people) including varying levels of fluency.
Within the county of Denbighshire, 22.5% of the population (20,940 people) can speak Welsh. The council’s internal staff alignment roughly reflects the wider region it serves.
The social engineering challenge for the Denbighshire council therefore looks much less demanding than that being called for by the professors in Otago.
Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE. - where this article was sourced.
