With summer here, families and tourists will flock to New Zealand’s beaches, rivers and lakes to paddle, swim, surf, fish, boat and kayak. But despite our love of the water, New Zealanders have a terrible record of drowning deaths.
Last summer was the worst year for drownings in a decade. Our 10-year average beach and coastal drowning rate is 44% per capita higher than Australia’s.
According to Water Safety NZ chief executive Daniel Gerrard, “drowning is the leading cause of recreational death and the third-highest cause of accidental death”.
New Zealand research suggests Western approaches to water safety have not worked for Maori. Water safety educators and advocates are now working to strengthen the connection Maori have with water through whakapapa (genealogy), matauranga (knowledge) and tikanga (custom).
Stuff
What a load of arrant nonsense. These people are full-flushing idiots milking the teat of Maori wonderfulness for some extra cash.
Cam Slater is a New Zealand-based blogger, best known for his role in Dirty Politics and publishing the Whale Oil Beef Hooked blog, which operated from 2005 until it closed in 2019. This article was first published HERE
8 comments:
It is downright blush-making - for human beings of any hue or persuasion.
I'm inclined to agree. Of course, Maori will soon have the five waters under their control - with their special subject matter relationships and understandings of this taonga to impart. While they have mastered harvesting food and, soon to be, other sources of money from it, it does seem strange that with all that knowledge and worldly understanding that they have allowed colonial influences to divert their ability to swim safely in it. Who would have thought the impacts of colonisation...
Cam, you have said "what a load of arrant nonsense" it should read, "what a load of arrogant nonsense"
This nonsense knows no bounds.
More Maori die than non-Maori. Well, maybe Maori are, on average, less sensible?
Surely there must be a vaccination for this out and out bullshit.
Maybe in the old days the utopia they lived in gave them the ability to walk on water? Pity there is no written record to confirm the wonderfulness. Kiwialan.
When a Maori person gets into difficulty in the water, do they shout “Help!” or do they shout the te reo equivalent that no-one understands? Perhaps a woke academic can write a government-sponsored paper on this to see if it has an impact on drowning rates.
The claim that Maori invented swimming is pure BS. However Maori do have a rightful claim to have invented BS or at least to have taken BS to a whole new level.
Comparisons with populations without a maori element or equivalent are meaningless. It is the tikanga approach of slack supervision which leads to drowning (and a myriad other problems). But also leads to many acquiring skills far more advanced than average colonist descendants, and esp Asians. As a colonist descendant too skinny as a youth to float, I am surprised at the maori fatality rate considereing the usual built in bouyancy. The exposure rate is typically far higher. In Oz fear of sharks keeps many out of the sea. According to early observers the te ao approach was to toss children in and let them sort it out.....
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