Peter Hemmingson: Maori Socio-Economic Disadvantage

The propaganda claim to a collective [part-] Maori socio-economic disadvantage has become one of NZ's most enduring tropes.

Adolf Hitler’s “big lie” technique: repeat a lie loudly and often enough and it becomes the ‘truth.’

As I will demonstrate below, aggregates are politically useful but factually vacuous.

In fact, when it comes to any indicator of socio-economic wellbeing, the vast majority of New Zealander with a Maori ancestor are normally distributed around that indicator’s Bell Curve for the general population.

The problem is a recalcitrant inter-generational underclass of around 15% of [part-] Maori who are intergenerational welfare recipients or in low-waged jobs with no exit strategy, who drag down the aggregate [part-]Maori data.

This sub-group passes its non-achiever views and values on to succeeding generations.

This is nothing to do with ethnicity or a ‘legacy of colonisation,’ but relates instead to poor personal choices.

As black American political economist, Thomas Sowell, reminds us: “Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity when some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?”

Here's Ministry of Social Development Chief Economist, Dr Simon Chapple, in a 2000 paper (link below):

"Maori ethnicity is a particularly poor predictor of labour market success or failure and there is considerable overlap between Maori and non-Maori outcomes. It is [those who identify as] sole Maori with low literacy, poor education, and living in geographical concentrations that have labour market problems, not the Maori ethnic group as a whole (there are probably also sub-cultural associations with benefit dependence, sole parenthood, early natality, drug and alcohol abuse, physical violence, and illegal cash cropping).

"In other words the policy issue may need to be viewed primarily at a sub-cultural and socio-economic level rather than the coarse macro ethno-cultural level of Maori/non-Maori binaries."

https://www.nzcpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Maori-Economic-Disparity-Simon-Chapple.pdf

If most New Zealanders with a Māori ancestor are doing just fine, the problem with those who fail to launch cannot be attributed to 'institutional racism' or to 'a legacy of colonisation,' but a lack of personal responsibility for one's life outcomes.

Putting in at school is seen by part-Maori losers at the margin as 'acting white.' It is rapidly discouraged by group harassment and physical bullying.

The 'crab bucket' mentality write large.

When one crab tries to climb out of the bucket, the other crabs gang up to pull it back down again.

Seen it many times growing up.

People are typically poor not because of what someone has done to them, but because of what they haven't done for themselves.

True poverty is -- first and foremost -- a poverty of spirit.

On the question of ethnicity and its application to statistical aggregation and social policy:

[1] on what basis should someone who is less than half-Maori be regarded by anyone OUTSIDE their kin group as "Maori" just because they say they are.

"Some delicate little snowflake will get hurt feelings when they discover others don’t share their self-delusion" is NOT an answer.

[2] on what basis should someone who possesses more of the blood of the coloniser than of the colonised be regarded as a "victim" of "white privilege" rather than its beneficiary?

Please don't tell me Maori genes are so inferior that even a smidge is enough to make someone a congenital loser and an inadequate.

Oh, the soft liberal bigotry of low expectations.

The grifters and troughers peddling the myth of a collective [part-] Māori disadvantage do so for their own self-aggrandisement, not because they genuinely care about those whom they claim to speak for.

Sowell again:
“The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives [in the form of financial and psychic rewards] to promote polarising attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.”

Indeed.

Peter Hemmingson is a New Zealander of multiple ethnic origins, who believes in a single standard of citizenship for all.