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?”
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."
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.
4 comments:
Peter, you must have missed the Te Pati Maori website's claims that Maori are the holders of superior genes?
But whatever, you are absolutely right about the grifters and troughers and it's a great pity, Thomas Sowell isn't doing a world tour down under.
An interview on his latest book is well worth a watch, in fact all his interviews over the years are profound.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn2gda_phAA
School non attendance and non application follows from the now embedded "imagine decolonisation" theme proselytised by Moana Jackson and fellow seditous activists.
No great effort seems to be made to observe the relation between low life achievement and early motherhood of parent and number of siblings. With maori ever more embedded in the health system, and most sure to be maori Labour or Te Pati supporters, and most intent on maori domination eventually by democratic process if co governance fails, no campaign for and serious advocacy of advice about family planning responsibility is likely.
One only has to look to Australia to see the starkness of the difference being unshackled from wider family makes.
I have said this before but I will say it again. We have for 70 years, in this countr y had the worst possible educational ideology progressivism.. This diabolical ideology had as its main aim the developing of a socialist state through schooling. Actually having schools being involved in academic learning was never its goal.
Achievement in literacy and other basics was just not its concern. Low SES children were the most disadvantaged by it because higher SES children had available to them homes where the deficiencies of the system could be remediated
by affluent and well educated parents.
This ideology also, being soft communism, had contempt for traditional values and morality. Not surprising licentiousness increased with solo parents and other social problems pulling loww SES children even further down until now we have one the longest tail of under achievement in the developed world.
I agree with all Sowell says but the educational aspect must be added in.
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