Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 1/11/23

While a wretched war is waged in the Middle East, Rawiri Waititi tenders foreign policy advice: NZ should adopt “mana motukahe”

The government’s official website – or is it the caretaker government’s official website? – again had no news, when Point of Order checked this morning.

The pickings were somewhat better on Scoop’s section for news from Parliament. It carried this new post:

Te Pāti Māori Statement On Gaza

Prime Minister Hipkins has been vocal in condemning HAMAS but silent on the war crimes of Israel as though Palestinian lives matter less.

The bombing of hospitals, homes and churches is not self-defence. The use of white phosphorous in densely populated areas is not self-defence. Collective punishment of civilians by cutting of food, water, and medical supplies is not self-defence.

The murder of 3,195 children is not self-defence.

We must never buy into the narrative that peace is “unrealistic”.

The statement – which does not include the name of the person(s) in whose name it has been issued – would have us believe that world leaders, including New Zealand’s,

“… have the ability to stop the killing of babies. It is the will that they are lack.”

Why the over-riding concern is to stop the killing of babies, rather than the killing of all innocent civilians, at first blush raises fascinating questions about the morality being applied by the Māori Party. But on reflection, the party does insist that some citizens in this country are entitled to rights which other citizens do not have.

More fundamentally, the statement does not convincingly explain how the killing can be stopped.

The Māori Party apparently believes the combatants should be ordered to cease fire.

By refusing to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the NZ government is turning a blind eye to genocide. To turn a blind eye to injustice is to become an accomplice to that injustice.

Calling for safe-zones is not enough when safe zones are being deliberately targeted – if a hospital is not safe, nowhere is safe.

But the United Nations is not mentioned in the press statement, an acknowledgement – perhaps – of that organisation’s lamentable failures to bring peace to a raft of trouble spots over the past several decades.

Calls for a ceasefire in the Ukraine serve as a tragic example.

The process whereby world leaders could end the slaughter in the Middle East thus becomes a matter for conjecture.

But then it becomes apparent the Māori Party is critical of the USA and Israel, while (presumably) finding no fault with the Hamas atrocity.

It wants the ambassadors of those countries sent packing.

Aotearoa can no longer be complicit to the killing of innocent people. We can no longer provide political cover for US-funded imperialism. We can no longer act as a Pacific spy base for the Five-Eyes Alliance.

The United States have poured billions of dollars into Israel’s Military and this brutal occupation will not stop as long as they continue to do so.

Te Pāti Māori have called for the expulsion of the Israeli Ambassador until the Israel implement an immediate ceasefire. We are now adding the United States Ambassador to that list.

And when the Ambassadors have gone home – will peace break out in the Middle East?

Of course not.

The statement wraps up with a demand that

NZ do all it can to stop the killing of innocent children.

Te Pāti Māori are calling on the New Zealand Government to:

• Demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, & expel the Israeli & United States Ambassadors until that demand is met.
• Recognise the State of Palestine, as we recognised the State of Israel in 1949.
• Demand an end the occupation, the blockade, and the continued confiscation of Palestinian land.

Curiously, the press statement did not mention the policy prescribed by Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi in an interview with Waatea News:

In the interview, he again railed against the USA:

Te Pati Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi has come out hard against the American’s who he says are propping up wars including those in Palestine and the Ukraine.

But he also promoted his own policy approach:

Māori Party co-leader wants mana motuhake exercised

And what will that achieve?

Let’s see:

He says the Māori Party’s policy of mana motuhake requires a stance of armed neutrality.

“And so we are continuously at the whim of the Americans, who to me, are propping up many of these wars around the place. You know, who’s providing all the military support to Israelis, who’s supporting the military support to the Ukraine And I’m not afraid to say these types of things,” he says

Rawiri Waititi says mana motuhake is that we are able to stand on our own two feet.

Is this the way that peace was maintained in the good old days before those bloody colonisers from Europe turned up?

Maybe not.

Point of Order found this rundown on Māori tribal wars:

Shortly after Europeans began to visit the country various Māori chiefs were quick to see the advantages of the musket and the power it gave them over enemies without such weapons. Chiefs who managed to acquire muskets by trading set out on a scale of slaughter and destruction quite unknown before. In the first 30 years of the nineteenth century thousands of Māori’s must have died in the campaigns of Hongi Hika and Te Rauparaha alone.

Mind you, there was a caveat to the material we have reproduced.

The website advises that this information was published in 1966 in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A. H. McLintock. It has not been corrected and will not be updated.

Perhaps it is wrong and the adoption of mana Motuhake by the Luxon government will help do for world peace what it did for tribal conflict.

Point of Order is a blog focused on politics and the economy run by veteran newspaper reporters Bob Edlin and Ian Templeton