In more than 40 years, sitting above the battlers in the debating chamber below, never has such a provocative, and for many, insulting speech been delivered.
It's in stark contrast to what the former Prime Minister John Key pleaded at the National Party's annual conference last weekend, to tone down the racial friction.
On becoming Prime Minister in 2008, Key embraced the Māori Party, even though he didn't need them for support, giving them two seats at the Cabinet table.
Today National's the Grim Reaper if you listen to Ngarewa-Packer. Her people she said, in a prepared speech, are punch drunk, are fatigued and are feeling persecuted in what she says in the biggest attack on them since the 1860s.
She spoke of a tsunami of constant and deliberate assaults to grind them down.
The party's co leader cited a number of areas where that's happened, like scrapping the Māori wards, which the Kaipara Council voted against yesterday and which was one of the first acts of the last Government to bring them in.
They are rightly seen as undemocratic, just as John Key once saw the seven dedicated Māori seats which gives the Māori Party its platform today.
Among the other things she cited was the boot camps, which are currently being piloted. She asked: "where's the aroha from this Government." The more salient question would surely be, where's the aroha from the families that the participants have come from?
But her bile became even more trenchant when she talked about ACT, saying the party's groomed the Prime Minister and the Government into exercising "ethnocide" on Māori culture.
She lamented what she saw as the Government being driven "to make us into one - their one, our none."
Then she accused them of destroying Māori culture, one punch at a time "very hard and very low."
Oh and she wound up with a dire warning of how this country's being led by a "dark triad," with three personality traits, the Machiavellian, the psychopath and the narcissist, leaving us to figure out which trait belongs to which party leader.
Put those traits together, Ngarewa-Packer says, are dangerous to Māori, delivering the "cruellest" social chaos, the worst ever inflicted on an indigenous population!
It's going to take a revolution of minds to withstand what's coming, she warned.
Oh please!
At the behest of ACT, Speaker Gerry Brownlee's been asked to review what was said, which he's going to do.
But if others, like Winston Peters, had sounded off like this, we would never have heard the end of it.
This current crop in the Māori Party are clearly on a mission to stir up discontent, rather than showing any attempt to be constructive, and there are many areas where they could do just that.
And that's the danger!
Barry Soper is a New Zealand political journalist, and has been featured regularly on radio and television since the 1970s. Currently, Soper's main role is political editor at Newstalk ZB, a radio network in New Zealand.
8 comments:
Obvious since Day 1.
>"Put those traits together, Ngarewa-Packer says, are dangerous to Māori, delivering the "cruellest" social chaos, the worst ever inflicted on an indigenous population!"
That must mean making them pay their own way and taking responsibility for their offspring. I can't think of anything worse for many of them.
Every day I have to keep reminding myself that I know a number of decent sane reasonable Maori. I refrain from asking them how they manage to cope with the dishonest idiocy of the public voice of Maori - many of whom carry less Maori DNA than they do 'other'. We so have to stop publishing these ignorant utterances as we have too many stupids in the rest of the population who buy their tripe.
Destroy what culture? Stone age warring tribes, the victors enslaving the vanquished, cannibalism normal, overseeing the extinction of the Moa and various other species, burning millions of acres of forests, no written language, no wheel, no pottery kilns, no woven clothes or paper from the flax resources available...... The list is endless so cut the crap about destroyed culture and educate young people to progress in the real modern world. Kiwialan.
Forgot to mention the indigenous rubbish, colonisers from Hawaii who arrived in New Zealand by boat a few hundred years before Europeans. Kiwialan.
Wake-up call for you Debbie:-
Maori are NOT indigenous to this country (New Zealand).
They arrived here about 600 years ago, having travelled from the Pacific Islands in canoes. The Maori still have a plaque in northland celebrating their “homeland” of Hawaiki.
Their current DNA shows, as does historical research, that they were indigenous to Taiwan, and travelled from there down thousands of years ago through Melanesia to eventually settle in (colonize) the Pacific Islands in Polynesia.
Maori are settlers, like all of us.
Seen any headlines in either the Herald or Stuff about thus disgusting tirade ???
If any of the Coalition muttered anything like this there would be banner headlines.
Will the editors ever admit their guilt in trying to destroy democracy in NZ ?
An eternal shame on them.
Good. Bring it debbie. 2% of voters versus the other 98% doesn't bode that well for the maori party does it. And if you try violence against others, then prepare to be thrown into the slammer.
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