Caleb Anderson: Our parliament needs more people like Ms Chhour

Recent attacks on Karen Chhour, and her understandable reaction to these attacks, have received some media attention in the past week, but not nearly enough.

Ms Chhour's outpouring of emotion tells a story a thousand words could not tell.  

They tell a story of tribalism at its most raw and most ugly.  Her treatment is an object lesson of what happens when race becomes the ultimate defining principle.

The response of the left to the impact of their vicious, vacuous, and unrelenting attack on Ms Chhour's character and identity speaks volumes.  In deference to the narcissism that has become their defining characteristic, the Maori Party and the Green Party have shown neither empathy nor remorse.  This is the price they are willing to exact in pursuit of their singular dogma, this is tribalism doing exactly what it does.  

The Labour Party, careful not to offend the ideologues in their own party, and those of their coalition partners in waiting, made a brief and transitory concession to decency, followed swiftly by a swipe at Ms Chhour's competency.

And in the midst of all this the mainstream media remained largely on the sideline.

New Zealand was once a country that generally acted as if the rights, feelings, and reputations of individuals mattered, where a view could be safely expressed, even when it ran counter  to other views, and when the outpouring of emotion, such as that elicited by Ms Chhour, would draw the sympathy of most, or at least of some. 

Not so now it seems.

But Ms Chhour won a lot of fans last week.  She became the face of true oppression.  She became the personification of those who refuse to surrender to the commodification of dogma and group think, regardless of the price, who insist on their right to form a viewpoint independent of the views of others, who deny the illusion of singular causality, and the primacy of dogma ... and the ignorance and blindness that follow in its wake.  

People like Ms Chhour will not be bullied because they know what bullies can do, they have experienced it first hand.

Bill 7AA is worth debating.  Identity is important.  Culture is important.  But so too is the right of a child to be safe, to be cared for, to be encouraged, and to be truly loved.  

While ethnicity and family should be considerations when placing children in care, never at the expense of their safety, and of their long term interests ... and never race above all other things.  

I personally know of children who have been placed in multiple whanau homes where the patterns of abuse continued unabated.  

Ms Chhour is right to take a wider lens on issues of placement.  Ms Chhour is right to put the wellbeing of children ahead of a policy which makes them an unwitting sacrifice in service of ideological purity.

Most of us long ago saw that those most loudly yelling oppression had become the oppressors themselves.  Their treatment of Ms Chhour made this clear for all to see.

Our parliament needs more people like Ms Chhour.  She stands head and shoulder above those whose attack on her integrity (and identity) mark them not only as a danger to democracy but to reason itself.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.