Dr Michael Bassett: Maori Party madness

After the mass Maori Party madness over David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill comes more extreme Maori make-believe. Some are now calling the 83% of New Zealanders who aren’t Maori, “guests” or “visitors” to the country where they are citizens. Many of long standing. According to some radicals, the 83% are “manuhiri”, a word traditionally used on marae to describe someone visiting from another tribe. So puffed up are they by their recent hikoi, that several Maori leaders have taken to treating every non Maori as a foreigner to the country that an overwhelming majority of us were born in.

This, of course, is intended to be the ultimate insult to the vast majority of Kiwis. In fact, all it does is invite the rest of us to examine the Maori credentials of the Maori Party loudmouths. Here are a few relevant facts. For more than half a century after the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, European migrants to New Zealand were disproportionately men. It wasn’t until after World War One that the number of women reached and then surpassed the number of men in the country. This meant that the preponderance of young virile male immigrants arriving to settle in New Zealand sought out available Maori women in large numbers. By the 1920s a substantial proportion of people with Maori ancestry also contained Pakeha blood in their veins. They were people of mixed race. If a half caste Maori married another person with even less Maori blood – and huge numbers did – then by law their progeny lost the right to call themselves a Maori. They couldn’t enrol on the Maori electoral roll. That was what led to a law change in 1974. It re-defined who was entitled to call themselves a Maori. From the mid-seventies onwards, a Maori was “a person of the Maori race and any descendant”. No mention any more of half-castes or quarter-castes. Any one with a drop of Maori blood could claim to be a Maori. Many choose Maori. Many choose not to claim Maori ancestry.

The result of the legislative change in 1974 has been that today’s Maori have a lot paler skin than I remember when I was young. Many women have taken to tattooing their chins as a reminder to others that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, they wish to assert that they are Maori. That’s fine. They are entitled to state their chosen cultural affiliation. Nobody should deny them their choice.

Where these developments become farcical, however, is when persons who are largely Pakeha, as most Maori in this country are today, start calling those who have no Maori blood, “guests”, or “visitors”. Their Maori ancestors didn’t shy away from mating with manuhiri, thereby contributing to the multi-cultural society that most sensible Kiwis are proud to be part of today. Why are they fighting themselves? The reality is that Maori Party loud mouths are only slightly less foreign than those of us with no Maori ancestry at all. Look at Debbie Ngarewa-Packer for instance. Her ancestry is at least three quarters European. Like the rest of us, she lives in a country made up of manuhiri. It’s been New Zealand’s strength for nearly two hundred years. Since before 1840, people with a multiplicity of ancestries began calling New Zealand home.

The Maori Party should drop their crusade to try to push ahead of other New Zealanders, using blood as their only claim to superiority. The Treaty didn’t give Maori any special right to lord it over non-Maori. If they are worried, as they should be, about the declining educational and health status of too many young Maori then they ought to start working out why this is the case. They’ll find it has nothing to do with colonialism, nor blood. Rather it is the result of years of their leadership overlooking sub-standard parenting among too many of those who choose to call themselves Maori. Today, all other ethnicities in New Zealand do a better job at looking after their children’s health, getting them to school, monitoring their homework, teaching them to look after themselves, and encouraging them to aspire to improve themselves by being law-abiding, working citizens. Trying to pull others down while doing nothing to build up your own side won’t solve anyone’s problems.

Is it too much to expect that the Maori Party might decide to join a New Zealand in which they and we are agreed that we are all to varying degrees manuhiri? A world where every parent is responsible for the efforts, conduct and achievements of their children?

And might we be able to expect that our leaders, our schools and our media all commit themselves to unify the country rather than encouraging separatist approaches to all of life’s challenges?

Historian Dr Michael Bassett, a Minister in the Fourth Labour Government. This article was first published HERE