It’s the go-to rebuttal. As if raising questions about one tax-funded spiritual holiday demands you condemn all the others. But let’s get something straight — this isn’t about whether a holiday has religious roots. It’s about how that holiday functions today.
Christmas and Easter have long since shed their theocratic teeth. They’re secular rituals at this point — family, food, presents, chocolate. They don’t come bundled with state-backed cosmology. No one's rewriting property law in Jesus’ name. No public school is teaching transubstantiation as science. And nobody’s losing land or legal rights because the Easter Bunny says so.
Matariki, on the other hand, is being introduced not just as a cultural nod, but as a sacred framework — one embedded in policy, classrooms, and courts. It comes with an origin story that’s not just acknowledged, but publicly funded and politically enforced.
We’re told it’s not a religion — yet speak against it, and you’re treated like you just insulted the Pope on live TV.
So no — the comparison doesn’t hold.
Matariki isn’t just a day off. It’s the spiritual spearhead of a broader ideological movement.
And if secularism still means anything, then all belief systems — even the fashionable ones — must be open to scrutiny.
Because once one myth becomes law, the rest are only a referendum away.
Matariki, on the other hand, is being introduced not just as a cultural nod, but as a sacred framework — one embedded in policy, classrooms, and courts. It comes with an origin story that’s not just acknowledged, but publicly funded and politically enforced.
We’re told it’s not a religion — yet speak against it, and you’re treated like you just insulted the Pope on live TV.
So no — the comparison doesn’t hold.
Matariki isn’t just a day off. It’s the spiritual spearhead of a broader ideological movement.
And if secularism still means anything, then all belief systems — even the fashionable ones — must be open to scrutiny.
Because once one myth becomes law, the rest are only a referendum away.
John Robertson is a patriotic New Zealander who frequently posts on Facebook.
4 comments:
I was listening to the Concert program yesterday at various times, and it was full of this new age Maori religion, about what spirits supposedly do and how 20 June rather than 1 January is the beginning of the year. But they still relied on the same European and American music written by pale, stale, males. I don't remember any Bible bashing, in the same way, over Easter or Christmas, but then I guess Jesus is no longer important because he wasn't Maori.
I wonder if the Subaru car emblem has been patented in International law? It would be an interesting Court case Subaru vs Iwi
“We’re told it’s not a religion — yet speak against it, and you’re treated like you just insulted the Pope on live TV.”
On the 6th March 1990, Paul Reeves our Governor General on an Australian Broadcasting Commissions Four Corners Programme ‘Trick or Treaty’ compared the treaty to a covenant between “God and Abraham or God and Noah” and said it was a binding document. “Many Pakeha people get impatient at what the see at being the way in which Maori keep dredging up things that happened 100 years ago. They say, why can’t we just live together, but Maori can’t buy into that because their injustice won’t go. What we’ve got to do is relieve people of that sense of injustice and if we don’t take the justice option, we run the risk of reaping the whirlwind”, he said.
Paul Reeves joined “Maori leaders”, in hinting that failure to address “injustices” under the treaty would lead to violence.
God’s chosen ones. Now where have I heard that before?
Ah, but Matariki was all over the latest news from Holy Trinity Cathedral, Auckland - now dumped. The Dean clearly espouses Maori mythology and adds that to the wokery of her political set up. FORGET 1st & 2nd November each year [All Saints and ALL Souls], Maori myth reigns. Reckon its FEAR at work. Where oh where, Dean, is your courage???
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