Graham Adams: RNZ’s te reo policy dovetails with He Puapua

Jacinda Ardern always insisted He Puapua was not official government policy although critics could be forgiven for thinking it was — whether it was the blind eye turned to illegal iwi roadblocks in Northland during Covid or the co-governance provisions under Three Waters.

Similarly, RNZ’s management would undoubtedly deny that its te reo policy closely echoes the He Puapua playbook despite striking similarities.

The broadcaster’s Charter requires it to “reflect New Zealand’s cultural identity, including Māori language and culture” but that vague brief has been aggressively amplified. In fact, it is in line with He Puapua’s Vision 2040 that demands increasing “Māori cultural content in all publicly funded media”.

He Puapua imagines that by the 200th anniversary of the Treaty of Waitangi, “te reo Māori will be flourishing, its use will be widespread, and its integrity will be protected”.

The Māori separatist report — drafted as a roadmap in 2019 to comply with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — also expects all New Zealanders will embrace and respect Māori culture (including the language and mātauranga) as an integral part of a bicultural national identity.

RNZ is so enthusiastic about furthering these aims it often appears to double as a propaganda arm for Māori nationalism with its tenets reliably presented as articles of faith. Questioning the broadcaster’s dedication to revitalising te reo as an integral component of this policy is regarded as racist, even though it is perhaps the single most obvious factor responsible for a swathe of once-regular listeners switching off.

RNZ is determined to normalise the Māori language as part of everyday life — no matter how annoyed many feel about being force-fed a particularly rosy view of the benefits of studying it, which is often a prelude to a rosy view of the first settlers’ culture and history.

Its management seems wilfully blind to how much the extravagant promotion of Māori wonderfulness and the arbitrary insertion of te reo words into its news contributes to the dismally low levels of trust among its audience — currently languishing at 56 per cent, as acknowledged in its Statement of Performance Expectations, signed on June 30.

In fact, insiders say the heavy-handed insertion of Māori words several years ago marked the beginning of the slide in its audience numbers.

The stream of articles on RNZ promoting te reo, mātauranga and Māoriexceptionalism is constant — and only the flimsiest reasons are required to trigger a new instalment.

Last month, “kaitiakitanga” was declared the world’s most beautiful word by a panel from the online language site Babbel, judged on its sound, layered meaning, and cultural relevance. It was a publicity stunt by the site’s marketing team that RNZ was eager to promote as yet another excuse to bolster the language’s profile.

It’s safe to assume RNZ imagines New Zealanders’ hearts swelling with pride at winning a global beauty contest despite the fact the vast majority of the population would have no idea what “kaitiakitanga” means and have never uttered it nor heard it pronounced in their lives.

But, in its dedication to never letting an opportunity for yet more boosterism slip by, RNZ produced a follow-up article titled: “Is te reo Māori globally hot but locally not?”

RNZ’s Māori news journalist Layla Bailey-McDowell rolled out the usual suspects for their very predictable opinions.

She interviewed Mātai Smith, co-chair of Te Mātāwai, which supports the revitalisation of the language within Māori communities.

He claimed any Māori word being recognised internationally would have been significant for language revitalisation and normalisation but “kaitiakitanga” was particularly important because it not only reflected guardianship but also “the Māori ethos and the Māori worldview... It's not just a word, there's more layers to it.”

He saw the accolade as “more than recognition of a single kupu, it’s the recognition of the beauty, the richness, and the mana of our reo”.

Dr Vincent Olsen-Reeder went further to make the stunningly illogical claim that the “recognition [by Babbel] … should send a strong message to the current government that what they’re doing isn’t anywhere in line with what New Zealanders want out of language”.

In fact, what most New Zealanders feel about the Māori language is clear: they’re not keen. And not only are they not keen on it, but neither are most Māori.

According to the 2023 Census data, roughly four per cent of the total population — or 213,849 people — reported they could hold a conversation in te reo Māori, with 20.5 per cent of those identifying as Māori.

These figures, of course, are self-reported and quite likely inflated. “Holding a conversation” could mean little more than offering simple greetings and very basic inquiries. As historian Paul Moon said in discussion with Dane Giraud on a Free Speech Union podcast last week, “There is a tendency to overreport fluency.”

He related conducting an unscientific experiment with a friend, who is a native te reo speaker, by visiting markets around Auckland over 18 months and listening to the different languages being spoken.

“We heard Samoan and Tongan, Korean, Eastern European languages, Asian languages, and so on… But in all the places we went to over 18 months, we never once heard people talking conversationally in te reo”.

If more than 200,000 New Zealanders were fluent in the language, you might expect that they would have overheard at least a handful of conversations.

Professor Moon — who described himself as “a good friend of te reo” — saw dangers in misrepresenting how widely Māori is spoken because many people will conclude the revitalisation project is proceeding much better than it actually is and become complacent about the need to further support it.

One obvious conclusion to take from his view about creating “false hope” is that RNZ’s extravagant boosterism may, in fact, be doing more harm than good.

Another perhaps less welcome conclusion, of course, is that the hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars that have been spent over 50 years on revitalisation have largely been a waste.

Moon supports the revitalisation efforts, but acknowledges a dismal truth: no indigenous second language has been successfully revived anywhere in the world. And the chances of te reo being resurrected are not encouraging given the experience of Wales and Ireland, where the vast majority of the population are native Welsh and Irish but revitalisation has had only mixed success.

Te reo, however, is the ancestral tongue of only a small minority making up 17 per cent of New Zealand’s populace. Somehow imagining the other 83 per cent will devote time to learning a language they have no obvious use for or interest in requires a heroic leap of faith.

RNZ also regularly runs boilerplate articles on people gaining salvation through learning te reo. Most recently, it was a 70-something Pakeha woman whose study was reportedly helping her understand “Aotearoa differently”.

“Though it will never be my language or my culture, by learning the reo you unlock so much about the culture that you're unaware of if you don’t speak the reo,” she said, while admitting she was not a natural linguist and would never become fluent.

Predictably, she acknowledged the usual RNZ pieties — including the obligatory nods to the connection Māori have to nature and the Treaty being a partnership. She also confessed to being “very disturbed by recent attempts to remove the reo, and aspects of Māori representation on councils”.

It goes without saying RNZ’s journalists will never seek out someone who is learning the language but who also objects to democracy being subverted by unelected iwi members on councils — or who supports the aims of the Treaty Principles Bill.

It also goes without saying its journalists are never going to interview anyone — Māori or not — who is studying Latin and Ancient Greek to connect with two of the richest and most influential civilisations the world has ever seen.

Yet with Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey dominating the international box office right now, it would be highly topical to discover someone immersed in Homeric Greek happy to extol the benefits of their study. But lauding the intellectual foundations of Western culture is not part of RNZ’s mission (or “kaupapa”, as it would no doubt describe it).

At its heart, the broadcaster’s strategy is to spruik the study of Māori language as the key to unlocking the gates to the magical kingdom of te Ao Māori. This is a fraudulent — and counter-productive — endeavour on two principal counts.

First, anyone who has struggled to learn a second language knows that gains from mastering a language are hard won over many years of intense study. And unless the student is fully immersed in that language, the attempt for most will be brutally disappointing. Enrolling in a te reo class for a couple of hours a week won’t deliver the cultural insights RNZ likes to imagine.

Nevertheless, in RNZ’s eyes, it’s apparently enough to enrol in a course to be connected to Māori culture and to become immediately virtuous.

Second, RNZ’s strategy depends on romanticising Māori history and culture.

This goal can only be achieved, of course by overlooking the less-flattering aspects of Māori history — slavery, cannibalism, and endless internecine warfare.

Topics such as the role of Māori allies (kupapa) fighting alongside British forces and the slaughter of Māori by Māori during the Musket Wars are studiously ignored.

The most telling example of RNZ’s bias in recounting Māori history is that the Crown’s 1881 invasion of pacifist Parihaka — during which no one died — has been covered or mentioned hundreds of times in the past decade whereas the genocide of the pacifist Moriori by two bloodthirsty Taranaki iwi after their invasion in 1835 is rarely featured.

Māori history and culture is obviously a very important strand in New Zealand society — and often a fascinating one — but the bowdlerised and black-armband version that RNZ provides only hurts its credibility.

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Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist.