Effi Lincoln: Failing the Commonsense Test

Failing the commonsense test: Concepts of equity in 1840 tribal Māori and fake treaty "principles" today.​

Equity means equality of outcome.  It’s a key demand of Māori supremacists. They say our government’s obligation to provide equality of outcomes arises directly from the “principles” created when their ancestors signed the Treaty of Waitangi 181 years ago.

They are more opaque when defining whether that equality of outcome should be applied on a tribal basis, or on an individual basis. Tribal equity and individual equity are two very different beasts.

On 6 August this year Michelle Mako, the “Director of Equity” at Te Aho o Te Kahu (literally meaning “To Be the Binding Thread of the Cloak” but somehow translating to “The Cancer Control Agency of New Zealand”), wrote a blog titled “In the interest of equity: Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.

Effi Lincoln: Nine ways to disengage from the Woke praxis of Critical Race Theory in New Zealand.

Every time you use te reo you owe Māori more.

New Zealanders are increasingly asking what is going wrong in our beautiful country, despite us working so hard to make it inclusive and fair?

Why are there increasing demands to dismantle and replace our culture, our language balance and indeed, our entire political system which, until now, we have understood to be generally heading in the right direction?

And New Zealanders are pleading to know; What can we do to stop this juggernaut hurtling us all down the road to ruin?

How can we push back?

Effi Lincoln: Gout and the Treaty-driven misrepresentation of health equity statistics.

“Research is political, and we must ask the question “who will benefit from the research?” [Irahapeti Ramsden.  Cultural Safety and Nursing Education in Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu – 2002]

Yes. We must ask…

So what is gout?

Gout is a painful and debilitating condition.

It runs in my family.  Doctors frequently treated it poorly.

I recall an elderly relative turning his gnarled, tophaceous hands in bemused horror at what they had become; another, stricken with gout, wincing silently as she chopped the onions.

Crying.

Their experience is a microcosm of the suffering many New Zealanders endure with gout.

It is an important condition that deserves wide recognition and continued efforts to manage using best practice.

Effi Lincoln: Why I stopped learning te reo

“These are strange days for Māori and politics, and the growing use of te reo is again a focus. Place names, greetings, familiar phrases: For some New Zealanders these words represent a threat”, said journalist Phillip Matthews disparagingly, in his Stuff article Mind your language: the backlash against the te reo revival (Stuff 11 June 21).

A “threat” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is defined as “an indication of something impending”.

Are you one of the New Zealanders feeling this threat of something impending?

If so, take heart, you are not alone and you are not a “flat earther”.  You have good cause to feel unease.  Something big is impending.  But to understand this, we need to step back from an immediate focus on te reo.  Focusing on this aspect of the threat is like focusing on the fin, rather than the shark.