Graham Adams: Can the Māori Health Authority really boost Māori life expectancy?

The purpose of the new race-based agency is mostly to fulfil the radical co-governance aims outlined in He Puapua.

Patrick Gower asserted recently on Newshub Nation that the burning question David Seymour has to answer in opposing co-governance is:

Why if a Māori child is born, like in the house next door to me, do they live for seven years less than the child born in this [Pakeha] house?

Newshub’s high-profile national correspondent was undoubtedly referring to the claim that the Māori Health Authority will improve poor Māori health statistics, including life expectancy.

It is due to swing into action on July 1, but both Seymour and Christopher Luxon have promised to abolish it if a National-Act government is elected next year.

Pointing at the house to his left, Gower announced his challenge to Seymour with an air of triumph — as if he had gone straight to the heart of the matter with a unique and devastating personal insight.

Don Brash: Absolutely no logic in a separate Maori Health Authority

Not many months after the 2020 election freed the Labour Party from the constraints which New Zealand First had placed on them between 2017 and 2020, the Government admitted to commissioning the most radical plan for over-turning New Zealand’s constitution since the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840.

It was called He Puapua, and I have written about its quite extraordinary implications previously. In short, it envisages New Zealand’s moving away from being a Parliamentary democracy in which all adult citizens have an equal vote to one in which those who chance to have some Maori ancestry – always now with some non-Maori ancestry – have a much larger say in how things are run. The ultimate aim was to put the small minority with some Maori ancestry on a par, politically, with those without such ancestry.

“Not Government policy”, the Prime Minister declared, but continued with policies designed to achieve exactly that goal.