Centrist: Almost traitorous’ - Laws slams Claire Charters....

Almost traitorous’: Laws slams Claire Charters for inviting UN to investigate ‘racist’ New Zealand

Michael Laws has accused leading Māori academics of “almost traitorous” behaviour after they told the UN that New Zealand is a racist, backwards regime guilty of cultural genocide.

Laws called the claims “a woeful and appalling misrepresentation of equality and democracy.”

John Porter: Why rob a bank when you can plunder the Treasury!

On October 8th, Associate Minister of Housing and Hamilton West MP Tama Potaka announced a multi-million dollar housing project with Waikato-Tainui. Potaka proudly advised the Government would invest $35 million in the project. 

“The Hopuhopu Housing Development will help deliver better social and community outcomes for whānau who will live, work, and build cultural identity there,” Potaka said. 

Alistair Boyce: “So, how is the revolution going?” - Waitangi 2024

Simple question but a complex and confronting one, especially to answer. 

When Te Pati Maori hierarchy are confronted with the question a contortion of confusion ensues and they run for the hills and the relative safety of established post-colonial New Zealand institutions. 

Is it “noise, noise, noise”, an ongoing ‘revolution by stealth’ or a ‘disparate rebellion’? It is certainly an ongoing continuum of activist and elite Maori being emboldened, empowered and entitled by public institutions with only unsettling paths to solutions that can never be fully resolved as the shifting sands of historical revisionism persist. 

Graham Adams: Treaty principles debate takes off

Underestimating David Seymour is a mistake.

Anyone who followed David Seymour’s patient championing of assisted dying will have a sneaking suspicion that history may well repeat itself in the Treaty principles debate. As Winston Peters might put it, this is not his first rodeo.

Karl du Fresne: We're all in the same waka

One thing that struck me about the background profiles published about Dame Cindy Kiro this week was that while listing her tribal affiliations, they also mentioned that her father came from the north of England.

It was only an incidental point, but it stood out because prominent Maori often don’t acknowledge their Pakeha antecedents.

It has become the norm for people of part-Maori descent to recite iwi connections, but without any reference to their European lineage. That inconvenient part of their ancestry is routinely erased.

I say “inconvenient” because I suspect it suits many part-Maori activists not to acknowledge their bicultural heritage, the reason being that their bloodlines demonstrate that New Zealand is a highly integrated society. This conflicts with their aim of portraying us as intrinsically and irreparably divided, with one side exerting dominance over the other.