Barrie Davis: Matauranga Maori is a Myth

The New Zealand Parliament is now receiving advice which is informed by maturanga Maori, New Zealand universities are offering courses on maturanga Maori, and New Zealand corporations are incorporating maturanga Maori in their business practices. What is maturanga Maori and why have our institutions accepted it so readily?

Professor Sir Sidney (Hirini) Moko Mead, a foundation professor of Maori studies at Victoria University and a prolific author, has this year published Matauranga Maori, a book about Maori knowledge. It is a companion volume to his 2003 book Tikanga Maori on Maori practices and values. I will consult his Matauranga Maori to consider the above question.

Barry Brill - Passports: Reverting to "New Zealand"

Letter to The Minister of Internal Affairs - Hon Brooke van Velden

Kia 
ora
 Minister

The 
media 
has 
reported
 your intention
 to 
restore 
the 
priority 
of 
the
 English 
language
 version
 of
our 
passports.
 In 
this regard,
 you 
might
 be 
interested 
in 
our 
experience 
in
 Mauritania:

A.E. Thompson: Encouraging the Survival of Te Reo

Even assuming a case can be defended for taxpayer-funded efforts to revive or to maintain te reo, what we are seeing seems a stupid way to go about achieving that.

Throwing in Maori substitutes for an arbitrary range of words in English narratives (e.g. 'mahi', 'whanau' and 'motu') will at best lead to many people recognising and perhaps using those few words but remaining completely unable to participate in a Maori language conversation either as a listener or speaker. There will always be a constraint on how many Maori terms can be inserted into an English utterance before it becomes so burdened with te reo it will no longer be intelligible to most of the English-speaking world. We are probably close to that limit already.

NZCPR Newsletter: Reversing the Cultural Takeover

All around New Zealand there’s a growing concern that a cultural takeover of our country is underway. It’s a problem that’s being exacerbated by the weaponisation of “Te Tiriti o Waitangi”, and the domination of the Maori language.

Guest Post: Diversity in NZ

A guest post by a reader on Kiwiblog:

I’m a naturalized citizen in NZ. Meaning my kids are aware of and somewhat interested in their American heritage as well as their NZ history. So my daughter’s school was having a Diversity Day where students from different backgrounds were encouraged to show off parts of their culture. Parents were invited to see the event and explore what diverse cultures were at the school.

Wendy Geus: Similar Journeys Reflect the Time We’re In

The left-wing media will have you believe the current National Government in New Zealand and Republican party in the US have recently made major radical moves to the right. That they are taking us back to the ’70s or even the ’50s.

That is rubbish and is a deliberate narrative to misrepresent and conceal the radical changes of the past three years (in NZ) by the political left; changes which were not campaigned on and were hidden from us by the most radical and corrupt of any government in our history, with full compliance from the media.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Why is MFAT ramping down its use of Te Reo Māori?

Probably the most interesting development of the day kind of related to the coalition negations is the fact that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been busted deliberately ramping down its use of Te Reo Māori to make the incoming Government happy.

At MFAT, if staff want to write a formal message to a Minister, they use a template. Until about a couple of weeks ago, that template told staff to use Māori words instead of some English words.

Graham Adams: Does learning te reo make you virtuous?

A week before election day, TVNZ’s John Campbell went to a polling station in Ōtara, South Auckland, to lie in wait for voters.

When he encountered a young Māori woman who was about to vote for the first time, his trademark gushiness was unleashed:

“Mere is nineteen. She speaks fluent te reo Māori and English. She’s one of those young people whose sense of self sparkles. Her bilingualism must be such an affront to those of us so insecure we paint out the word ‘rāpihi’ on a rubbish bin. That strange, mean, brittle fear, that makes being enriched feel like being diminished.”

Peter Hemmingson: White Settler ‘Wickedness’?

“In the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King. And he that does not know his own history is at the mercy of every lying windbag.” – outgoing Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe, in his 1935 farewell address

Truth-telling surely obliges us to torpedo the oft-repeated assertion that 19th Century white settler governments wiped out the Maori language as part of a deliberate policy of enforced assimilation.

Hitler’s Big Lie technique: repeat a lie over and over until it becomes the ‘truth.’

Peter Hemmingson: The Trojan Horse of Te Reo

It is important to understand the key role of the Māori language in the ever-increasing Maorification of Everything.

The Māori language is of huge assistance in further conditioning the public mind into accepting the “One country, two peoples, our country” co-governance agenda of brown supremacist part-Maori.

Marama Fox, former Maori Party co-leader, admitted as much in an interview in The Listener” before the 2017 election.

Peter Williams: Is there no end to the waste?

Fiscal discipline missing at DOC

On May 24th this year, the Deputy Director General of the Department of Conservation Mike Tully emailed other members of the senior leadership team and other line managers at the department.

This was soon after the Budget, where DOC did not get a significant increase in funding and is facing a multi-million dollar budget shortfall.

Mr Tully is pretty frank. He wrote: “To be transparent, the initial view shows that we do not have sufficient funding to cover our basic running costs.”

Wendy Geus: If the Right Regain Power

Does Seymour have the spine to become a ‘Matt Gaetz’ type of figure?

Republican politician Matt Gaetz, leader of the renegades who got their demands by holding out on Kevin McCarthy’s election for House speaker, has been labelled far right. It is an insult designed to give him a negative image and it is one commonly used in New Zealand as well.

However, all he wanted was more oversight and transparency and he was afraid that without assurances in writing, McCarthy would do what speakers before him like Paul Ryan and John Boehner did: weaken in the face of staunch criticism and opposition from the Democrats and the entrenched left-wing media.

Karl du Fresne: The cautionary tale of the Woodville Wire

Ever heard of the Woodville Wire? No, I hadn’t either, until a couple of days ago. It’s a newsletter that publishes community news and comment on local issues in a southern Hawke’s Bay town where nothing much happens (at least, not usually).

I'm guessing the Wire’s readership would be counted in the hundreds, at most, yet this very modest news sheet has unexpectedly been pitched headlong into the culture wars. What follows is a cautionary tale about the febrile state of Maori-Pakeha relations and the precariousness of free speech in a climate of state-sanctioned authoritarian orthodoxy.

Greg Newbold: English Literacy Essential

The following is an unpublished letter written by Greg Newbold to the Bay of Plenty Times.

In his article, 'Literacy in NZ Does Not Stop at English' (BOP Times 24 August), John MacDonald looks forward to a time when all schools will teach Maori language as a core subject alongside English. He envisages a future where competence in te reo will be essential at all levels in the public sector and even in private areas such as law, medicine and engineering. And he applauds it.

As someone who has just finished a 32-year lecturing career at Canterbury University, I can see some major problems with this proposal.

A.E. Thompson: The Newly Named Government of our Newly Named Country

 

We are seeing huge changes to our government and its services under false claims about what the Treaty of Waitangi said, even assuming it's at all sensible to engage in the mental gymnastics required to apply any such treaty to circumstances far removed from the era for which it was designed. Let’s look at some of what's happening to our administration under our noses.

 

According to its new logo, our government now calls itself 'Te Kawanatanga O Aotearoa' with 'New Zealand Government' as a deliberately lesser postscript underneath. There appears to have been no warning about this, no opportunity for the public to consider it. It wasn't mentioned at all in Labour's election campaign. "Big deal, it's just a Maori name for government" some might say, but it's a lot more than that. It's not just adding a Maori name, it's prioritizimg that name and essentially renaming our government.

Michael Bassett: Jacinda force feeds us Te ao Maori

Are you, like me, getting sick and tired of being told that everything about our culture is inferior to Maori, and that we should learn to live with a constant diet of Te Reo? Turn on Radio New Zealand in the morning and Susie Fergusson, Guyon Espiner and even Corin Dann do the news introductions in Maori. Try Midday Report and you get Mani Dunlop showering us with untranslated Maori phrases. “Aotearoa”, we keep being told, wrongly, is “the original name for New Zealand” when it wasn’t. As an historian who spent a decade on the Waitangi Tribunal, I abhor such crass ignorance.

Cam Slater: Then How Come It Is Being Shoved Down Our Throats?

Apparently te reo is a taonga and so precious that it must not be spread around willy-nilly by virtue signalling white people learning te lingo, so says Peeni Henare. Perhaps he might like to tell his own Government and their lickspittles in the bribed and corrupted media to stop shoving Maori down our throats.

Government minister and Tamaki Makaurau MP Peeni Henare has revealed he doesn’t want te reo Maori to be introduced in schools as a core subject.

Graham Adams: Are Pakeha really the bad guys in the demise of te reo?

To mark the beginning of Māori Language Week, veteran journalist Janet Wilson began a Listener magazine story: “It’s the language that refuses to die, despite efforts across generations to kill it.”

There was no explanation in the succeeding six pages of what the writer meant by her opening statement — no doubt because, in the long-running and simplistic morality play staged everywhere in our media, the protagonists and antagonists need no introduction. It is, according to received wisdom, the malign machinations of Pakeha that suppressed te reo Maori “across generations”.

Graham Adams: The puzzling push for te reo in public

I have spent many years learning languages other than English — formally at school and university, and informally in private — but I find it difficult to grasp exactly what the current craze for inserting untranslated phrases in te reo Māori into English broadcasts and publications is expected to achieve.

Recently, a press release by Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta said her travels to Niue and Tonga were “to engage kanohi ki te kanohi with counterparts”.

As a wag on the Point of Order blog noted: “We imagine this is a legal form of behaviour among consenting adults and look forward to the television coverage.”

Bob Jones: Heresy at the Dominion Post

Last week blood-curdling screaming saw the Police storming the Dominion-Post’s offices, there to find and release a sub-editor being subjected to a brutal flogging. My how he’d sinned.

It transpired he’d run an item he should never have allowed to be published, and if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d put it on the front page.

This was a cry of woe from a Professor Rawinia Higgins, a language and culture specialist, these being perfectly legitimate fields of study, as also mind you, are medieval church architecture, lycanthropy and no end of other topics.

Professor Higgins is a Maori Language Commissioner and she was bemoaning the absence of progress in persuading the public to resurrect a dead language, namely maori.