Maurice Williamson: Move to Māori names “madness”

Imagine you’d decided to leave the car at home and make the shift to public transport.

After all, if you live around the Pakuranga part of town, you’ve been the subject of construction fatigue for years and years, and you finally thought “I might give the Eastern Busway a go”.

Cam Slater: Let’s Hope So

The woke wombles at Stuff are all enraged that the incoming Government may axe all the Maori names and use of Maori in communications. Chance’d be a fine thing, given how woke Christopher Luxon is. But if there are changes they are likely being driven by David Seymour and Winston Peters.

Garrick Tremain: Foundation stone

 Here is Garrick Tremain's cartoon commentary on woke maori names, bungling and cost cutting! 

Denis Hall: Renaming New Zealand's modern cities

The modern cities of Auckland - - Hamilton and Wellington - Christchurch and Dunedin - and the smaller ones of - Napier Hastings - New Plymouth - Palmerston North - Nelson - do not owe their existence in any way to Maori or Maori culture.

They - like so many smaller towns in New Zealand are representative of - and at the most fundamental level - entirely the product of the European culture and enterprise and investment and work ethic and technology and tradition and plain hard work - that took more than - in some places - two hundred years to build.

European culture, hard work and enterprise created them - with no cultural help from anywhere.

Warren Sanderson: City Rail Link Stations - or Mythical Symbolism to Excess

I read that the City Rail Link's Manu Whenua Forum which would appear to be a Maori Tribal Group have “gifted” to Auckland names for the two new stations and the two existing stations on the CRL.

This “gift” should be politely declined by the New Zealand Geographic Board and here is the reason why. Let’s take each station in turn:

1.    AOTEA: The proposed new name is Te Wai Horotiu. 

Firstly, for moderately mature Aucklanders this name suggests a meatworks situated just north of Hamilton, which is not a good start. It is stated that the name is from the stream that ran down the Queen Street valley to the harbour. In reality this muddy stream that ran down the valley to the harbour was not a pleasant feature of early Auckland and the street  was certainly improved for both pedestrians and horse traffic when piped underground.