Barrie Davis: Better Together

We, the people of New Zealand, are being forced apart by our own representative Parliament into two groups – part-Maori and non-Maori. Here is my understanding of the situation:

Wayne Ryburn: Reframing New Zealand’s History

New Zealand's mainstream media continues to propagate the one-sided history espoused by the Waitangi Tribunal, activist Maori academics and their pakeha acolytes, as our official history. History is complex and comes with many perspectives. Several articles published in the NZ Herald during 2024 and more recently, by authors Simon Wilson, Julia Gabel, and Audrey Young, clearly indicate their support for viewpoints propagated by the Waitangi Tribunal and contemporary iwi.

John Porter: Tell a Lie Big Enough…

Google the term "indigenous" and you will find a multitude of interpretations.

Cambridge Dictionary – indigenous = adjective

· used to refer to, or relating to, the people who originally lived in a place, rather than people who moved there from somewhere else.

Tony Orman: Natural Climate Change

An article in a recent farming paper entitled “Carbon Credits a Discredit” by Leo Cooney rekindled questions about climate change, the ETS, indeed the whole matter of climate change formerly known as global warming. There arises much confusion in the manipulation by proponents of global warming to any modicum of thought and pondering.

I have pondered why the term "global warming” reverted to "climate change"? That in itself is confusing because climate change has always been happening in cyclic fashion. There’s scientific evidence.

Bruce Moon: A University Professor denounces our wicked ways - As he sees them!

In “Stuff” for 16 July 2022, Jacob Edmond, a professor of English at the University of Otago, has written an “Opinion Piece”. In it, he says “mainly Pākehā writers and scholars speak out against what they claim is the inappropriate use of such words as ‘racism, ‘colonisation’ and ‘science’, [reflecting] a common fear: the fear of confronting the complexities and uncomfortable truths of this land, of coming to terms with their position as Pākehā in Aotearoa ... and their failure to confront the difficult history of colonial settler society [which] are Pākehā problems.”

Well, well, well! Most of that will come as quite a surprise to most of us! Just for a start, it might be news to him that many of us, descended from colonists from Europe, find his use of the term “Pakeha” complete with the mandatory bars over some vowels to be culturally offensive. Second, he appears to be ignorant of the plain fact that “Aotearoa” was never a name for New Zealand in pre-colonial Maori usage, but was simply concocted as such by a couple of white men in the 1890s (with a few loose occasional references earlier). If he doubts this, he could try looking for it in the Treaty of Waitangi where the Williams, seventeen years in New Zealand and fluent in the Maori language, would certainly have used that name had Maoris been doing so. But these, when all is said and done, are merely fashionable, but silly, peccadilloes.

Karl du Fresne: My reply to Shelley (whoever she is)

I received the following comment last month from someone identified only as Shelley. (We can’t be sure Shelley is female, because we can’t know anything about people who shelter behind pseudonyms. However for the sake of convenience I will assume she is a woman and therefore use the appropriate pronoun. The woke “they” will never be used on this blog to refer to a single person.)
Shelley’s comment was written in response to my post Pssst ... don't mention the iwi and ran as follows:

It really is hilarious each time I read or hear ideas such as yours that 50/50 co-governance with Iwi is simply the worst thing since Todd Muller and Nikki Kaye teamed up… stop it, nothing could ever be worse than that. Your blog is as polarising as a fart in an elevator, scattering people to each far flung corner and then out the door. And so predictable. Talking about the elephant in the room - that Māori may ask for more, massa? Please, sir, I want some more? Oooh aaah! Gosh, sorry bout it but the elephant in the room is dead! Māori are rockstars of our little country. Pākehā who don’t want to be Tangata Tiriti are like old beans on a bean rack - they will shrivel up and fall off, while all the young shoots thrive! The racist assertions spouted here are as old and worn out as Chris Luxon’s bic razor. This blog and the blogger are passé - like yesterday’s shrimp cocktail. Fear mongering about Māori is a yawn. There is nothing new in this space. Find somebody else to pick on [phrase deleted here because it smears someone not in a position to defend herself]. Cos we’re not gonna take it anymore. Ngā mihi ki a koutou. PS: I love mixed metaphor. Shelley.

I’m breaking my own rule by publishing a comment that directly attacks me anonymously, but I’m doing so for several reasons. One is that it illustrates what we’re up against in trying to argue rationally with people who resort to crude, simplistic caricatures and indulge in ad hominem arguments.

Another is that by running it, I deny Shelley the satisfaction of saying “See, this racist blogger shut me down because he doesn’t like what I’m saying”.

While Shelley has no right to be published here, since she breaks the rules of this blog by directly attacking me without identifying herself, I decided to publish her comment because I believe in free speech, and because she expresses opinions that some other people almost certainly share. Even people who hide behind pseudonyms have a right to free speech, although the rest of us are equally entitled to take no notice of them.

But I have another reason for publishing her rant, which is that it gives me an opportunity to put one or two things straight.

Point of Order: Brace for more change and for the Treaty to be further sanctified in public policy prescriptions

It’s a great day for change or the prospect of change – of the Earthquake Commission, the teaching of history in our schools, the work of the ACC and gambling regulations. It’s a great day, too, for the Ardern government’s programme of sanctifying the Treaty of Waitangi.

Earthquake Commission Minister David Clark announced that making a claim following a natural disaster will be easier soon thanks to a Bill introduced today.

Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti announced a review of pokie machine regulations to “reduce harm to vulnerable communities” (or people who gamble money when they can’t afford to lose).

Education Minister Chris Hipkins announced every young person in school will soon start learning about how New Zealand’s histories have shaped our lives.

Nicholas Kerr: Unleashing New Zealand’s Potential and Suppressing Washington State’s—Lessons for Texas

This speech was delivered to the Dallas Chapter of the Bastiat Society on June 17, 2021.

In 1847, French economist Frédéric Bastiat, this society’s namesake, published a facetious petition to the king now known as “The Right Hand and the Left”. In it he laid bare the fallacy of some of his contemporaries that if you simply create more work, regardless of whether it’s productive work, everyone will be wealthier. The proposition he makes to the king is to require everyone to work with their left hand and not their right. He proposes:

Murray Reid: Māori History and Language

I am 73 and grew up in Hamilton at a time when there were almost no Māori in the town, except to the west in Frankton. I went to Whitiora Primary, Peachgrove Intermediate and Hamilton Boys High School and my class photos show virtually no brown faces. If there were any Māori children they were just kids to us. High school was a bit of an exception but I think the few Māori boys there were from Raglan and Ngaruawahia. Again, they were just part of the mix.

Consequently, I grew up with almost zero Māori contact or knowledge and from memory our class social studies teaching was very superficial.

Once I started work in the mid 1960’s things changed as I was posted to places like Mt Maunganui and Taneatua. The industry I was in, and allied to, had many Māori workers. We mixed and mingled freely on the job and over a beer. I enjoyed the banter, some of which had racial overtones. They gave as good as they received, often with a smattering of Māori words or phrases. When I sort translations, there were always roars of laughter, from all parties.

Owen McShane: Who do we Think we Are?

James Belich’s remarkable book “Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World” (2009) certainly challenged the conventional version of the early settlement of New Zealand. We had grown used to being labeled “colonizers” extending the powers and reach of the British Imperial Empire. But Belich declared New Zealand was nobody’s “colony” but was settled by people determined to create a new world – a world of their own design and choosing. My father’s Irish forebears settled here in the late 1830s. My mother’s Welsh forebears arrived in the early 1900s. Both my parents were atheists and Fabian Socialists. I never heard either of them suggest their families were here to promote the interests of the Brittish Imperial Empire.

Ron Smith: Afghanistan and the SAS

It was entirely predictable that news of the death on active service in Afghanistan of L/Cpl Leon Smith of the NZ SAS detachment would be greeted by an almost unanimous media chorus of questions about bringing the troops home. It was predictable because that was what had happened on the previous occasion (the death of Cpl Grant in late August), and, with variations, on occasions before that.

Almost as sadly predictable was the response of New Zealand politicians, with the exception of those who are actually politically responsible for the deployment at the present time. All the rest, including those who had been politically responsible at earlier times, and who ought to have known better (for example, Phil Goff) dutifully answered in the affirmative, ‘Yes, the SAS detachment should be brought home’. So what are we to make of this?

Ron Smith: Scholarship and Truth

The World Extra section of a recent edition of the Waikato Times (September 3) leads with an article taken from The Times of London concerning the situation of academic staff at some American universities (religious foundations) who have lost their jobs because they have challenged the literal truth of certain articles of faith. Specifically, some faculty staff were having difficulty in maintaining their support for the creation story, in general, and, specifically, for the notion that humanity is descended from a single couple, namely Adam and Eve; this in the light of the enormous amount of knowledge, now available, about the evolution of the planet and of life on it.

Behind the Times discussion was the widely-shared assumption, that university scholars should be free to challenge knowledge claims, in whatever domain, and that it is dubious scholarship to attempt to maintain these kinds of myth in the face of overwhelming evidence that they cannot be literally true.