Damien Grant: New Zealand is where we live. Not who we are

Who won Olympic Gold at Paris for New Zealand?

If you can recall more than one champion you have done better than me. Ten individuals or teams brought home gold. By contrast, for older readers, who won two gold medals for swimming at the 1996 games in Atlanta?

I’m asking this question as I sit at a café in the Korean city of Jeonju. Or more precisely, the South Korean city. Korea is one nation divided by history but still, I think, a single nation, in the same way Germany was divided but not irreparably so.

John Robertson: New Zealand’s Apartheid - Rebranded and Ready for the World

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to New Zealand 2.0: land of the long white cloud, kiwifruit, and apartheid. Oh, sorry, I mean co-governance. That’s the shiny, politically palatable term slapped on this grotesque social experiment where your rights depend on your bloodline, not your backbone. 

Once upon a time, Kiwis prided themselves on equality, unity, and fair play. But now? We’ve traded egalitarianism for a racial caste system that would make 1980s South Africa blush. The government’s genius idea? To divide a nation of five million into two camps: those with ancestral connections to a canoe and everyone else who has the misfortune of existing in the wrong lineage.

Brian Giesbrecht: Rosa Parks and The BIPOC Café

If you wonder how the social justice war is going, look no further than the University of Michigan-Dearborn. There, in the “diversity, equity and inclusion” activism that has all but replaced education in too many of our institutions of higher learning, the university’s “Center for Social Justice and Inclusion” established two remote “cafés”. 

One, the “BIPOC café” was for the exclusive use of “black, Indigenous and people of colour”. The other, the “non-POC café” was to be for white students only. The geniuses who dreamed this up abandoned the dreadful idea only after some heavy criticism on social media.

Perhaps the people who thought this was a good idea need a bit of a history lesson. One person they should learn about is Rosa Parks.