Point of Order: Coming up with a new name for this commission was a walkover?

Not when it is developing a Treaty partnership

The news from an outfit called the Walking Outdoor Access Commission was startlingly summed up in four words in a press statement headline: We’re changing our name.

The fundamental change should have be no more than the removal of the word “walking”, because (as the press statement tells us):

“Our new name recognises more than the breadth of trail users, which range from people in tramping boots to fishing waders, sitting astride a horse or a bike, shouldering a rifle or pushing a stroller.”

And so, the new name will be the Outdoor Access Commission?

Bruce Moon: Changing our Country’s Name by Stealth

To anybody who is reasonably observant, the rapid increase in appearance of the word “Aotearoa” in print and the spoken word will appear very striking, even sinister.  Thus, even the recently appointed Race Relations Commissioner, Dame Susan Devoy, has used it and it has appeared on postage stamps in larger print than our country’s real name.  What is going on?  Is our country’s name being changed by stealth?  We are New Zealanders – surely we are proud of that!  By what right can anybody alter it?

As always, we can get some perspective by looking at our history which tells us that “Aotearoa” is a quite recent upstart with scant justification, if any at all, to be used as our country’s name.

Reuben Chapple: Gross Impudence

“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 1922 farewell address

 New Zealand is increasingly being referred to in the public square as “Aotearoa” or “Aotearoa New Zealand.” This fiction deserves to be mercilessly deconstructed.