Posted on 08/23/2004 4:33:34 AM PDT by NZerFromHK
The Maori Party is already driving a larger and considerably more dangerous wedge into the New Zealand Left than anything so far inserted by the National Party.
As it grows in strength and consolidates its already powerful grip on the Maori imagination, the Maori Party has the potential to split Labour into two hostile camps, aggravate racial sensitivities within the trade union movement, and push the Greens below the all-important 5% MMP threshold.
The Left's vulnerability to the Maori Party is entirely of its own making.
From the early-1980s, the critical "sites of struggle" for most progressive political activists shifted from issues relating to class to issues relating to identity (race, gender and sexuality).
With the benefit of 20 years' hindsight, they would have done better to stick with class.
Unfortunately for the working people who were once its prime beneficiaries, the experience of the 1981 Springbok Tour fundamentally re-wired the thinking of the (mostly) middle-class progressive movement.
The thin Marxist veneer many had acquired during their years at university simply could not survive their encounter with the racism, sexism and homophobia of the real-life, rugby-loving proletariat.
The veteran protester, Tim Shadbolt, summed up the situation nicely on the day of the abortive Hamilton game.
When someone driving past the still-assembling anti-tour marchers called out: "What's this, a rising of the workers?" Shadbolt shot back: "You'd better hope not. They're all at the game!"
Following the tour, the "identity" politicians castigated the traditional left-wing pre-occupation with issues of class.
They accused the traditionalists of evading the "real issues" - ie, institutional racism, the Treaty of Waitangi, pornography, domestic violence and the suppression of gay and lesbian sexuality.
About the only concession to old-style worker politics was the trade union feminists' campaign for pay equity.
The identity politicians' world-view was succinctly summed-up on a badge I once encountered, pinned to the chest of a hard-line student feminist: "Socialism," it declared, "is the limit of the patriarchal imagination."
But the tensions straining the relationships between progressive men and women were nothing compared to the political animosities between progressive Maori and Pakeha.
As Stephen Stratford writes in The Dirty Decade: New Zealand in the 80s: "Behind the scenes of HART and the other groups organising anti-apartheid marches and sit-ins, radical Maori activists like Donna Awatere and Ripeka Evans were making sure that the anti-racist activity wouldn't stop when the Springboks went home.
"They pointed out that Pakeha liberals were more concerned with injustice in South Africa than here in New Zealand.
"They drew attention to the fact that there was also injustice in New Zealand, but that long-festering resentments over the land confiscations of the nineteenth century - and even, as in Raglan and Bastion Point, the twentieth century - was news to most."
This guilt-tripping tactic soon deepened into a wholesale rejection of everything to do with Pakeha society.
Donna Awatere, the author of Maori Sovereignty (a hugely influential series of articles published in the NZ feminist magazine Broadsheet ) regarded Pakeha New Zealanders as, to quote Metro columnist Bruce Jesson: "exploitative, oppressive, dehumanised and spiritually deficient - obsessed with individual self-interest, material gain and personal comfort."
Awatere, herself, wrote that she was certain of two things: "First, that we cannot become a bicultural society because deep-rooted elements within Pakeha culture will prevent it and secondly that even if it were possible it is eminently undesirable, something like trying to mate with a barracuda."
And, just in case any liberal "barracudas" were in any doubt about how the Maori militants felt about them, Hana Te Hemara's infamous 1988 statement that it would be preferable for Maori prisoners contemplating suicide to "kill a Pakeha first and die a hero" clarified matters nicely.
The vast majority of New Zealanders, Maori as well as Pakeha, who lived outside the hot-house environment of liberal-left activism were only vaguely aware of these developments.
They witnessed the intensifying conflict surrounding the celebration of Waitangi Day and were duly shocked by the Sunday Times‚ "Kill a White" headline.
But, by and large, most remained blissfully ignorant of the increasingly acrimonious quality of the race relations debate and the effect it was having on the nation's intellectual leadership.
In the universities, the civil service bureaucracy, the state-sector unions, and even some of the larger corporations, deferring to Maori sensitivities became the accepted norm.
Treaty "workshops" drove the precepts of Maori nationalism deep into brow-beaten Pakeha psyches.
Eventually, "acknowledging the Treaty of Waitangi as New Zealand's founding document" became as automatic for Pakeha leftists as the genuflections of a devout Catholic.
By the end of the 1980s, the only acceptable role for these "reconstructed" Pakeha "anti-racists" was to clear the way for Maori initiatives without question.
The legacy of this period is all around us: institutionally in the Waitangi Tribunal's extended purview; judicially, in the Court of Appeal's "partnership" decision; educationally, in the development of kohanga reo, kura kaupapa and wananga; economically, in the Maori corporates erected on the substantial treaty settlements of the 1990s; ideologically, in the rise of the neo-traditionalist "two worlds" paradigm of New Zealand race relations; and politically, in the persons of politicians like Margaret Wilson, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Metiria Turei and, of course, Tariana Turia.
In many respects Turia's Maori Party represents the political culmination of the so-called "Maori Renaissance" which began more than 30 years ago.
Indeed, the children of the Renaissance are among the Maori Party's most enthusiastic recruits.
Many are employed in the state and local government sectors to administer the numerous programmes established under the "Treaty Partnership Model" inspired by the NZ Maori Council vs The Attorney General decision of the Court of Appeal in 1985.
Others work for iwi-based corporations, Maori radio stations and, more latterly, Maori Television.
But not only the new Maori middle class is flocking to join the Maori Party.
In small towns and rural hamlets all across the North Island, working-class Maori Party members, equipped with their official clipboards, are methodically canvassing every registered Maori voter in the district.
The message they take to the doorstep, courtesy of Tariana Turia's by-election campaign manager Matt McCarten, is simple and direct. "We want to sit at the table with the Pakeha, not do deals with them under it."
There is a chunk of Labour's rank-and-file membership, probably quite a large chunk, who will instinctively warm to that message.
Similarly, not everyone in the Labour caucus is as hostile towards the Maori Party as John Tamihere, Dover Samuels, Ruth Dyson, Trevor Mallard and Helen Clark.
There will be some, possibly many, who are secretly hoping that, when the dust of next year's election has settled, the Maori Party will reveal its true left-wing colours.
In the unions too, there are conflicting reactions to the advent of the Maori Party, especially within those (mostly state sector) unions which have done the good bicultural thing and set up special Maori structures in their organisations. The Public Service Association, the Nurses Union and the PPTA all fall into this category.
Any attempt on the part of union officials loyal to the government to ban or suppress Maori Party organisation among the rank-and-file is likely to have extremely divisive repercussions.
In the private sector unions, most particularly those affiliated to the Labour Party, pressures are already growing among Maori members to broaden the scope of their union's political relationships to include the Maori Party.
Once again, Labour supporters won't like it, but in the interests of unity are unlikely to try and stop it.
The Greens' devotion to the interests of the Maori Party has become positively embarrassing.
The merest hint of government bullying, as with the political harassment of Amokura Panoho a fortnight ago, and the Greens' staunchest Maori nationalist, Metiria Turei, can be guaranteed to leap to their defence with - at the very least - a press release.
This level of support carries significant risk.
The "trendier" fraction of the Greens' social-liberal support base may interpret such staunchness as meaning the Maori Party possesses more in the way of radical cachet - and vote accordingly.
The party's more conservative supporters, especially those determined to preserve full public access to New Zealand's wild spaces, may move in the opposite direction, interpreting such open support for the radical Maori agenda as an affront to their core environmental values.
The fate of the Alliance, currently tearing itself to pieces over how best to respond to the Maori Party, is not yet being interpreted as a portent of the sort of rancour which may soon engulf other left-wing organisations.
Even so, the battle lines dividing the older members of the Alliance, with their historical suspicions of nationalist politics in all its forms, from younger members espousing the identity politics of the 1980s and '90s, are highly suggestive of the shape of things to come.
"Progressive" New Zealanders will struggle to remain unemotional about the Maori Party phenomenon.
Throughout the 1980s and '90s they were encouraged to view their country's history as an unrelieved tragedy of force and fraud.
Pakeha culture, when acknowledged at all, was derided as weak and derivative and certainly not to be compared to the rich cultural heritage of the tangata whenua.
For a great many people on the Left, the Maori Party, as the authentic electoral voice of "an oppressed people," will be seen as automatically deserving all the support they can offer.
Most will not see, or wouldn't care if they did, that some of the most prominent supporters of the Maori Party are believers in a past that simply didn't happen and promoters of a future that most emphatically shouldn't.
Hone Harawira, for example, was reported in the Australian Green Left Weekly as informing an Asia Pacific Solidarity Conference held in Sydney during Easter 1998 that: "The Maori population was about one million when the Europeans came."
In the same speech Harawira warned the New Zealand government that "you can set up tribunals and commissions, you can give us compensation, you can put Maori people in charge of this and that, but at the end of the day we demand that the treaty be honoured: it guaranteed Maori government of our own lands, our own forests, our own fisheries."
The Maori businessmen quietly backing the Maori Party certainly wouldn't disagree with the last part of Harawira's statement: indeed, they're counting on it.
The Left of an earlier age would have poured its energy into warning the Maori employees of those businessmen that just because they happen to have been born with the same coloured skin as their boss, it doesn't mean he's going to pay them what they're worth.
The Left of today has become so dazzled by white sin it can no longer see brown privilege.
Chris Trotter is editor of NZ Political Review
It applies equally well to Native American (Indians) in the US (and to some extent blacks and affirmative actions), Inuit and First Nations issues in Canada, and the Aborigines in Australia.
Extremely interesting and informative article, especially for those of us who need to be reminded that the struggle against the leftist culture destroyers is a worldwide struggle-thanks for posting it.
Any democracy in which parties arise based on racial identification rather than political identification is one which is beginning its death throes. Either the Maori are part of the nation of New Zealand or they aren't. Racial separatism is not a process which can reach a moderate "okay, this is good enough, we'll stop here" conclusion.
Chillingly, I know some very radical Maori (though not even a majority among the sovereignists) declare that the nation of New Zealand was built on European (British) conquest of the land, and they have NO intention of honouring that nation. We have already reached there, and some of them are dreaming of sending all non-Maori people packing.
New Zimbabwe can't be far behind.
"Any democracy in which parties arise based on racial identification rather than political identification is one which is beginning its death throes."
Speaking of the USA ? Take out the proper names in that article and you have exactly an exact copy of the dnc and the "Progressive Socialist Democrat" party (aka DNC)
Except that if they try this, the people to be sent packing would be 90% of NZ's current population.
Except that if they try this, the people to be sent packing would be 90% of NZ's current population.
Maoris were treated a lot A WHOLE LOT better than a lot of other colonized peoples. Perhaps instead of throwing pies at Donald Brash, they should pay attention to his wonderful speech. He IS going to win whether they like it or not.
That just breaks my heart.
Not!
,,, no he's not - but the article is. Trotter's one of the left's most capable journalists but over the last few months to even the last year, he's worked out that The Independent is paying more in a month than Socialist Action could pay in five years for what he has to say.
Add the Hawaiians.
There is a serious secession movement in Hawaii aimed at indegenization and possible independence.
Forget the fact that Hawaii was ruled by a Queen, i.e. the embodiment of a repressive, antiquated, monarchical system of governance; Lili'oukalani had dark skin, therefore she is to be celebrated by ignorant socialists, who have no consistent ideology, other than opposing the status quo.
What strikes me as being even more ridiculous though, is this dispute over the Elgin Marbles. It confounds me that a former imperial nation, led by men who were essentially white-if a bit darker than their Northern European counterparts-can somehow fashion a self-serving argument on their behalf that relies upon contemporary, deconstructionist, anti-colonial claptrap, to acquire relics that haven't been in their nation's possession for years.
In my opinion, all of these people are boobs, whose opinions should be treated with the contempt that they have so rightfully earned.
,,, it's all on throughout the Pacific in that regard - New Caledonia and anywhere else you care to name to various degrees.
Thanks, and I myself would certainly classify Mr Trotter as on the Left. Give credit where it is due: he is able to see through the absurdity of today's identity-driven Leftist sentiments. They don't hesistate to support Third World nationalist movements which would earn scorns of "racism!" had they been led by developed world whites.
Give this to Keith Locke, Mark Gosche, Tariana Turia at home, Bob Brown in Australia, and Jesse Jackson, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Lee, Michael Moore in the United States, the entire Liberal Party, New Democratic Party, Green Party, and Quebecois Bloc in Canada, and everyone at the UK Guardian, Independent, Ken Livingstone, and the entire editorial board at Le Monde.
,,, the way things stand at present, the GREENS have much more credibility than LABOUR. At least they've stuck to the platforms they went to elections on last time.
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