Category Archives: New Zealand society, culture, politics

Walk on by? Māori and the “Compassion Gap”.

Posted on June 25, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

Most mornings I park my car at the Wellington Railway Station and briefly join the teeming masses heading into the CBD. Often I’ll walk by somewhat rumpled individuals sitting on the ground in the subway displaying hand-lettered cards asking for money. Often (not always) these individuals will be Māori. And every single time the same small war carries on in my head. My inner liberal asks: “how much can I spare today? Does she get any support from City Mission? How did she fall through the cracks?” My inner conservative asks ” If I give her any money will it go on food or alcohol? Did she bring this on herself? Why is she there? Where’s her whānau?” Often I don’t carry cash anyway, so the battle eventually abates and the parties evacuate my mind’s battlefield. If I do have cash I’ll usually give something, reserving one or two coins just in case I see someone else in the same position, or a charity seeking donations, on Lambton Quay later on. On a couple of occasions I have bought food and passed that on, rarely I’ll stop and talk to that person. Usually I make a conscious effort not to avert my eyes. But once or twice I have taken a detour to avoid prompting my inner turmoil altogether. Once, at night, I saw an old man standing and berating a seated young woman and her nodding politely in response. I told him to leave her alone. He did. Only once he got his point across. Several times.

I don’t actually know what other people think when they walk the same route, and I can’t presume. What I do suspect is that my internal decision-making process, springing from my own personal discretion, and formed by my internal values, is not dissimilar to thousands of decisions being made all around the country by charity and government workers springing from their own official or informal discretion. Rules and regulations abound, but at the heart of government welfare and charities are individuals making discretionary choices: help or not? Deserving or not? Right or wrong?

Another factor in decision-making may well be the nature of the distance between the decision-maker/observer and the person asking for help. Received wisdom holds that we are more likely to extend compassion to those most like us. Sometimes evidence suggests the poor are more likely to give to the poor, than the rich are, for example; ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/ )
although I dislike the counterproductive demonisation of wealthy people). Arguably it’s easier to feel empathy for those who somehow seem reachable across a divide. On the other hand, it might actually be easier to feel compassion for largely anonymous people half a world away, and have a picture of an African sponsored child on your fridge and walk past local supplicants every day (and yes, I speak from experience on that too).

An interesting tweet caught my eye the other day, from Sue Bradford. She was rueing the results of the Stuff/Ipsos Poll released on 20 June 2014 showing that over the course of the last two years increasing numbers of respondents have said they think New Zealand is heading in the “right” direction, while decreasing numbers thought us to be heading in the “wrong” direction. She tweeted;

This poll ‘63% think NZ on right track’ shows again the compassion-gap – for so many, homeless & poor don’t count http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/10179950/Voters-confident-of-NZs-direction

This term ‘compassion gap’ is interesting. It has figured a bit lately in New Zealand and overseas on the Net largely in the wake of a recent New York Times opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof in which he noted an interesting phenomenon in readers’ responses to an article he wrote about a three year old boy with a hearing impairment who had missed out on much needed intervention. Instead of readers focusing on the child, they directed harsh judgement against his mother who was poor, overweight and adorned with tattoos. Why, the readers asked, did this boy miss out on the help he needed when his mother was so clearly self indulgent? She, not the American public, was to blame for her son’s predicament. Kristof observed:

In that trailer in Appalachia, I don’t see a fat woman with tattoos; I see a loving mom who encapsulates any parent’s dreams for a child.

Johnny shouldn’t be written off at the age of 3 because of the straw he drew in the lottery of birth. To spread opportunity, let’s start by pointing fewer fingers and offering more helping hands. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/opinion/sunday/kristof-the-compassion-gap.html

In New Zealand this equivalent phenomenon can be easily seen, often with Māori faces providing an instantly recognisable target to illustrate the gap between those deserving of our compassion and those patently not. Cartoonist Al Nisbet captures (and many would say embodies) this understanding of Māori as the main group in the gap. Remember this charmer?

Al Nisbet Cartoon

The notion of a compassion gap towards poor Māori (deserving or undeserving) is not difficult to grasp or see, particularly when it is fed by mainstream notions of Māori (and especially poor Māori) being an identifiable and passive group at the bottom of the statistical heap separated from ordinary New Zealand, without agency or variety (except for that distinction between deserving and undeserving, of course).

Yeah. Well. Real life isn’t really so neatly dualistic. I’m interested in how Māori also exercise personal and collective discretion in determining who to extend aid to, and who to refuse. As the Treaty settlement process rolls on and more iwi are exercising a higher degree of decision making in social programmes for Māori are there likely to be more instances brought to public attention of the fruits of such decisions? Another headline caught my eye, a couple of days after Sue Bradford’s aforementioned ‘compassion gap’ tweet: “Eviction painful but our right – marae”, a story about a Marae committee’s decision to evict an elderly couple from their kaumatua flat on the basis of the husband’s abusive behaviour:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/10188909/Eviction-painful-but-our-right-marae

I know way too little to critique the decision, but I am interested to see how this public narrative develops, as Māori are increasingly seen as the decision-makers who can give or withhold aid based on an exercise of discretion. Of course, Māori have always exercised some level of such decision-making within Māori social organisation and Māori entities, but the idea of the Māori ‘Brown table’, the Māori corporate elite separated off from ordinary Māori has really only emerged with the first major treaty settlements (to my understanding at least) in the late 1990s. The recent Tūhoe settlement includes a social services management plan whereby the iwi works in partnership with Crown agencies to deliver better social services to Ngāi Tūhoe. Interestingly, Tāmati Kruger made the following statement in April:

…under mana motuhake, the iwi plans to take responsibility for the estimated $9 million of benefit money distributed to Tuhoe annually. As part of the 40-year plan, the tribe will take state funding and use it change the dependency culture.

Kruger said: “We want to work with the Ministry of Social Development in utilising the $9 million of benefits to use some of that for job creation, and also changing a mindset in Tuhoe around being beneficiaries of the state.”

In working with a system of individual entitlement based on stringent eligibility criteria (as the benefit system is) Tūhoe are going to be engaged in deciding, in some way at least, who are deserving and who are not. How those decisions will be made and how tikanga will feature will be interesting to learn.

If we are to accept the notion of a compassion gap, we ought to be alert to it wherever it occurs, or could occur, in all parts of our society, and not make easy presumptions as to who resides on each side of the gap. And that includes my own decision making on my own uncomfortable walk to work every morning.

BTW: I’d be interested in your thoughts: do you agree there is a compassion gap in our society (generally speaking? Among Māori?)? How do you make your decisions on whether or not to help people?

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Why the Glenn Report makes me uneasy (but we need it anyway).

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

I read the Glenn Inquiry’s report (The People’s Report) yesterday, during the course of two or three hours (when rampaging offspring permitted). I found myself feeling increasingly uneasy as I absorbed the material and reached the end of the report. As I cooked a very slapdash dinner I tried to work out the source of my unease. Was it the absolute lack of secondary material or relative lack of statistics supporting the material in the book? No. Not at all (once I got over my irredeemable pointy-headedness which has a tendency to bark: “What’s your evidence??” and “What about peer review?” at inopportune moments). Actually, those aspects were strengths. This report was largely what the Chairman (Bill Wilson QC) said it was:

…it has allowed so many victims and frontline workers to tell their stories in an unvarnished way. It gives them a genuine voice in exposing the strengths and weaknesses of the present system. The report does not dictate, rather it recites what those most affected by family violence say happened to them, what worked and what did not.

https://glenninquiry.org.nz/uploads/files/The_Peoples_Report_-_full_document.pdf

There should be a place for unvarnished voices, however grating on the ear, to be heard, however discomfiting the message. 500 interviewees is not a large number of people given the thousands upon thousands of people involved with, and affected by, family violence and child abuse every year in New Zealand. There are also obvious gaps in the kinds of voices included (as acknowledged in the report itself there is no focus on the voices of disabled New Zealanders), but nevertheless these are 500 people we would not have heard from without this report.

I was involved in a similar (albeit far more modest) process as a member of Welfare Justice, the alternative welfare working group commissioned by the Anglican Social Justice Commission, Caritas and the Beneficiary Advocacy Federation which operated in 2010-2011. Welfare Justice was set up to feed into the welfare reform process that was being dominated by the Welfare Working Group set up by Paula Bennett, which ultimately led to the welfare reforms of the past few years. We had more than 400 people take part in our consultation process and we keenly felt the need to issue a separate report that would allow the observations of those groups and individuals to be heard on their own merits. Predictably enough much of what we heard focused on the perceived deficiencies and inequities of the welfare system, and gave people a real opportunity to tell us how things were for them.

This report is at: /www.caritas.org.nz/sites/default/files/Welfare%20Justice%20in%20NZ%20What%20We%20Heard.pdf

I do have faith in these kinds of mechanisms that feel democratic to me; because they encourage and provide for participation by ordinary people in a process of discussion and prioritisation of important ideas. We need more, not less of this kind of forum.

So a report reflecting ordinary voices in crisis and critique is welcome. Provided…ah. There’s the rub. There is a proviso in my endorsement of this kind of report. As I tried to articulate to myself why I struggled with the report it eventually became clear to me that the report purports to be more than it is. The report crosses some line from reflection of voices into direction on what form reform ought to take. I think this is too early.

The final section of the report (Taking Action) starts out OK, as it provides an account of suggestions made by interviewees and submitters as to how they would like things to change. The report states at the beginning of the section:

We have devised a set of suggestions based on the voices of the people who came forward to speak to the Inquiry. These suggestions are based on key issues that are complex and multilayered. They require substantial changes to societal, institutional and community perceptions, organisations and systems, and families. We suggest seven key issues for consideration that might help New Zealand better meet the needs of those impacted by child abuse and domestic violence.

Again, relaying the suggestions of those people who participated at this of the inquiry is important. Further, it would be inevitable that the authors imposed some interpretation on the material they received, if only by the way in which they had to organise it for presentation. We had to do something similar with the Welfare Justice report. In this case the authors collated the suggestions made under the rubric of RESPECT:

R Refining documentation to eliminate

inaccuracies, fragmentation and errors
E Early intervention
S Skilled workforce – it only takes “one
champion” to make a difference
P Prevention via education, especially children,
to interrupt the cycle of violence
E Equitable approaches – helping one, helping
all
C Community action – how can communities
intervene?
T Tying it all together – inter-agency
collaboration

So far so good. In this section, however there are a number of instances where the authors move beyond merely reflecting the voices of those participants to the inquiry itself directing the nature of the reform that ought to take place. I understand the frustration at the lack of action on family violence issues, and that the temptation to be directive at this stage would be huge, even if at least to give the media some handy nugget to digest and to kick off debate. There were a great couple on interviews this morning on Nine to Noon about the notion (strongly enunciated in the report) that further reform is needed in the Family Court. So the report in that sense is doing its job, getting people to engage in public discourse and wrangle about the best path forward. Good. maybe only directiveness can get that ball rolling.

My worry is that the authors (and by necessary extension, the Inquiry itself) taking such an early and directive stance on what needs to happen for reform now undercuts and discounts all other relevant research or perspectives that would need to be taken into account before working out that best way forward. I thought the job of the Inquiry was to gather information (including the incredibly valuable material in this report) and propose a framework of reform, the ‘Blueprint’ to be released in November this year. The work of information gathering is only part-way done:

By identifying promising solutions from the panel interviews, working with people who have an in-depth understanding of the current system, and with the help of system experts from New Zealand and overseas, we will look at how to develop an ideal system for addressing abuse and violence. A literature review, in-depth interviews and workshops will be undertaken as part of this work. https://glenninquiry.org.nz/where-are-we-up-to

So, in other words, there is a heck of a lot of water that needs to go under this bridge before the Inquiry is in a position to make even solid suggestions let alone recommendations for change. Here I have to let my pointyheadedness take over and identify that my fundamental unease is that the People’s Report presumes it has the answers already to what it identifies as key issues that are complex and multilayered. Here is the final paragraph of the report:

A national strategy also needs to include requirements around the improved education of professionals and frontline workers, and require better inter-agency collaboration. There also needs to be a major review of the courts system and Child Youth and Family so that the gender bias against women and mothers is eliminated and victims can get the necessary assistance when they are traumatised and need help to be safe and secure. Importantly, people need help in overcoming the trauma and abuse they have endured. They need access to free counselling that is not time-limited, because child abuse and domestic violence erodes people’s spirit and psychological wellbeing. It can’t be fixed in six short sessions. Finally people need to have a code of rights and an independent forum whereby they can have their grievances heard and addressed

I do not suggest for a moment that these statements are wrong. I’m saying they are directive and break away from the purpose of the report which was to give voice to the voiceless. There is nothing merely suggestive here, this is the Inquiry speaking. Perhaps the perspective the report’s authors want us to understand is that of the Inquiry as Advocate: in these (and many other) directive words, the Inquiry is standing as an advocate on behalf of those who spoke with the panel and contributed to the inquiry. Perhaps this stance is is intended somehow, to make up for the inaction and the trauma that those contributors have described. Goodness knows passionate advocacy is required, as is productive and creative imagination to figure out the best way out of the morass. But if the Blueprint is to have any chance of success once released, I would have thought that allowing the New Zealand public to hear these voices in as unmediated a fashion as possible would provide those people with the best service at this stage of the inquiry.

Reality and pragmatism have to kick in. It’s inevitable that this report was going to be subject to huge scrutiny. We wanted it to SAY SOMETHING. Here I am moaning that it says something, so it seems. But early criticism that the report lacks rigour and analysis (http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2599880/advocates-slate-report) might have been avoided if the Inquiry had kept its powder dry and stuck to what it said this report was intended to be; that voice for the voiceless.

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Elliot Rodgers, Mauha Fawcett and the truth about monsters.

Posted on June 5, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

The last week has been a bad one for human monstrosity, or at least obvious and individualised examples of it. The sad discovery of Blesilda Gotingco’s murder happened when we were still processing news of Elliot Rodger’s slaughter of 6 people in California. A few days later we learned of two teenaged girls in Uttar Pradesh, gang-raped and lynched because they had tried to find a safe place to relieve themselves. And yesterday the 60 year old father, a lay minister, pleaded guilty to 3 counts of incest with his adopted daughter who later killed the baby born of that incest. He is reported to have claimed he was under the influence of the Devil, when he offended against her. (http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/246328/incest-girl’s-‘oppressive-conditions’)

The families in all these cases will be searching for meaning and explanation for the terrible crimes committed. We all are.

In regards to Rodger, the internet is now alive with discussions presuming misogyny and rape culture and everyday sexism to be primary drivers of his actions, helpfully assisted by his video placing the blame for his isolation and unhappiness on those females who refused to allow him access to their bodies. No doubt that thinking holds some water. See for example, the Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen. One of the benefits of this thinking is the line drawn between this single sociopath and his acting out of a misogynistic fantasy, and ordinary men and everyday sexism. I get that. The human monster is not just slavering over the helpless victim in the dark and stormy night of our imagination, he is on the couch next to you sharing your popcorn.

But in some ways this kind of analysis feels incomplete..misogynist monsters are formed to a large degree by societal pressures that demean and dehumanise women and girls, enabling and facilitating misogyny, and in Rodgers, its ultimate expression. Rather than Victor Frankenstein as the creator of the monster, the creator is patriarchy and its gun culture.

We crave explanation. We need motive, we need cause, we need rationale as if human monsters are the product of some fiendishly screwed up recipe that went horribly wrong. If only we could just find the gene, or the step-father or the poverty-stricken background that could enable us to see the perfect formation of the causal chain. Of course, mental illness, gun culture, caste hierarchy, misogyny, alienation, social disenfranchisement, lost moral compasses, can all explain in some part why people do bad things. But at the end of the day sociological or psychiatric explanations can only take us so far. This is because at the heart of all these kinds of events something evil has happened. In New Zealand’s secular society the notion of evil is unfashionable and a sign of a bygone and more credulous age. Evil, as an explanation for bad things, is now only really permissible in movies and books. Respectable commentators and analysts rarely speak of evil. But every so often the narrative of human experience of evil breaks through the strictures with which we have attempted to eradicate it.

I remember something one of the witnesses said at Mauha Fawcett’s trial for the murder of Mellory Manning:

“I could hear the crackling of tarpaulin or plastic,” he told the jury. “It was made to be done really slowly, you know what I mean, it wasn’t rushed, or hurried.”

A splash followed and was “pretty loud”, the witness said.

“I said it ‘aint Canadian geese or ducks or anything like that,” he told the court. “I couldn’t hear anyone talking, I couldn’t see anyone.

“I actually ducked under a canopy, some trees, to see if I could see any silhouettes moved.”

But before the man could see anyone he was stopped “dead cold” in his tracks by a feeling he described as horrible and cold.

“It was quite freaky, it was a lot of fear; I knew something was not right, I retreated rather rapidly to where [my partner] was.” Read more: http://www.3news.co.nz/Mellory-Manning-trial-Witness-heard-blood-curdling-scream/tabid/423/articleID/331794/Default.aspx#ixzz32iKvErpT

I don’t think what that witness felt would be unusual in such circumstances, and those feelings are what has kept Stephen King in clover all these years.

It’s tempting to think that Fawcett and his as-yet-uncharged co-offenders, Elliott Rodger, Mrs Gotingco’s killer, and the rapist-murderers in Uttar Pradesh are true monsters, or ‘mad’ or any other label that separates them out from us. In truth though, they are extraordinary only in the degree of harm they have caused. True, these perpetrators had, between them, created something evil, something greater than the sum of its parts. But in order to do so, they probably felt entitled to follow the only yardstick that mattered to them (for whatever reason): their feelings at that time. Nothing, no moral strictures, no societal restraints, no physical restraints stood in the way between these perpetrators and what they felt they needed or wanted to do. Above all people, they alone were entitled to do what they saw fit.

Now while it might not be easy to see ourselves becoming fully fledged ‘monsters’ and bringing evil into the world like Rodgers et al, we probably can imagine what we might be like if we had no limits placed upon us, no obstacles to meeting our our desires. And we all know the battles we fight on a daily basis within ourselves between what we want to do, and what we know we should do. This is a war as old as humanity. What was it that Paul said of his darkest struggles between what he knew he should do and what could not stop himself from doing?

Romans 7:14 So the trouble is not with the law, for it is spiritual and good. The trouble is with me, for I am all too human, a slave to sin. 15 I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate. 16 But if I know that what I am doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. 17 So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.

That willingness to turn away from what is right to instead give in to our desires, (‘sin’ as Paul saw it) was not externally imposed, not purely the result of external factors such as poverty, or abuse, or loneliness. Of course our willingness to, in the words of Depeche Mode ‘give in to sin’ can be informed by all those things and other factors that make up our complicated selves. But the capacity to sin is within us all, and in this nothing really separates us from the more obvious human monsters that make the news. There is no devil on our shoulder. If only it could be that simple.

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Internet Mana: the enemy of my enemy is my friend (atm, lol)

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

There is a leap of faith that the membership of both the MANA Movement and the Internet Party have taken. That leap is the presumption that voters will be as pragmatic as these parties have been. As one thoughtful commenter on social media observed (commenting on Sue Bradford’s decision to leave the party):

I also was worried about this when it was first mooted. However it is a very pragmatic arrangment with the Internet Party (not Kim Dotcom the individual) and the way it is set up totally leaves Mana intact as well as it has many rigorous safeguards…What it does do is offer the possibility of maximising the party vote in a way that may make some dent in ousting the Nats (without which the reality of a “farleft movement for change” is a fantasy) Realistically Mana had neither the people or resources to promote the party vote alone. The Mana electorate candiate campaign is the same as it would always have been. …. More damage will be done to the “left” by inaccurate negative spin than the arrangment itself.

The last sentence of this post encapsulates the issue I mention. To some degree at least, it won’t matter that the arrangement leave a high degree of autonomy to each party. It won’t matter that MANA gets most of the top seat spots in the combined party list. These countervailing arguments won’t matter to a significant degree of the voting population because now they can no longer be so sure what each of these parties represent. They are the voters not involved in the decisionmaking, not in the room when the deal went down, or on the email lists. I know MANA apparently has a terrific party organisation, and I’m sure that was a major factor in the decision. I also suspect that standing on lonely principle is not all that attractive to two parties that really want some degree of political power, and memberships that clearly want that as well.

But the abandonment of unifying principle is a dangerous course. Many people still vote on the basis of a positive idea, however muddy that idea becomes in realpolitik. National party supporters really do buy the notion of freedom, autonomy and individual responsibility, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Labour Party voters really do buy the idea of social and collective responsibility, again in the face of all political history that suggests such pure ideals never survive intact. The Māori Party knows better than anyone how difficult it is to sell a party based primarily on a pragmatic idea, in this case that Māori can benefit from being at the decision-making table. That too is a pragmatic stance, but at least it is phrased in the positive, and closely married to the idea of achieving a level of rangatiratanga for Māori. And it might be yet seen that the Māori Party has ended up losing its way because of that pragmatism.

Selling the idea of getting rid of the current government just doesn’t stand for anything in the hands of this new entity. No doubt ample numbers of the supporters of both future components of Internet Mana can explain the logic and the utilitarianism of this decision, with that unifying goal of bringing National down. But those people are not where the tyre hits the tarmac. How does each potential voter now articulate for themselves and others what this entity stands for? Internet freedom (except in the case of Māori cultural knowledge)? Being the voice of the poor and dispossessed (except when that voice has to articulate, or at least accomodate other concerns)? How does each voter explain their own voting beliefs in the absence of any demonstrable conjoined beliefs in their party?

And thinking of the future..come September, if the election does see the return of a National-led coalition, where will the combined energy of these two collections of people go? On? In 10 years time will there be an Internet Mana? Once the conjugal purpose is either fulfilled or defeated, what’s left?

I spotted this quote a moment ago:

“[The party] was not well received by the general public…The perception that these MPs had “betrayed” their former party was strong. Many voters believed that [the party] had been born out of political opportunism, not out of firmly-held principle.”

Any guesses? Yep, a quote from the Wikipedia eulogy to the very short-lived Mauri Pacific Party formed in 1998. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauri_Pacific

Of course Internet Mana will likely have a longer presence just because Hone is a sitting MP and favoured candidate. Ultimately my prediction, for what it is worth (!), is that this pragmatic venture can’t have a long life, because it cannot now give voters something they can believe in without a proviso, a ‘but’, or a hedged exception.

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Posted in New Zealand society, culture, politics and tagged 2014 election, Internet Mana, MANA Movement, Māori politics, New Zealand politics. Bookmark the permalink.

Māori in Australia: standing whose ground?

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

If you are reading this on Friday morning (22 May 2014) Ngāti Toa, Porirua City Council and Blacktown City Council and the local Blacktown community will be celebrating the erection of two pou in the New Zealand South Pacific Garden in the Nurragingy Reserve, in Blacktown, west of Sydney, on land that is part of the Darug people’s heritage. http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/244960/maori-pou-to-be-erected-in-nsw

This news caught my attention because my father and most of my Aussie whānau lived in Blacktown until very recently so I have spent a bit of time there, conscious of the lack of physical reminders of the local people in the Blacktown cityscape. This is a town originally named for the old Native Institute, the settlement that grew up around it, and the road leading to it (“the Blacks’ Town” becoming known as “Blacktown” by the 1860s). In the years I visited Blacktown I was always struck by the prominence of the Blacktown Workers Club sign being (it seemed to my ignorant eyes) the most obvious allusion to any indigenous history of the area in an area with the largest concentrated Aboriginal population anywhere in New South Wales. And yes, apparently there is a vibrant arts, culture, and heritage scene in Blacktown, just not much civic visibility of the Aboriginal heritage. At all.

Of course, quite apart from the Ngāti Toa/Porirua City Council initiative, there have been political infighting and funding scraps over the public installation of a sculpture of Nurrngingy himself (a Darug elder who received one of the first land grants to Aboriginal individuals in Australia, from Governor Macquarie in 1816). The sculpture languishes, waiting for $80,000 needed for bronze casting that Blacktown doesn’t want to pay for. (http://www.blacktownsun.com.au/story/240937/calls-for-two-of-blacktowns-aboriginal-heros-to-be-honoured/)

This sculpture was made by a Hungarian sculptor and so doubtless there may be ambivalence from local Aboriginal people as to the priority to be put upon funding it, but in the relative absence of civic recognition of Aboriginal heritage, the fact that Māori culture and heritage gets civic engagement and civic involvement from two city councils is interesting.

The road to that engagement has not been entirely smooth. You might recall the trans-Tasman stoush that happened over the original plan to have these pou erected at the gateway to the Reserve. A Darug elder Sandra Lee left us in no doubt as to her opinion on the proposed erection:

“Would the Maoris like me to go over to New Zealand and hang ring-tail possums all over the place? Or kangaroos? No they wouldn’t, I know they wouldn’t, so why are they doing it to us?” she said

Ms Lee said situating the poles at the front gate would diminish the Aboriginal symbolism of Nurragingy and continue the ongoing genocide of her people.

“I’ll stand there and I’ll burn them down if I have to,” she said. “They can put them anywhere inside, no worries – but not at the gate.”

(http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/02/11/aboriginal-elders-object-maori-poles-blacktown)

Māori leaders, including Taku Pārai from Ngāti Toa, upon learning of the objections, called for consultation to be carried out before endorsing the installation, and now the matters apparently have been resolved. I don’t wish to decry the installation of these pou. It’s a wonderful thing I’m sure, for Ngāti Toa and the Porirua District Council to see these pou erected within the Nurragingy Reserve, in partnership with the Blacktown City Council to commemorate 30 years of the sister-city relationship. This will clearly be something to celebrate.

Māori wardens will be involved, as will representatives of the local community, and I hope, the Darug people. The event though raises a few broader questions.

The Māori presence in Australia in truly impressive, and just a little bit mind-boggling. Ever increasing numbers of Māori now live across the Tasman, as at the last Australian census, 128,434 at least (not counting the many Māori who don’t report their ethnicity in census date). For more info see Paul Hamer’s fascinating updated research on the Māori population in Australia (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2167613). Obviously there is a migration of Māori ideas as well as people to our West Island, and this is hardly a new thing. But with an estimated 1 in 6 Māori now living in Australia there are obviously long term implications for the growth and evolution of the ways of being Māori. For one thing, there is a growing number of competent reo speakers who have now taken their language skills across the Tasman. There are now fantastic Waitangi Day celebrations. There are growing numbers of Māori organisations (Māori Wardens, kapa haka teams, Māori radio shows on Radio Koori just to name a few) and the establishment of permanent marae is not far away, judging by current initiatives in Melbourne (https://www.facebook.com/MaraeMelbourne) and Sydney (https://www.facebook.com/sydneymaraeappeal) at least.

Part of me wonders whether there may be a cost to Aboriginal peoples at some point of this Māori cultural burgeoning. Sure there have been some perhaps unsurprising accounts of ethnic tensions between Māori and Aboriginal populations in recent years (http://nzh.tw/10491857). I know of several Māori who have headed to Australia to work with Aboriginal communities at least partly on the basis of a shared indigenous experience of colonisation. I’m also interested in the extent to which Māori may, by the establishment of Mārae and pou in the indigenous soil of Australia, end up claiming a portion of Australian civic identity. By this I mean that Māori seeking to create spaces of belonging that are not only private spaces, but also form part of the civic, public narrative. The new pou definitely provide a way of creating a public Māori presence and the planned marae, no matter how they are funded, will be, to some degree, public entities, with a visual imprint upon the civic landscape. I’m not for a moment seeking to dissuade Māori from creating and establishing marae in Australia. And it is hardly a new thing for migrant communities in Australia to create spaces within which to celebrate their own culture. Māori cultural spaces will barely raise a ripple, I’m sure. I just hope that those developments are carried out with consideration and consultation with the local Aboriginal peoples. If it is right to value the freedom of a people to decide to create/affirm civic identity and civic space, that freedom ought to belong first and foremost to Aboriginal voices and Aboriginal stories. I just hope we remember this truth in our understandable rush to create our own whānau ora narrative in Australia.

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Posted in New Zealand society, culture, politics and tagged Blacktown, Blacktown City Council, Darug People, Māori culture, Māori in Australia, Ngāti Toa, Porirua City Council. Bookmark the permalink.

Shane and the Dragon: the risks of appealing to difference

Posted on May 14, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

It’s very tempting to believe, as a Māori, that I have some kind of connection to an essential cultural truth that is just a little different, and a little bit better than others around me without that connection. The feeling might occur in unexpected moments; in a joke shared in the reo, in singing a song at a tangi, in an offhand comment at the supermarket, in catching Pūkoro on Māori TV after school. As someone who has had to learn to be Māori, I’m quite conscious of being privy to something greater than myself. Fortunately for me those ‘connection’ moments are far more common now than in my more culturally tentative 20s.

This feeling of special connection, as well as whakapapa connection, is useful, after all; it can be a bulwark against the torrent of all the other messages I might receive over the course of my adult life, the ones about how being Māori is a passport to the bottom-of-the-heap statistics. But it is not much of a leap from this sense of being ‘set apart’ culturally, to a sense of playing by a different sets of rules in other ways. So these words leapt out at me from an RNZ Manu Korihi report yesterday in regards to the report released recently on Shane Taurima’s activities at TVNZ:

The panel members were particularly interested in [Shane Taurima’s] response about how he managed conflicts in the Maori world.
He told them that Maori journalism was different.
He said instead of reporters having topics to cover, such as health and business, tangata whenua tended to be assigned to tribal areas from which they come from.
Mr Taurima said Maori journalists were challenged by whanau and friendships everyday.
But an advisor to the board carrying out the investigation, the former correspondent Chris Wikaira, rejected the explanation.
He saids basic journalism such as balance as fairness, was universal and did not change because of a person’s ethnicity.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/244163/maori-journalism-excuse-rejected

The report itself fleshes Shane’s observation out a little more: (available at: http://www.3news.co.nz/Portals/0/images/TVNZ_independent-report.pdf):

The world of Māori broadcasting and journalism, and particularly Māori language reporting has differences from reporting in the Pākehā world. We are challenged by our whānau and friendship relationships every day, which mean that conflicts of interest and the potential for perceptions are at the forefront of our minds every single day, as we believe those relationships, whilst ensuring that they do not stray into our onscreen or editorial work.”

I find the characterisation of a “Māori broadcasting and journalism world” and a “Pākehā” world of journalism and broadcasting to be interesting, as if there is a veil through which we must pass to operate in either world. I suspect Shane was making an appeal to difference here, that somehow the rules are different in each world. It’s pretty easy for those of us who have ever worked in broadcasting to believe that. But here there be dragons, maybe taniwha, if you don’t know where your ethical waka is heading.

On one level I completely agree with Shane that Māori journalists and broadcasters do have to operate differently just to be able to do their jobs properly, in the same way that Māori lawyers ‘do law’ differently, in the same way that Māori psychologists work differently with Māori clients. The point of ‘doing it differently’ in different contexts is to benefit Māori professionals, Māori clients and Māori in the community generally, to ensure ultimately that Māori are served properly by whatever profession is in focus. At the heart of these ‘different’ ways of doing things is the practice of whakawhanaungatanga, the establishment of common ground and right relationships between the Māori professional and the Māori client in such a way that that client (and by extension the Māori community) gets the right service. It makes complete sense that Māori journalists will have to operate differently in order to have their fingers on the pulse of what is going on in Māori communities, so that those communities will see themselves reflected in the work of that journalist, of that broadcaster, and not some imagined caramel collective with only a passing resemblance. Sometimes, as in the recent Native Affairs investigations, the image that is reflected back to the community may be true (or at least a version of true) but not flattering.

Whakawhanaungatanga is critically important as a way of Māori connecting with each other, discovering and reinforcing whānau, hapū, or iwi ties, or in the absence of those, some other shared identity that makes sense in that moment. Isn’t this mode of practice then at odds with the usual pressure upon professionals, legal, journalistic, or whatever, to create space between the professional and the client, for the professional to maintain disinterest? Not at all, if whakawhanaungatanga is exercised in honesty and transparency. When I was a probation officer (many moons ago) writing reports on offenders it could be essential to spend time with an offender (love those labels) talking about our shared ancestry, where he and I grew up, or whatever else was right for the moment to create that spark of fellow-feeling between us. I might still recommend imprisonment at the end of the process. He knew it, I knew it, but the whanaungatanga was still there, and still necessary, even within the giant monolith of our criminal justice system.

It is, of course, so much harder for someone who was in Shane’s position of being under direct and constant pressure from his whānau and iwi to return to politics to balance the demands of his people with the demands of transparency and accountability to TVNZ. The pressure must have been enormous, but the demand for transparency and honesty in the preservation and exercise of whakawhanaungatanga remains the same. Chris Wikaira’s reported response to Shane’s quote above is also worth quoting in full from the report:

Mr Wikaira reviewed the transcript of the Panel’s interview of Mr Taurima. His view was thatthe basic tenets of journalism, ie balance and fairness, are universal and that a conflict is aconflict regardless of the ethnicity of the person at the centre of it. Furthermore, while he acknowledged that Māori journalists often have more interests to balance (be they familial, tribal or political), the management of these needs to be consistently applied. The potential reputational damage to TVNZ overrides any cultural nuance, and it required Mr Taurima to disclose these activities. He noted that this issue was less about tikanga Māori and cultural nuance and more about a senior manager in a mainstream media organisation managing his political aspirations in a mainstream political party.[99]

I’m sure few of us are blameless when it comes to blurring lines between our professional and private responsibilities. I’m not. But nothing in the Māori rule-book excuses Māori professionals from the other professional demands on us. I don’t have, as a condition of my Māoriness, an entitlement to throw away the rule on client confidentiality, or objectivity. Nor, in legal practice did I have an entitlement to ignore conflicts of interests in that context. In my current job I don’t get to appeal to difference to justify dispensing with fairness in marking my students’ exam papers (much as I dearly want more Māori to be passing those blimmin’ things). If I want to be good at what I do, I have to exercise whakawhanaungatanga in all those contexts, and keep up with those other professional demands. And bear the cost.

For me to appeal to difference, to specialness to justify dispensing with those other professional demands suggests that I might think it’s OK, as a Māori, to engage in whakawhanaungatanga without transparency and honesty (or tika and pono, to put it another way) with all those relationships. For me, that’s a level of comfort that I’m … well, just not comfortable with.

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Posted in New Zealand society, culture, politics and tagged Māori culture, Māori politics, Māori society, Shane Taurima, TVNZ. Bookmark the permalink.

A connection between Konrad, Judith & Maurice? You betcha.

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

I blame Paul Henry for my current curmudgeonly state of mind. There was I, innocently browsing the net on my laptop when I spied, out of the corner of my eye, Paul Henry on the TV in the corner of my lounge bobbing his head up and down in the imitation of…oh dear. A thinly disguised act of intimacy. He was, of course, doing a Henry in regards to the Konrad Hurrell and Teuila Blakely’s little home video that has been in the news lately. Not having seen the video, I nevertheless still have a charming set of images in my mind, thanks to Paul. In truth, I had been getting grumpier as the last couple of weeks have progressed as New Zealanders have had, inflicted upon them, story after story with a very similar central theme. That theme is one of hubris: exaggerated pride or self-confidence, and an entitlement by individuals in positions of power/influence to behave badly in defiance of their respective teams. It takes an extraordinary amount of belief in one’s own competence and value to justify, promote, excuse behaviour that is probably dodgy, if only one takes a moment to step back and take a pause. It takes an absolute refusal to live by that wise old adage ‘may you see yourself as others see you.’

I can only imagine that Konrad thought he really was the Mantis as he broke heaven knows how many road regulations, and trashing his momentary partner’s own reputation in the process by sharing his wee movie, which saw it SnapChatted immediately. The usual mollycoddling excuses came out shortly thereafter, he’s a young guy, he made a bad call, it’s unfortunate, move on, people. ”They get a lot of education on this but they are still young men. They have got physically matured bodies, but maybe not in the mind. Sometimes you make the mistakes and he has made one and he is going to have to live with that.’ http://tvnz.co.nz/rugby-league-news/hurrell-live-consequences-sex-tape-mcfadden-5950209

I think this is right, and too much ought not be made of the incident itself, certainly he should be dealt with proportionately, and the $5k fine appears to do this. I wonder though, if his own hard-earned status as an NRL player, in the Warriors, of at least 42 games, with a pretty lengthy list of social network videos already to his credit, has meant that Konrad lost sight of how vulnerable he really is to same slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that all high performing sportspeople are. His own attitude does seem a bit ambivalent. He said: “I am so sorry this has happened and want to apologise for the trouble I have caused”, (http://tvnz.co.nz/rugby-league-news/konrad-hurrell-fined-5000-over-sex-tape-5956310) Curious choice of words, that: “I’m so sorry this has happened”, as if he was somehow passive in the matter. As if hitting ‘send’ was not an entirely voluntary act. Regardless, he is highly social media-savvy, he knows the power of wider media to enhance his own profile as well as that of his team, as a whole. It defies belief that when he shared the video he did not foresee what would happen to it. He just didn’t appear to care. He certainly didn’t waste any of his time asking himself ‘Now, as a Warriors league player wanting to get selected for the next game coming up..should I send this? How will this affect the team?’ Nup. If only.

Other commentators have written at length about Maurice Williamson and Judith Collins’ behaviours (with Donghua Liu and Oravida respectively) and their insistence, initially, that their actions were entirely normal and justifiable and of no moment to the New Zealand public, or their team-mates. While the clock is still ticking for Collins, the jury is well and truly back on Maurice, and the verdict has taken a regrettable toll on a well-liked and ebullient individual. Notwithstanding, I’m less interested in the behaviours themselves as opposed to the overweening confidence that both Ministers appeared to have had that their individual, personal connections, charisma and positions would justify their actions. At no point do either of them seem to have taken pause and asked themselves, as a Minister should I….[pick up the phone and call the police about this man] / [embark on a ‘royal tour’ of this commercial company and go for dinner with individuals including at least one official that can open pathways for that company?]. Neither appears to have considered the impact of their actions on their team-mates. Perhaps it was their positions and their confidence in their individual status that prevented them from seeing what has been so obvious to so many of us from the outset: you can’t use your ministerial position to create benefit for a commercial company, or to influence criminal prosecutions. These are not very complex propositions.

Arrogance is not solely a right-wing problem, contrary to what many on the left might wish. It is not solely the preserve of the well-heeled nor of those in the public eye. Arrogance, even hubris is found everywhere, nevertheless it is an occupational hazard for some people more than others. Supreme self-confidence is required by all three of these individuals mentioned here to stand out in the ways that they have. This is a necessary tool to enable them to get selection, to pull off the moves that get them noticed, that guarantee them some kind of a future in their particular blood sport.

But there should also be a moderator; the necessary creature that keeps that hubris under control, and enables such strong individuals to be a part of a team. This moderator is something we barely ever mention anymore: shame. Shame is a concept that has fallen into disfavour perhaps in these meritocratic, individualistic times. Shame is often now seen as a disabler, something that keeps women in their place and sexually denigrated, a holdover from earlier, socially restricted, communitarian times. But shame (whakamā) has its place. An ability to feel shame, that is, guilt, regret, or embarrassment is a necessary thing to stop ourselves from bringing harm to others that are close to us, by our own actions. One might feel shame indeed, after having done something egregious. Williamson, Collins and Hurrell have all expressed such regret that they caused some degree of harm to their colleagues, their teammates, for example, but even now I suspect both Collins and Williamson perceive themselves as being treated unfairly as individuals. But what is equally important is the ability to imagine the feeling of shame if we undertake some course of action that will lead to guilt, regret, or embarrassment for those around us. This ability to imagine how our actions impact upon the others close to us, those in our team, is crucial, and clearly, in these three cases at least, neglected.

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Posted in New Zealand society, culture, politics and tagged Judith Collins, Konrad Hurrell, Maurice Williams, New Zealand politics, Society and culture. Bookmark the permalink.

Thank Heavens for Donald Sterling and other Lightning Rod Racists

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

Make no bones about it, Donald Sterling helps many of us sleep better in our beds at night. The owner of the LA Clippers gives form to the formless. Like a lightning rod he draws the ire and righteous anger of all of us who pride ourselves on our ability to tolerate difference. He ticks all the right boxes, powerful, super-rich, white, curiously formed (looking as if he has been carved out of aged Lucite), not to mention helpfully braying racist claptrap to his latest (wired-up?) lovely in the grip of his papery claws. (see http://www.tmz.com/2014/04/26/donald-sterling-clippers-owner-black-people-racist-audio-magic-johnson/) He is in the mould of the equally odd local multimillionaire Louis Crimp…remember him from a couple of years back? Old, bigoted, wealthy:

“All the white New Zealanders I’ve spoken to don’t like the Maoris, the way they are full of crime and welfare.” (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10806938).

There is a kind of functional purging that happens when such obvious bogeymen are exposed in this Western society. It reminds me a little of what Aristotle named ‘catharsis’; the ‘pity and fear’ an audience to a tragic play felt when the protagonist invariably fell from what had been a lofty height (Oedipus, Agamemnon and so on). Catharsis in that ancient context meant feeling pity for the plight of the doomed protagonist, and a kind of compassionate fear for ourselves lest we undergo a similar fate. Well. I don’t detect pity for Louis & Don, this kind of modern catharsis is a little different, we feel a kind of cleansing revulsion.

Yet underneath all that disgusted wrath perhaps we also feel a little bit of fear lest we are revealed to have similar bigotries within us. This fear is perhaps at the heart of our curiously formalistic approach to eradicating racist and sexist symbols from our language and our public actions. As Jeremy Clarkson has just discovered, uttering the N-word creates a moment of talismanic horror that he can atone for on the public altar of Twitter (http://www.stuff.co.nz/motoring/news/10000683/Jeremy-Clarkson-I-m-begging-your-forgiveness). Eradicating such obvious symbols from our overt actions and words saves us from having to examine what we really think and feel. Replacing these symbols with new ones can also be handy. Keen to be seen as a non-racist? Why, take a selfie with a banana in honour of Dani Alves’ pretty wonderful response to thuggish banana throwers in a football match at Villareal on Sunday. When the banana landed near him as the Brazilian was about to take a corner he picked it up, ate it and carried on. The fact that this was apparently a preplanned marketing campaign is overlooked in favour of the simple beauty of the new inclusive symbol, so right for t-shirts, now selling for 25 Euro each. https://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/pitchside/anti-racism-banana-movement-revealed-cleverly-planned-marketing-104501574.html.

I’m not going to engage in a sociological examination (you’ll be relieved to know) of the dynamics and causes of racism, sexism or homophobia. I understand the analysis that tells me that racism (and other isms) is produced from ‘power dynamics’ in society. Those with power can exclude consciously, or otherwise, those without power, based on a denigration of the race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality of the excluded. I get that. What worries me about that analysis is that it (superficially) excuses us, if we ourselves fall into any one or more of the excluded groups, from examining ourselves. I can’t be racist, I’m Māori. Well, I’m less interested in whether an ‘ism’ can be attached to my outward language and behaviour. I’m more interested in the failure of imagination that I am definitely in danger of sharing with Louis and Don. We are all at risk of this kind of failure, regardless of the label we put upon it.

I have a young female relative in my large extended family whom I love dearly. She’s a teenager, a gorgeous, bright, talented girl. And she is ashamed of being Māori. She doesn’t acknowledge her own Māori name, she wonders why the only Māori women she sees (outside of her family) are fat and why the men are all criminals. She can’t yet imagine, you see, that there are other Māori realities, other Māori futures. Even when she sees Māori that don’t fit that mould she may not shift her thinking. Perhaps those ‘other Māori’ are just aberrations to her perceived truth. Like Don, Like Louis, she makes false deductions from limited information, and won’t or can’t (yet) imagine how things could be different. All is not lost for her, and I am ever a believer in the power of human imagination to create change. Eventually I think she will be able to imagine Māori differently. Louis & Don haven’t managed this leap of imagination, it appears, but I would wager that none of us is totally cured from this particular condition. Some people have more power to harm than the rest of us, based on their bigotries, which is why we need protective laws and actions designed to counter and prevent harms from racism, sexism and the like. But let’s not be fooled, Louis & Don are not strange or remote, they are in the room with us.

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Posted in New Zealand society, culture, politics and tagged Donald Sterling, Jeremy Clarkson, Louis Crimp, Māori, Māori society, racism. Bookmark the permalink.

ANZAC day, Shane and Māori leadership: do we really need another bloody hero?

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

A few months ago I had a delightful experience. I got to visit the ramshackle, dusty, grubby and altogether questionable Mad Max II museum in Silverton, just out of Broken Hill in Australia’s Outback. Full of old banged up cars, clothes, models and props from the Mad Max movies I found myself entranced, and seduced again by my teenage memories of Mad Max in all his 80s glory. We found ourselves some DVDs that night, and sitting through some, sleeping through the rest, I realised once again that the past is another country. And that bloody awful Tina Turner song hid some even more awful movie by the time we got to Mad Max III. No, we don’t need need another hero, now bugger off and take your mullets with you. (Don’t know the song? Check out this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq4aOaDXIfY )

I found myself humming Tina’s song quite a lot over the past few days as ANZAC day approaches and news of Shane Jones’ departure broke. ANZAC Day and Shane Jones for me, at least, highlight one of Māoridom’s continuing problems, the valorisation of past heroes (such as the men of the 28th (Māori) Battalion, Tā Apirana Ngata, et al) and the search for new (almost inevitably male) heroes to take their place. A sentence from Morgan Godfrey’s interesting recent post on Shane’s departure illustrates this thinking: Maori political history isn’t rich with choice. Telling us to wait for a more “progressive” candidate is deeply offensive. Maori have waited too long for too little. Shane was an opportunity and one many – including myself – were willing to back. He wasn’t perfect, but he was as close as we’ve come in more than a decade to the centre of power. Winston was the last Maori politician to come close to real power. It’s been a century since Maori actually touched it (Carroll as acting prime minister). (http://mauistreet.blogspot.co.nz/2014/04/shane-jones-political-obituary.html)

I find this quote interesting because of the yearning it expresses, as Māori wait for a leader to arrive; a leader presumably to lead Māoridom from its current state. Shane, the implication is, could have been such a leader. Thus, a people continues to wait.

Another similar sentiment was expressed by Kiritapu Allan in her blogpost ruminating on Māori political leadership The Maori vote is wide open, but the vote is calling for a champion for justice who is pragmatic enough, and in touch with the pulse of Maoridom enough, to create some excitement about the opportunities that a post-settlement world creates for hapu and iwi. http://kiritapuallan.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/an-ode-to-fallen-and-an-invitation-to-the-new-ka-pu-te-ruha-ka-hao-nga-rangatahi/

These posts from young, sophisticated Māori urban commentators echo a cry I hear occasionally, a lament really, that Māori have no true ‘leader’, at least, not one that reach across the divides of class, race, and political affiliation. Since the arrival of Old Testament narratives along with colonisation in the early 19th century many Māori have held fast to the notion that a Mosaic, or a Messianic figure will some day appear to lead Māoridom (Ngā Tiu) out of the wilderness and into the Promised land. There is now a lot of scholarship about these powerful myth narratives in Māori thinking (see Bronwyn Elsemore, Judith Binney, Te Ahukaramu Charles Royal, Selwyn Katene and so on) Māori history and mythology is suffused with heroes grappling with the evils of colonialism. An obvious and influential example are the mythological narratives that grew up around the deeds and the personas of Te Kooti Arikirangi and Rua Kenana, both messianic figures in the foundation of the Ringatū church (and stories still abound of the forthcoming successor to their legacy). (http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document//Volume_93_1984/Volume_93,_No._4/Myth_and_explanation_in_the_Ringatu_tradition%3A_some_aspects_of_the_leadership_of_Te_Kooti_Arikirangi_Te_Turuki_and_Rua_Kenana_Hepetipa,_by_J._Binney,_p_345-398/p1)

Of course Māori are a heterogenous bunch, and notions of leadership within Māoridom have undergone massive changes over the last couple of centuries. Leadership has evolved from models primarily based on ariki, rangatira and tohunga, to charismatic, transformational leaders of the 19th century, on to leaders affiliated with powerful corporatised Māori interests (trust boards, the New Zealand Māori Council, Māori Women’s Welfare League, tribal rūnanga). (see Katene 2010) http://moodle.unitec.ac.nz/pluginfile.php/176946/mod_resource/content/0/Katene.pdf.

So yes, Māori notions of leadership have changed and adapted to modern needs,but the idea of A LEADER to surpass all, and to tap into the Māori (and national) psyche is a long-lived, powerful and seductive one. This nostalgia for our wartime heroes, this late-blooming nostalgia for what Shane Jones might have become, this apparent yawning gap in Māori leadership begs, in my view, a far more important question: what about those of us who would be knit together by such leaders? How prepared are we as individuals, whānau, and hapū to engage politically with those among us who would lead, to such an extent that such leaders would be bound to do what we require of them?

I would prefer to see less bemoaning the lack of Māori leadership and a focus on ordinary people and what we are prepared to do to create leaders in the first place. Are we prepared to take our whānau down to the ballot boxes on polling days to vote in our local body and central government reps? Are we engaging on Twitter and FB about issues other than what we ate for breakfast? Are we engaged with our kōhanga, our school boards, our marae, our sports committees, making decisions and showing our whānau what it means to make decisions and take the consequences? Are our own actions lighting sparks in the eyes of the seven year olds or the ten year olds in our homes? Are we actually present? Or are we waiting for a fully formed mythopoeic leader to emerge from the mists of our past, cloaked with the benedictions of our tupuna for us to claim her or him as our own?

Heroes are never what they seem to be, Shane watched porn on the taxpayer. Apirana was sometimes impatient with ordinary frailty, our veterans are and were brave men with feet of clay. We don’t need another hero, because there are no heroes. What we need are active, involved, engaged Māori across the political spectrum to make the damn thing work for Māori. Among us are all the leaders we need. Or deserve.

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Posted in New Zealand society, culture, politics and tagged Anzac Day, Māori leaders, Māori mythology, Māori politics, Shane Jones. Bookmark the permalink.

“Institutional racism”. Warning: label may smudge with over-use.

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Sparrowhawk/Kārearea

Today we heard, courtesy of Radio New Zealand, that a UN delegation visiting NZ prisons has urged our government to consider the extent to which our system creates systemic bias against Māori (http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/240995/un-critical-over-maori-jail-numbers)

The problem with a phrase like ‘institutional racism’ (the term used most often to describe this notion of systemic bias) is that it creates a distance between people and the problem. The problem is well documented. We all know that Māori are over-represented at all stages of the criminal justice system, from arrests to court appearances, to sentencing, to prison population. http://aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/tandi/421-440/tandi421.html .

Do these statistics really point to a systemic problem? Commentators tend to fall into two kinds of camps. There are those who point to the monolithic nature of the system, the racism of Pākehā, lack of Māori values evident in the system, the history of colonialism and the breakdown of Māori legal institutions, the displacement of Māori autonomy over their own lives and so on as setting the scene for, and justifying the name of, institutional racism. Māori have no investment in this system, and until they do there will be no substantive change. A kind of systemic revolution is necessary to roll back the stats (Moana Jackson is probably still the leading commentator in this camp, as discussed in the JustSpeak paper http://justspeak.enspiral.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/JustSpeak-Maori-and-the-Criminal-Justice-System-A-Youth-Perspective.pdf )

The other camp tends to focus less on the racism and culpability of Pākehā, and the system itself, instead pointing to sociological/individual explanations that underpin Māori over representation. Māori over-representation occurs by and large because Māori offend more. Identify the drivers of Māori crime, address those, and the problem will sort itself out. The system is not to blame, as far as any system can be, the criminal justice system is neutral, and upholds and reflects the primary values of the community (including Māori) appropriately. Sure there could be changes to make the system more ‘Māori friendly’, but the solutions lie within Māori decisionmaking, Māori families, Māori individuals. Criminologist Greg Newbold represents this perspective to some degree, seen here in conversation with Moana Jackson on Native Affairs: https://www.facebook.com/justspeaknz/posts/515353868520154. Another quite strident view from this camp can be seen here: http://www.nzcpr.com/institutional-racism/

My own perspective falls somewhere in between the two camps. In my view the term ‘institutional racism’ has become a kind of label that cloaks the nature of what really goes on in the criminal justice system, and within society more generally. The nature of what really goes on cannot be divorced from the individuals that make up the system. This system is a human artifact and cannot be value free. The law is not neutral, we made it, and we infused it, and the system that upholds it, with values.

I remember hearing one of New Zealand’s high profile judges speaking frankly about the dilemmas he is confronted with when sitting on the bench when Māori offenders come before him. He acknowledged that a decision about giving bail, for example, could go differently depending on whether the offender before him was Māori or not, NOT because of ethnicity, but because almost inevitably the Māori offenders had less stable home circumstances and less support to help them keep to their bail conditions, were more likely to breach, and more likely to end up back in court for the breach. Therefore, such Māori offenders might be more likely to receive bail than their Pākehā counterparts who usually had more obvious home support and more stable home circumstances. What was he, as a judge, to do? Grant bail, and see that offender back in front of him for breach, almost inevitably, lengthening the already negative contact between that offender and the system (including the police), usually resulting in jail anyway, or refuse it, thereby expediting the CJ process but sending the offender to jail more quickly (if the court process ended up in a finding of guilt). Which values does he call upon in the making of that decision? As he observed (and I’m paraphrasing), “if these are the moments of discretionary power I have as a judge, what about all those other moments before the offender even gets to me?” Indeed. Social workers, case workers, teachers, parents, family members, police, probation officers, lawyers, all of them will have had moments of discretion they exercised that impact upon our theoretical Māori individual as she progresses through life, let alone the criminal justice system. All of the ‘discretionary moments’ intersect with the decisions made by this person; what are the nature of the choices she makes in her life? How might she have been ushered into making those decisions, some of which could see her enter into the system?

Māori are agents, not just victims, and a term like ‘institutional racism’ does two things, it denies Māori agency, but it also points to the sum total of those discretionary moments exercised by all those who have decision-making power within the Criminal Justice System. Perhaps the first step to undermining the phenomenon of systemic or institutional racism, or just over-representation of Māori within that system, is to ask those individuals what decisions they made today. And those same questions should also be asked of the whānau and friends. Ultimately, I think we are all collectively responsible for Māori over-representation in the criminal justice system.

As for a remedy? Well, I think Jackson is partly right. Māori must have decision-making power over Māori lives, and they must also see themselves reflected in the systems of this country in a way that normalises rather than demonises them. So structural change can achieve some of that. And the capacity of Māori to create and implement useful dispute resolution processes, perhaps using the marae more often, is exciting, and growing recognition of Māori customary law and processes offers fantastic room for growth. There are also international developments in sentencing law that New Zealand could look to in the recognition of culture and background in the sentencing process. We already have this capacity in NZ law (by virtue of ss8 and 27 of the Sentencing Act 2002), the Courts have basically declined to use it to address disproportionality in similar ways that have been done in Canada, for example. (see the Court of Appeal decision in the case of Mika v R, and some interesting commentary here: http://maorilawreview.co.nz/2014/01/criminal-law-sentencing-and-ethnicity-mika-v-r-sensible-or-superficial/.

But I also think that the focus on the institution cannot be at the expense of the focus we place upon ourselves. The battle to stop our young people going to jail starts at home in the everyday discretionary decisions we make as parents, whāea, mātua, tuakana, teina, and finally, as mokopuna ourselves, to live a life outside the criminal justice institution and well away from any of its tatty labels.