We all know that indulgence, excuse-making, and blameshifting have devastating consequences. Institutionalised indulgence, excuse making and blameshifting magnifies the devastation many times over.
In this regard the liberal-academic-media complex has a lot for which it must answer. In this regard also, the Maori Party is a perpetrator of great harm.
It is helpful and salutary when someone stands up to expose the harm and sheet home the blame. We applaud Michael Laws piece in the Sunday Star Times, accusing Maori racism of building a culture of failure.
RODNEY HIDE to a secret, and taxpayer-sponsored, skinhead conference: "Why are we fighting blood against blood? There's so much enemy that isn't white!"
Had this empathetic admonition been among the revelations released last Sunday by this newspaper, then the Act leader would be an ex-minister today – especially given he had also congregated the skinhead and white supremacist leaders with the public purse and then thanked them for being a bit more co-operative with each other "because parliament sure hasn't".
There would have been an ensuing week of condemnation, the Act Party would be in fundamental disarray and John Key would be attempting to extricate himself, as quickly as possible, from the tar baby that was his coalition partner.
And the above exchange did happen. Except substitute Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples for Rodney Hide, and the skinhead leaders for the leaders of the criminal gangs Mongrel Mob and Black Power. Oh yes, and substitute the colour. There is so much enemy that isn't "brown".
Incredibly, the state of both this country's politics and media is that we allow racism and we allow racial preference so long as the protagonist is Maori. It is the unwritten rule of liberal political correctness that the normal standards don't apply if the subject is tangata whenua. The chosen people shall receive a licence and a liberty that may not be applied to any other ethnicity. Especially a white one.
I was reminded of the double-standard again last week in the unveiling of the John Ballance statue in Wanganui – New Zealand's first Liberal premier/prime minister and something of an enlightened politician of his time. Ballance was a Wanganui boy (oh, all right, via Ireland) but a Wanganui boy made good. Apart from former governor-general Arthur Porritt: probably the goodest of them all.
A dispassionate and academic overview of Ballance is that he was a clever, driven and compassionate premier with no shortage of courage nor acumen. He was a paternalistic native affairs minister, a far-sighted finance minister and a supporter of the female franchise.
For some reason, he is seen by some Maori as some sort of provincial pariah. An unscrupulous land grabber who ensured indigenous misery. It is a perception wholly at variance with the facts. And yet like much oral Maori history, there is a touch of the cargo cult built into the memory. This postmodern grievance mentality needs historic harbingers to explain the current state. Someone else must always have been to blame and Ballance is dead enough, remote enough and white enough to wear that collar.
So where does this antipathy come from? This hate?
One answer is local kura kaupapa. Their rendering of New Zealand history is hopelessly skewed and often wrong. They teach grievance as a part of the curriculum. It explains their existence and excuses their inadequacy. They also build myths that Maori are a kind of chosen people, vested with privilege, and solely because they arrived here first. These myths include that Maori were instinctive environmentalists, living life in harmony with nature and themselves, until the advent of the white man.
Even 21st-century rates of child abuse are blamed on the effects of nineteenth century colonisation. It is the stock in trade of the Maori Party and its leadership that anything afflicting Maori is always Pakeha fault. It is the politics of the ghetto and designed to reinforce the ghetto as the only rational existence.
Maori success – individually or collectively – shatters such politics, challenges excuses for the excesses of the gangs, the making of brothers of the monsters that are the Mongrel Mob and Black Power.
Certainly this is not the Maori way. There is growing evidence that Maori have had enough too; the rahui against gang insignia at Murupara being repeated on many marae. Gang lore is not tikanga: no matter how Sharples tries to make them so.
But the sad part of all this is that we have all come to accept Maori failure as a given. We accept the welfarism that is Maori TV and radio – propped up by the taxpayer. We accept that there are lesser standards and lesser expectations. We accept that Pita Sharples' covert racism is a substitute for getting tough on gangs. And we're not tough on gangs because, well, because so many of them are Maori. We still accept that Maori need to be patronised as some sort of cultural cringe: that a departmental waiata and a few Maori words of greeting somehow mean something.
Nothing has changed in a generation. In 1984, Koro Wetere launched the devolution of Maori funding and programmes – Maori Access and Mana schemes; institutionalised kohanga reo, kura kaupapa and wananga; special seats on everything from polytech councils to trades training bodies; separate PHOs and health organisations. But has it made a difference?
No. Twenty-five years of trying a different and distinct delivery system and the plight and position of Maori has not improved – relatively – against other ethnic groups. All that has happened is that under-performing departmental schemes have been replaced with under-performing Maori ones. There will be the odd exception, but they are genuinely odd.
This will not stop Sharples, Turia, Jackson et al continuing to preach that the only redemption for Maori is separate everything. But it must stop the rest of us. The tokenism, the dirty dollars, the let's-look-the-other-way-because-it's-cultural attitude must stop.
Quality, accountability, results. They are the only standards that matter irrespective of colour. Anything else will be inherently racist.
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