One said Māori were like seagulls: if you feed them “more come - and then they start crapping on you.”
Another said that over the years there’d been a “self-serving reinterpretation of the Treaty to benefit the Māori elite”.
Yet another reckoned that before Pākehā brought colonisation and war Māori “were killing each other anyway”.
There was talk of what percentage of Māori ancestry should count, and an assertion that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon wasn’t brave enough to investigate Māori organisations with charity tax status.
Holy fucking shit. I hope that even Seymour might have winced at these comments.
A right wing politician speaking to a room of rich white racist retirees who think the natives are too uppity and need taking down a peg or two; if ever there was a generation who I wish would just shuffle off this moral coil.
Its hideous but it isn’t new. We just had a period of blissfull ignorance when it was less acceptable to be a rascist coloniser i.e we made some progress , but they were still there simmering in their own filth. Passively aggressively holding in. They’ve wriggled back out of the cracks emboldened by this mini Trumpist dweeb and possibly by comparable events elsewhere, enabled by spineless reactionary slugs in their coalition (National) that’ll agree with whatever ends up being popular - they have no actual value system, beyond following the orders of their political donors. Hatred and division is also the default business model in this phase of the info age. Engagement.
But that may be reducing how serious this could be. I still think these types are a large element of this country , maybe even a majority have a streak of this tendency, so what we have is an ideological clash over what we want this place to be or what to base it on. They want to wind the clock back to their romantic idea of a rosey (non-existent) past. Perhaps it relieves some pent up pressure to have a hopefully short period of this (dangerous to assume though), so making the statement and pushing back as with the hikoi is so important to ensure we dont end up back in a bland homogenous faceless outpost of a dead colony. The mindset is so pervasive, the tendency is quite possibly genetic in us descendants of colonisers and very similar psychology occurs in other European colonies.
Take your pick, especially in those where settlers outnumber the Tangata Whenua. We’ve inherited a hospital pass from hell, but the solutions are so easy beginning with respecting where we are in the world, who’s space we have been allowed to share, and a partnership that was entered into. But most important Looking inward to recognise these tendencies. Self reflection may be beyond these shrivelled slime dwellers though. Theyre like wild animals lashing out when they have everything they need and none of what they perceive is of any threat to their comfortable lifestyles whatsoever. On the contrary, their own attitude is what risks what they have already and theyre being used as cannon fodder for someone else’s benefit just like original settlers funnily enough.
Also its tempting to frame it as generational, hopefully it is, but things can wind back, so hoping we will grow out of it will not be enough.