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
Does this mean they'll be setting up casinos ?
(Pointing to roulette wheel.)
12 on red?
Joska Fischer may be the moderate, public face of this party, but it is still nothing more than the same band of radical Marxists that caused such massive upheaval and destruction throughout Western Europe during the 60s/70s.
They haven't changed their stripes, merely bought newer, more expensive suits to disguise their unbridled fundamentalism.
They're are essentially unchanged, espousing the same ideology that has been tried repeatedly, e.g. in the G.D.R. and former Soviet Union, and which has never succeeded, in spite of their best efforts.
still awake?
I know, you probably thought that I was still hanging out in those wild, Harare night clubs, didn't you?
Nope, still here in Brooklyn, New York.
Proud to state that I was thrown out of one once, in my younger, wilder days.
Did you ever see someone pull a tablecloth on a fully loaded table, then get picked up by two bouncers with her scrawny legs air-jogging ?
That was me......
Does this mean they'll be setting up casinos ?
They don't really need to do that. They were already running the show when all the casinos were built here in the 1990s. All public projects need to consult the local Maori iwi (tribe) and sought their approval to go ahead as per the requirements of Resource Management Act 1991.
You got it to the T. One of the original founders of the Green Party of New Zealand was in turn an original founder of the German Green Party itself - he moved to NZ in the late 1970s.
And the Greens are unashamedly Chomskyite in its stand. Keith Locke, who is their current Foreign Affairs spokesman, oops, spokesperson, is openly and virulently anti-American. He is certainly no greenies way before 1990s, and publicy praised Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot when he came into power in 1975 and he even said today he has "no regrets" over what he said back then. And wait, he also defended David Irving, which gives you a clue as to how close the far-left, Greenies, and neo-Nazis are in today's world.
Looking at how NZers vote, we could end up with Locke as our PM by 2008. Just remember that there are people on that position of power that take Noam Chomsky that seriously. ;-)
,,, you've just given me encouragement and new zeal with that statement. I never thought of slapping the "fundamentalist" label on the GREENs - what a strategy!! For a while I've been calling gender femanists "female chauvinists"... works like a charm.
In fact, there was a high-ranking European liaison with Al Qaeda-who also happened to be a fervent Nazi sympathizer as well-who was recently captured in France.
Then there's that psychopath David Hicks, who still hasn't been brought to trial, even though he is one of the few detainees at Guantanamo to actually be indicted.
The Islamofascists have spread their tentacles across a wide swath of the planet, and their alliances with anti-Western communists and RDDB is evident to all but the most dense of observers.
All you need to do is browse through a couple of issues of David Horowitz's wonderful website, frontpagemag.com.
Then you'll realize how much these vermin have infested the infrastructure of Western civilization.
It's scary, but it's also true.
L
Though, to be perfectly honest, I think that the term would be a little too abstruse for your intended targets to fully comprehend.
I have a brilliant-if I do say so myself, and I do-deconstruction of these anti-evolutionary twits and their twisted philosophy on my profile page.
In addition to including excerpts from noted scholar Daphne Patai's wonderful exegesis on modern feminism's crimes (HETERPHOBIA), I've also posted a very humorous-but fake-questionnaire devised by Adam Cohen and Paul Krugman, authors of that caustic analysis of the baleful consequences of the 1990s, Generation Ecch.
It's loosely based upon Antioch college's own ridiculous student policies regarding sexual harassment/dating between students living on campus.
Check it out for yourself.
Misandrist... you are forcing me to dust off my copy of the Red Primer and learn all over again. How dare you sir!
HONEST!
(Sheepish grin.)
Liar. Don't do it again or I'll do to you what Dave Matthews did to those poor souls on the highway ;-)
Ping, Ivan, to an interesting article from the one person (aside from the younger members of my family on my dad's side) from NZ I think has anything reasonable to say on politics anymore.
Huh???
(Scratching head. Thinking back to days at Edward R. Murrow High School, when I actually knew someone who was both black and a Dave Matthews fan. WHO WASN'T EVEN IN THE 'DAVE MATTHEWS BAND'!)
I know, it's hard to believe, but I'm not lying.
-good times, G.J.P. (Jr.)
That combination in a Dave Matthews fan is a miracle sir. I am boycotting Mr.Matthews for being a self hating southern African and forgetting about us folks. The last interview I heard it sounded like he ate too many mbanje muffins. New Zealand should be happy they don't have Dave Matthews for a citizen!
I think that there was a story that broke about an hour or so ago-I think that it's in the "Music & Clubs" section of Newsday-about an investigation by the Illinois AG regarding their lease of this bus.
I don't think that they were in it at the time, but they were still responsible-to the best of my knowledge-for what purposes it was used for, even in their absence.
IT STINKS, I TELLS YA!
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