Garth George: Time a lot of Pakeha bailed out of their comfort zones

I am becoming increasingly uneasy at the way in which the one-size-fits-all mentality - a feature of the thinking of six years of Helen Clark's Administration - seems to be taking root in an increasing proportion of our population, or at least in the Pakeha section of it.

Several events lately indicate that far too many of us are becoming more and more one-eyed and intolerant and have lost that innate Kiwi ability to think outside the square.

Many seem to feel threatened by anything which might alter or upset their set way of thinking and/or behaving and which might encourage them to expand, or to venture outside, their traditional comfort zones.

Examples of this have been tumbling over one another as the year gets into its full stride. Such as:

Dame Silvia Cartwright's crack on Waitangi Day at the place of Maori women on the marae.

The way the police and the Manukau City Council have treated and are treating the residents of the Green Acres caravan park in Mangere.

The ructions over the governance and financial probity of Te Wananga o Aotearoa.

And the objection being taken by some to Foodtown briefly having bilingual announcements in its supermarkets.

Dame Silvia Cartwright's outburst was redolent of the worst of patronising colonialist condescension of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, made worse because it came from someone who is supposed to represent the Crown.

What disturbs me more, however, is that it promotes the idea that the Pakeha attitude to women's "rights" and that indefinable thing called "equality" is the only right one.

This attitude is made more ridiculous in the face of plain evidence that there is a goodly and growing number of Maori women who have achieved positions of national prominence and authority in, among other things, politics and the professions - in spite of where they are required to sit on a marae.

The plight of the residents of Green Acres really made me wonder at the intelligence of the powers that be. I'm damned if I can see why, just because the cops picked up a clutch of drug dealers and users and a pound full of unregistered dogs, the innocent in that community should be made to suffer.

The Manukau City Council had turned a blind eye for years to unpermitted structures built on to caravans, the place had been used as a dumping ground for people the social agencies couldn't handle and a tremendous sense of caring and community shines through. The Weekend Herald headline summed it up beautifully: "A haven for misfits."

And now the electricity has been turned off, caravan additions are being torn down, rubbish isn't being collected and a whole bunch of hugely disadvantaged people who have found refuge at Green Acres are being threatened with eviction.

It makes me furious because once again it shows our growing intolerance - even contempt - for anyone who is different and who chooses to live in a manner which is to most people, Pakeha in particular, inconceivable, yet which suits those people just fine.

And it ignores the fact that, if you were to draw a circle a kilometre out from any home in any number of Auckland suburbs, there would be as many drug dealers and users, drunks, wife beaters, burglars, thieves and unregistered dogs as there ever were at Green Acres.

The ructions over Te Wananga are centred on the stewardship of public money, particularly the suspicion of nepotism and the giving of inducements to students in various unusual courses.

Yet there has so far been no acknowledgment of the success this unique educational institution might have had on the lives of scores or perhaps hundreds of men and women who have taken advantage of what it has to offer. How many people whom society has seen as hopeless have had their lives turned round and made meaningful by Te Wananga?

Successive Governments have turned education into a business and I can't see how it can take exception to this particular business giving inducements to its "customers", which is common practice throughout the commercial world.

Once again we see those who cannot or will not think outside the square condemning that which is different and doesn't quite fit in with their narrow conception of what constitutes "education".

As for the supermarket announcements, those who object are beneath contempt. This country has two official languages - English and Maori - and anyone who takes exception to hearing mellifluous Maori, in any setting, deserves to go deaf. It sure beats the raucous noise that passes for music in many retail outlets.

The irony is that in one Foodtown shop, in Grey Lynn, the edict has come down that the multi-ethnic staff can only speak English in the lunchroom.

In both cases we are confronted again with that craven fear of something we don't understand, that one-size-fits-all attitude that seeks to make everyone conform to some preconceived notion of how things should be, that intolerant and one-eyed determination to let nothing disturb our comfort zone.

We see ourselves as a country that prides itself on that nebulous thing called "tolerance". Rather, I suspect, we are becoming a nation of hypocrites.