Brian Rudman: Hypocrite Harawira let us all down

Hone Harawira, with his feisty mother, Titewhai. Photo / Brett Phibbs

If Parliament is a true House of Representatives, then pressuring Hone Harawira to apologise for spouting off in an email views he's been shouting from the rooftops all his life seems a tad counter-productive.

On this I'm with Dover Samuels, the former Labour MP for the Te Tai Tokerau seat Mr Harawira holds.

"Any apology from Hone would be absolute hypocrisy. He's advocating what he really believes in. He's done that for many, many years before going into Parliament," Mr Samuels told Radio New Zealand. He added any apology would "be artificial, superficial and he actually doesn't believe it".

Mr Harawira and his whanau, with other Maori sovereignty campaigners, have been claiming all my adult life what he said in his recent email, that whitey has been "raping our lands and ripping us off for centuries".

An informal 1979 CV, quoted more recently, quotes him writing, we "beat the shit out of some smart arse Pakeha students at Auckland for ridiculing Maori culture".

In 1984, he asked in the Listener why should he celebrate Waitangi Day: "It just celebrates the fact that we were conned. That we were ripped off and are still be ripped off today."

Leap forward to Waitangi Day 1995 and he made headlines after Prime Minister Jim Bolger opened the first stage of the Te Araroa walking track by declaring he had as much right as anyone to live here.

"I am as much tangata whenua - I was born here - as anyone else and I will never give that up because I can't," Bolger said.

In classic Harawirese, Hone, then a leader of the protest group Te Kawariki, quipped back: "He can call himself tero heihei [chicken bum] if he wants to but he's not Maori ... and it makes no difference to the process we're talking about."

That was the year Te Kawariki forced the cancellation of the Treaty celebrations, Mr Harawira claiming it a victory for Maoridom.

In the aftermath, his sister Hinewhai was jailed for six months for spitting at Governor- General Dame Catherine Tizard.

A decade before, Mr Harawira was reported saying: "We don't lock ourselves in a room and say there's nothing we can learn from the white man. It's just that our history has taught us we can't trust them."

One thing he's obviously learned from the invaders is where the white man fancies taking his missus for a weekend.

So off he went to Paris, one of the centres of the imperial nastiness he's been fighting all his life.

And he didn't even use the excuse of rescuing shrunken Maori heads from the Louvre. One up for whitey here.

The current furore shows it is not just whitey you can't always trust.

Did he expect his pen pal Buddy Mikaere to be so ungentlemanly as to release to the media his emailed meltdown?

As for Mr Mikaere getting all precious about Mr Harawira having "no right to talk like this", surely it's a bit late in the day for him, or anyone else, to be getting upset.

Even the expression "white motherf***ers" hardly has much shock value these days when you can walk down Queen St and hear the "F" word trilling from the lips of teenage girls.

What is a little quaint about the email exchange is to hear a 54-year-old grandfather of two still using the angry slang of American rappers of a past generation.

As a Pakeha New Zealander, I have long disliked the way Mr Harawira labels us as white mother molesters, but I'm bemused why Hone has suddenly become a pariah.

The latest Marae-DigiPoll survey ranked him as Maoridom's most popular politician.

Love him or loathe him, Pakeha New Zealand will continue to have to live with him and the views that obviously make him so popular among Maori-roll voters.

As for persuading him of the errors of his ways, I guess it could happen.

Remember what happened to Maori sovereignty warrior Donna Awatere. In her heyday, in the mid-1980s, she was scarier than Mr Harawira's feisty mum, Titewhai.

In her book Maori Sovereignty, Awatere thundered: "This country is Aotearoa. It is ours. White people of any generation have no business being in this country."

In an interview, she told me that "we can never have biculturalism" in this country "because the Pakeha, with their in-built hatred towards other cultures, will never allow it".

By 1996, she had joined the right-wing Act Party and recanted her earlier anti-white views in a tell-all book My Journey.

Maori and Pakeha were as close as Siamese twins, with no choice but to get on.

I guess Mr Harawira could have a similar road-to-Damascus experience, but his history says otherwise.

Unfortunately, it's his road to Paris that's got lost in the furore over the bad-language emails. Crusaders can get away with a lot of things, but hypocrisy is not one of them.

Perk-busting Rodney Hide discovered that when he partook of the cheap flight deals he'd long thundered against. Mr Harawira's recently exposed transgressions combined hypocrisy with the sort of bad behaviour that crosses cultural boundaries.

He agreed before he left to lead a delegation of parliamentarians to Europe to meet counterparts at the European Parliament in Brussels. Then he got bored, abandoned his role and flitted off to Paris with his wife because it seemed like more fun.

I can live with his rhetoric and his antiquated bad-boy swearing. But if he decides to accept a leadership role, however minor, in representing our country overseas, then is it too much to ask him to honour his obligation?