Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer has accused the coalition Government of destroying Māori culture. Photo / Marty Melville
THREE KEY FACTS
Barry Soper is Newstalk ZB’s senior political correspondent
OPINION
The world as we know it is coming to an end, the “big one” is coming, but what that is exactly the Māori Party’s co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer is leaving us in the dark to contemplate.
In more than 40 years, sitting above the battlers in the debating chamber below, never has such a provocative, and for many, insulting speech been delivered.
It’s in stark contrast to what the former Prime Minister Sir John Key pleaded at the National Party’s annual conference last weekend, to tone down the racial friction.
On becoming Prime Minister in 2008, Key embraced the Māori Party, even though he didn’t need them for support, giving them two seats at the Cabinet table.
Today National’s the Grim Reaper, if you listen to Ngarewa-Packer. Her people, she said, in a prepared speech, are punch drunk, are fatigued and are feeling persecuted in what she says is the biggest attack on them since the 1860s.
She spoke of a tsunami of constant and deliberate assaults to grind them down.
The party’s co-leader cited a number of areas where that’s happened, such as scrapping the Māori wards, which the Kaipara Council voted against yesterday and which bringing them in was one of the first acts of the previous Government.
They are rightly seen as undemocratic, just as Key once viewed the seven dedicated Māori seats which gives the Māori Party its platform today.
Among the other things she cited was the boot camps, which are currently being piloted. She asked: “Where’s the aroha from this Government?”
The more salient question would surely be, where’s the aroha from the families that the participants have come from?
But her bile became even more trenchant when she talked about Act, saying the party’s groomed the Prime Minister and the Government into exercising “ethnocide” on Māori culture.
She lamented what she saw as the Government being driven “to make us into one – their one, our none”.
Then she accused them of destroying Māori culture, one punch at a time “very hard and very low”.
Oh, and she wound up with a dire warning of how this country’s being led by a “dark triad”, with three personality traits, the Machiavellian, the psychopath and the narcissist, leaving us to figure out which trait belongs to which party leader.
Putting those traits together, Ngarewa-Packer said, was dangerous to Māori, delivering the “cruelest” social chaos, the worst ever inflicted on an indigenous population.
It’s going to take a revolution of minds to withstand what’s coming, she warned.
Oh, please!
At the behest of Act, Speaker Gerry Brownlee’s been asked to review what was said, which he’s going to do.
But if others, such as Winston Peters, had sounded off like this, we would never have heard the end of it.
This current crop in the Māori Party are clearly on a mission to stir up discontent, rather than showing any attempt to be constructive, and there are many areas where they could do just that.
And that’s the danger.
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