And now he ignores the inequity for his iwi and all Māori, whom he openly discredits, that goes right back to the early 1800s. As a lawyer how can Peters defile the Treaty, a legal document signed by peoples of two separate nations?
How can he state that “elite” Māori wrongly benefited over “ordinary” Māori and quote Sir Āpirana Ngata in the same breath?
As the head of a minor party that has limited number of seats in Parliament, along with Act , it is against the principles of democracy for two tails to be wagging the dog.
Marie Kaire, Whangārei.
Convoluted thinking
Co-governance is about mutually beneficial cross-cultural collaboration - the clue lies in “co”. There is nothing to fear and much to value about the aim of cultural inclusion and equity.
What convoluted thinking has led Winston Peters to lose the plot by equating co-governance with Nazi Germany? Third Reich Aryan supremacists set about exterminating those who did not meet their pure Aryan specifications - the exact opposite of what co-governance sets out to achieve.
Michael Smythe, Northcote Point.
Spitting tacks
It is totally unacceptable behaviour when a person spits at anyone, let alone at a politician such as David Seymour.
We all have views and rights to express ourselves but this borders on arrogance and rudeness, which is not tolerated by any society let alone people who live in New Zealand.
What is this country coming to when we have rude protests, spitting and violence happening?
It is time New Zealand came back to learning respect for all people, all races and learnt to keep their opinions to a more respectable level.
Marilyn Cure, Pāpāmoa.
Lost in translation
Your editorial (NZ Herald, March 15) repeats the mantra that anyone criticising the inclusion of te reo into TV news is somehow offended, and lacks appreciation of New Zealand’s Māori culture.
I would like to see research into the substance of viewer comments and believe it would show most Kiwis enjoy and respect all sides of our multicultural society, but are irritated by forced adaptations to our languages.
Simply put, English and Māori languages have entirely different syntax and structure so clumsy attempts to mix them interrupt the fluency and comprehension for the listener; this would be the same with Chinese, Greek, Zulu or any non-Latin based idiom.
English has always absorbed words from other tongues and continues to do so naturally. For example “mana” and “taonga” are in common usage because they represent ideas for which we did not have a succinct noun, and “kia ora” has been in English dictionaries for decades.
But TV news never had longer introductions than “good evening” so the sports presenter with the 30-second introduction (in te reo, English, sign language or anything else) becomes as intrusive as the adverts and is treated similarly.
Those presenting TV shows must accept that audiences are fickle, easily driven away but hard to get back, and their jobs depend on it. Newshub should have inquired why its viewer numbers declined while Al-Jazeera’s grew, and corrected before it was too late.
The remaining ones take note.
Alan McArdle, Glen Eden.
Cut-and-thrust rugby
The Blues-Hurricanes women’s Super Rugby Aupiki match had to be one of the best rugby games I have watched in decades.
Rugby union was always meant to be a running game - until kicking for territory over and over as with scrum resets and lineouts from out on the full slowed the game at times to a walk. It’s the reason many once rugby union stalwarts turned to rugby league.
Not so with the Blues-Hurricanes women’s rugby game - you could count the number of kicks for territory, lineouts, kicking away possession and scrums on the fingers of one hand, which had spectators treated to 80 minutes of cut-and-thrust thrill-a-minute running rugby the way it was always meant to be.
The Blues men’s team should be forced to watch this magnificent game, they would learn a lot especially about not kicking away possession, which has been their nemesis for as long as I remember going back as far as Carlos Spencer.
Gary Hollis, Mellons Bay.
