Minister hammers colonial 'holocaust'

By AUDREY YOUNG

Maori tribes suffered a "holocaust" under colonisation, Associate Maori Affairs Minister Tariana Turia claimed yesterday in a speech that will test the Prime Minister's tolerance of her radical views.

Mrs Turia said Maori violence was a phenomenon of "post-colonial traumatic stress disorder."

Until the Maori holocaust was acknowledged, healing could not begin, she told a psychologists' conference in Hamilton.

Mrs Turia, under fire last week for linking Maori child abuse to colonisation, said there was a double standard when people were outraged by home invasions but not by the "home-lands invasions" Maori had suffered.

She also confided that she has conversations with a spiritual guardian, or kai tiaki, and sometimes takes its advice.

"What if I told you I have been visited a number of times by my kai tiaki and had carried out a conversation? What if I said to you that my kai tiaki had cautioned me about a particular action?"

Mrs Turia was not available to expand on her speech, but it is believed she raised spiritual objections to the planned site of the new Northland prison.

The speech was immediately seized upon by Opposition MPs, with National's Roger Sowry describing it as "the most off-the-planet speech by a politician in living memory."

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters called it "psychobabble."

Prime Minister Helen Clark, who is taking a break in the South Island, looks set to want a word with Mrs Turia when she returns to duty.

A spokesman said the Prime Minister "will be reminding Tariana Turia of her responsibilities as a minister of the Crown."

The Prime Minister has been publicly tolerant of her minister's radicalism and apparent fixation with the effects of colonisation.

Last week, she described Mrs Turia as "inexperienced" when it emerged that the junior minister had asked for statistics on child abuse and family violence to be cut from a Children's Commissioner's report because they were not presented in the context of colonisation.

But Helen Clark's patience with troublesome ministers is known to be short.

In her speech, Mrs Turia said the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder on Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were well researched.

"What seems to have not received similar attention is the holocaust suffered by indigenous people, including Maori, as a result of colonial contact and behaviour."

Members of the Auckland Jewish community last night questioned Mrs Turia's link between colonised Maori and Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust and, they said, by implication the parallel between colonial settlers and Hitler.

In an analysis of the causes of Maori violence, Mrs Turia said that "a consequence of colonial oppression has been the internalisation by Maori of the images the oppressor has of them."

"It is for this reason that I found the negative portrayal of Maori whanau last week to be both spiritually and psychologically damaging."

The psychological consequence was Maori self-hatred, suicide and the high number convicted of crimes of violence, or Maori women and children who were their victims.

"Early records of Maori society indicated violence towards children was uncommon."

After reading the speech, the chairwoman of the Auckland Jewish Council, Wendy Ross, said many Jewish people agreed that the majority of New Zealanders should try to understand the history of Maori and the pain of colonisation.

"But we don't think it is a valid understanding of history to compare what happened to Maori people under colonisation with what happened to the Jewish people of Europe in the Holocaust.

"I personally know many, many Jewish people who lost everything ... Their land, their families, their homes, their language.

"Yet they have nurtured their children ... It hasn't caused them to bash their children, and I just don't accept that that is cause and effect."