OPINION
Te reo and other elements of tikanga Māori have been embraced by core constituencies of the National Party, including businesses, private schools and provincial institutions. Why is the Government so out of touch with this?
Year 13 students were farewelled with the traditional haka last week. Which school? I’m going to guess it’s most schools in the country. At Palmerston North Boys’ High, a self-described “traditional” institution, the haka is such a massive effort, inside the crowded school hall, you wonder why the building doesn’t collapse.
But the one I’m especially thinking of is St Cuthbert’s College, a private school for girls in Epsom. It’s the top-performing school, academically, in the country.
The St Cuthbert’s haka is beautiful, noble, incredibly thrilling, all of that. It’s famous, at least in the leafiest suburbs of this city.
We’re used to te reo and tikanga Māori in sport and entertainment. Few would be uncomfortable with the national anthem being sung in te reo. The younger you are, the more certain it is that you’ll know how to perform a haka and sing Tutira Mai – and very likely enjoy them both.
But the reach of this lovely language goes much further now. It’s embedded in many, perhaps most, service industries, not just in the public sector but throughout the private sector too.
At a black tie event in Shed 10 on the waterfront last week, the Deloitte Top 200 awards celebrated the best of New Zealand business. Deloitte chief executive Mike Horne introduced himself with a mihi whakatau and te reo featured in many of the speeches. Nobody there would have blinked an eye.
It’s my impression most people are on board with this. Whether you think of yourself as a New Zealander, a citizen of Aotearoa, a Kiwi or something else, the chances are you value the way te reo and tikanga are being incorporated into our lives. They express something important about who we are.
So I have two questions.
One: How is it possible the National Party, the natural party of business and of private schools in Epsom and “traditional” schools in the provinces, is so out of touch with what its core supporters believe about this?
Two: Why don’t those core constituencies make this clear to the National Party?
It shouldn’t be left to Te Pāti Māori to complain the new Government seems so obsessed with a gratuitous, offensive and small-minded rollback of the progress we’ve made.
Why aren’t business leaders – those all-important and powerful voices we know National listens to – complaining about it, too?
Business NZ, the Employers and Manufacturers Association, all the chambers of commerce: None of them has spoken up about this. Don’t they see themselves as members of civil society? Do they think it will be good for us to have a culture war?
Sadly, they have not spoken out about any of the silly and sometimes dangerous agreements National has signed up to with its coalition partners.
Why did National, ostensibly a sensible party, agree to the rollback of anti-smoking legislation, or the “urgent” decision not to sign up to the new World Health Organisation regulations?
Why bother to instruct Waka Kotahi to give its English name priority, despite a Curia poll showing it’s the best recognised of all the Māori names for Government departments?
Waka Kotahi will once again be primarily known as the NZ Transport Agency. Although not Transit NZ, which it was from 1989 to 2008, or the National Roads Board or Main Highways Board, which it was even earlier.
The names are a bit of a clue: As a society, we evolve. Usually, that means going forward.
Perhaps the silly policies are part of a “dead cat on the table” strategy. This is when you want to do something important and unpopular, so you distract whoever’s watching by plonking a dead cat on the table. Suddenly, no one notices anything else.
The trouble with the dead cat strategy, apart from how stupid it makes you look, is that we notice the other things anyway.
No one, for example, is letting Christopher Luxon’s Government off the hook for reintroducing oil and gas exploration, despite an end to fossil fuels obviously being the most important climate-related goal facing the world.
Greenpeace has launched a billboard campaign calling the Government “climate extremists”. Seems fair, frankly.
Nor has anyone overlooked the Government’s intention to scrap Fair Pay Agreements this week. The unions have been very vocal.
If the silly policies are not dead cats, did National have another motive for allowing them? Perhaps they believe the furious fantasies you’ll find on X, formerly Twitter, are mainstream.
Or perhaps they just don’t care. That’s my reading. I assume Luxon simply didn’t know how much people value te reo. That he didn’t think we might be worried about the harm caused by smoking, or want us to belong to a responsible international public health community. And so on.
The deeper lessons are not good. One is that our new Prime Minister is badly out of touch. That his instincts for what’s appropriate are poor and he doesn’t think much about things that don’t affect him directly.
Another is that he got played.
This should not happen to the leader of a major mainstream party. He should be able to recognise silly suggestions that will discredit his Government and laugh them out of the room. It’s disgraceful that Luxon didn’t, or couldn’t, do that.
And it contrasts with the view of his Education Minister, Erica Stanford, about the silly policy to “restore balance to the Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum”.
She told RNZ yesterday this was “not a priority right now”. She said she was worried about a lack of progress markers in history, but was not planning curriculum changes.
Stanford, it seems, intends to tell the minor parties in the coalition what they can do with their culture-war grandstanding. Luxon could learn from her.
Also last week, they had the grand opening of Parliament and Te Pāti Māori was criticised for being “theatrical”.
Of course the party was being theatrical. In a ceremony stuffed with the costumes and customs of medieval England, our democratically elected representatives were obliged to pretend they were happy to serve at the whim of a hereditary English King.
So Te Pāti Māori brought a bit of their own. Introduced some Māori pageantry. Was it appropriate? Of course not. That’s the point.
It happened while the “Usher of the Black Rod” (what?) was required to walk backwards out of the chamber because she was not allowed to turn her back on the Governor-General. You want to complain about Rawiri Waititi’s hat? Get back to us when you’ve sorted that one out.
I suppose we’re lucky she didn’t have to prostrate herself and crawl. That’s been a thing in the courts of some kings in the past.
Te Pāti Māori served up another lesson last week with their sudden nationwide protest.
The party revealed it can organise quickly and nationally, that it controls its followers and that it’s serious about the full range of opposition, from parliamentary reform to disruptive activist protest. And it will be back with much, much more.
Perhaps Christopher Luxon thinks that although schools and business leaders are comfortable incorporating te reo and tikanga Māori into their routines, it doesn’t mean anything. But it does.
It means there’s a process of change under way. Fundamentally, it means we don’t want the bitterness and rage the Government seems intent on unleashing.
And if you don’t think there’s all that much to what the Government is doing to unleash this, check out Audrey Young’s analysis here.
This is not to say everything was just fine and now it isn’t. On all sides, there has been frustration, confusion, sometimes conflict. Progress can be hard. But, on the whole, we have chosen a negotiated progress over a culture war. And along the way, with a bit of help from Ruby Tui and whole armies of others, we have embraced the delights of te ao Māori.
The Government has only a few weeks to work out how to get in front of this, and then it will be Waitangi Day. It has a lot of catching up to do. To date, Luxon has done nothing to reassure us he grasps what this means.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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