Turia says two child families not Maori way

Tariana Turia fears the Maori population is declining because Maori have been "brainwashed" into having no more than two babies.

She believes other New Zealanders have been similarly affected.

And she says doctors, helped by the law, fuel the problem by encouraging teenagers to have abortions and by not involving their families in discussions.

But she says claims by Race Relations Minister Trevor Mallard that she has encouraged Maori 13-year-olds to get pregnant are "outrageous" and simply aimed at deflecting attention from the Government's troubled week.

Mr Mallard jumped into the race relations fray again yesterday, accusing Mrs Turia of encouraging Maori girls as young as 13 to have babies in order to build the base for "Maori ownership of the country".

Mr Mallard had earlier courted controversy in his new role by saying schools wasted too much time on powhiri.

The minister's race relations role was created following National leader Don Brash's Orewa speech.

Mr Mallard based yesterday's argument on a speech the Maori Party co-leader gave to a conference on Maori sexual and reproductive health on Monday and also referred to Cabinet committee discussions while she was still with Labour.

In the speech, Mrs Turia said it was disappointing the annual growth rate of the Maori population was projected to decrease, reflecting our "reduced fertility".

"Maybe one of our policy goals in the Maori Party should be to go forth and multiply!

"I am intolerant of the excessive focus on controlling our fertility."

She said she regularly got into strife with former ministerial colleagues over the way teen pregnancy was characterised as bad.

"So when Cabinet ministers sat around tut-tutting the fact that the fertility rate for Maori females aged 13 to 17 years was 26.2 per 1000, more than five times that of non-Maori ... I objected to their analysis of our fertility as a problem."

Mrs Turia said she was "not saying that we should not be concerned about the impact of sexually transmitted diseases, or indeed that I'm opening the doors to a sexual explosion. Quite the opposite".

Mr Mallard said Mrs Turia was encouraging 13-year-olds to have babies, which was "grossly irresponsible".

"What was clear in discussion within the Cabinet committee is that Mrs Turia thought increasing the Maori proportion of the population is important and one of the ways of doing that is to have a shorter gap between generations."

Asked why he believed she wanted to grow the Maori population, he said: "It's part of her sense of Maori ownership of the country."

Mr Mallard, who claimed his views were those of the average Kiwi bloke, said her message also ran the risk of encouraging older men to think it was acceptable to have sex with 13-year-olds.

Mrs Turia said Mr Mallard was simply trying to create division and was obviously panicking about the support her party was gaining from non-Maori voters.

The references to colonisation and "Maori ownership", which she had never discussed in the speech, was designed to paint her as extreme.

She believed the way the pregnancy message was being delivered to young Maori women was failing because it focused on the negative.

Many Maori had children young - including her mother-in-law, who had her first child before she was 17 - and felt stigmatised by the "problem label".

Teen births were until recently common in many other cultures and countries.

Mrs Turia said she was "really concerned that our population is dropping" but that was not to say it was up to 13-year-olds to arrest the decline.

"Of course I don't want to see 13- to 15-year-olds getting pregnant. But what I'm saying is that when they do, the focus should be on supporting them.

"I believe our fertility has been controlled and I don't personally agree with it. We have been brainwashed into believing that having more than two children is wrong."

Non-Maori had been brainwashed as well, she said.

Her 18-year-old niece had got pregnant and was offered an abortion by a doctor when she hadn't even inquired about it.

This was not uncommon.

Maori and Pacific women's abortion rates had been higher than those of non-Maori for years and questions had to be asked about why.

How many children?

In her lifetime, the average Maori woman has 2.47 children.

The average for all NZ women (Maori included) is 1.9 children.

* Source: Statistics New Zealand