Moral question: New Zealand is a great place to live. Why should we worry about the one in six of the population who is struggling?
Moral question: New Zealand is a great place to live. Why should we worry about the one in six of the population who is struggling?
I WAS in conversation the other day with a well known New Zealander who is a wonderful dad to his kids and a talented artist, well regarded internationally.
We were talking about issues relating to Maori and some of the concerns that stand in the way of progress of particularly Maori youth when he asked the question: "Why should I worry about that?"
I guess that is a question many people ask and, although I'd like to think he was asking a rhetorical question, many say: "I am pakeha, so why should I care?"
It is an odd question at a time when many apologists for having no ethnically targeted policy believe we live in a utopia where all can succeed at the same rate regardless of individual or collective circumstances.
They repeat the mantra "one law for all", but fail to acknowledge that the same "one law for all" must work against minorities because we don't all start life with the same opportunities. Success cannot be measured for all people with the same ruler, weighed on the same scale or plotted and compared to a national standard.
If we acknowledge that Maori make up about a sixth of the population and also are 58 per cent of the prison population, under-achieve at mainstream schools and are over-represented in health and welfare statistics, we can make an analogy with the "typical" Kiwi family — whatever that looks like.
The parents of six kids, by this one-law-for-all standard, should not mind at all when one child is failing at school, cannot find work, is soon to be before the court and in danger of falling off the rails because the other kids are all fine.
In fact, they are all fine 20 per cent of the time, and some of them never struggle at all. Why worry that one of the children is more likely to smoke, die in a car crash, commit suicide, die younger and suffer worse health during their lifetime? The other kids will live long and happy lives, in good health, working in good jobs with great salaries, and own their own homes.
Five out of six ain't bad, right? Nup, it's wrong.
I wouldn't want to live in a family where the parents and siblings don't care about the one who is struggling. I wouldn't drive a nice car with even one bald tyre. Have a nice house with a broken window that never gets fixed.
And I don't want to live in a country where one in six of the population is struggling and nobody does something sensibly targeted to smooth the path for that one in six so all of us can achieve to our full potential. The failure reflects on all of us. We can't be dissociated on the basis of race.
Those who see us all as kiwis with no delineation of ethnicity, race, nationality, age demographic, educational background, religious persuasion or sexual preference are fooling themselves. We are one nation with a beautiful and challenging set of individual characteristics that should add to our nationhood and not take away from it.
The spectre of loss of language, repatriation of land, assertion of sovereignty, ascendance of communities, aspiration of leadership is not a question of "why should one have more than another?", it is "why does one obviously have so much less?", if we are all one family, one nation, with one dynamic, colourful vibrant and successful future.
In recent times we have seen this plain and obvious truth get past even the smartest of us, and we need to change that.
Chester Borrows
■ Chester Borrows served as Whanganui MP for 12 years and as a minister in the National Government
