Notes from the New Zealand race wars Paul Reeves used to tell the story of the Māori bus driver who took passengers on tours of 19th Century battle sites in the Far North. After several stops, one of the Pākehā passengers asked the driver, "How come when you tell the story of the fights, the Māori win every time?"
The driver looked him over and said, "So long as I’m driving this bus, that’s the way it’s going to be."
The debate raging in mainstream media, and even more heatedly on social media, is just about as partisan as that, with accusations of racism flung about like confetti. On one single morning not so many months ago, RNZ carried four stories in a row on its website. Two were about local body name calling. The deputy mayor of South Waikato was accusing a fellow councillor of German descent of following in the footsteps of his "hereditary forebears", who ignored the norms of "decent society".
In Masterton, the deputy mayor labelled his detractors "grumpy old, white men". TVNZ had to accept a broadcasting standards complaint that its use of the term "gypsy day", to refer to the date on which dairy sharemilkers move around the country, was a racial slur against the Romany community. And Disney’s streaming platform updated its content advisory notice on racism to include Dumbo (for its depiction of the crows, one of whom is named Jim), and The Jungle Book (for King Louie the ape, shown to be lazy and singing Dixie jazz).
To interpret why the debates about racism become so incendiary, a little context is needed. Behind the ranting and raving lies much that is highly formalised and carefully constructed. The skill of talking to each other is one part art, two parts science. It’s the ancient science of rhetoric – persuasive speaking. European settlers came to New Zealand at a time when rhetoric was dropping off the higher education syllabus in Britain, but here in Aotearoa, the art of persuasive oratory was highly prized on marae, as it still is today. The way that Māori talk about Pākehā in formal settings is artful compared with the way in which some Pākehā bang on about Māori in Facebook taunts and talkback radio harangues.
The racially different dialogues rarely overlap. Few Pākehā hear what Māori are saying about them except for the occasional outburst that is picked up by the media, such as the taunts at the time of Tuia 250, the government-sponsored commemoration for the 250th anniversary of the arrival of HMS Endeavour in Aotearoa in 1769–70, labelling Cook a "syphilitic destroyer of indigenous cultures, a barbarian and a racist", or Donna Awatere Huata’s since revised but never forgotten call for Pākehā to "go home". By comparison, the Pākehā rhetoric about Māori is vastly more visible and extreme.
At the inflammatory end of the scale are two organisations. Hobson’s Pledge was created and is led by former National Party leader Don Brash to oppose and eliminate any trace of racial preference in the way the country is run. It promotes a mistranslation of Governor Hobson’s pledge at Waitangi for Māori and Pākehā to be "one people". The One New Zealand Foundation was established in 1988 to fight what it calls "Māori apartheid’ and promote ‘one law, one flag, one New Zealand" and the dismantling of the Waitangi Tribunal. Its best-known advocate is Northland farmer Allan Titford, whose long-running dispute with Māori over land ownership was overtaken by his conviction for rape, assault and arson in 2013 when he was jailed for 24 years. Both organisations’ websites peddle conspiracy theories about such subjects as creeping Marxist ideology, conspiracies about lost versions of the treaty, secretive Waitangi Tribunals and a red-haired, pale-skinned tribe, most likely from Wales, predating Māori 3000 years ago.
Forming a supporting chorus to these websites are the shock jocks, the talkback radio hosts who assure us that "Māori were very lucky they got the Brits" as their colonisers. Then there are letters circulating online, decrying, for example, the "Māori cultural takeover and the greed, waste and hostility" that go with it. There is also the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, originally the New Zealand Centre for Political Debate, founded by former ACT Party politician Muriel Newman, which describes itself as having "a research-based approach to public policy matters" and encouraging "the free and open debate of political issues". It hosts Karl du Fresne, former editor of the Dominion Post, who has written that "in the 21st century the word racist simply means anyone who doesn’t conform to the authoritarian orthodoxies of identity politics".
In 2021, historian and former Labour minister Michael Bassett wrote a newspaper article, later deleted and apologised for by the publisher, that, in the words of a reasoned and thorough response from Scott Hamilton, maintained that "a cabal of 'Māori revolutionaries', 'woke' academics, and civil servants is working with sinister efficiency to turn Aotearoa New Zealand into a bicultural dystopia". Brash criticised the removal of Bassett’s piece, claiming that the decision showed "how far New Zealand has drifted" in the wrong direction.
Accounts of warmongering by Māori (talk about the pot calling the kettle black) are endlessly recycled – the Musket Wars are popular in this line of argument – but nothing is mentioned about their peacemaking, which happened even more frequently. Accusations flow about bloodthirsty Māori back in a time when Europeans were still hanging, drawing and quartering offenders. We hear a lot about the warrior excesses of Te Rauparaha but much less about the peacemaking missions of his son Tamihana, who sought to heal the damage caused by his father’s campaigns in Canterbury.
And then there are the simple mistranslations of Māori words, skewed to suit a political agenda. The famous phrase Hobson is reputed to have used at the signing of the treaty in Waitangi, "He iwi tahi tātou", is a prime example. To translate that as "We are now one people" is to use the wrong pronoun. It’s an easy mistake to make, given that there are some 27 different possessive pronouns in te reo, but the endlessly repeated mistake – as mentioned above, Hobson’s Pledge is a major offender – is driven more by political than grammatical motives. When Ngāpuhi elder Waihoroi Shortland translated the phrase for the Governor General Patsy Reddy at Waitangi in 2020, he said it meant "Together we are one nation."
At the other end of the scale is the disconcerted but never publicly voiced disquiet of older, middle-class Pākehā, who would like to be sympathetic but fear the claims for self-determination, such as those seen in He Puapua, the Report of a Working Group on a Plan to Realise the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the growing use of te reo are a step too far. The dis-ease isn’t confined to conservative quarters. An opinion piece on the Listener’s editorial page echoed those fears, complaining about ‘untranslated, rapidly spoken Māori, particularly on radio leaving older people, especially, "feeling excluded and belittled".
The language employed across this range of views about Māori contains some dominant narratives, as the linguists call them, familiar and popular themes that are often repeated but rarely fact-checked or updated. "They’ve never had it so good" gets a lot of coverage. It’s often coupled with a comparison with other colonised peoples such as Aboriginal Australians. Then there’s: "The problems all happened a long time ago and it’s not my fault. Don’t blame me for my great-grandparents’ mistakes."
And yes, "Māori had it tough but it’s time to kiss and make up and move on." Actually, some say, "The Crown is doing its best, just look at the treaty settlements so far. It all takes time." "Yes, there’s racism, but it’s not as bad as it used to be. We’re making good progress." Frequent, too, are complaints about the sense of entitlement that many Māori have: "It’s as though we and the government owe them something more." The Treaty of Waitangi is a good thing to have, "but we’re making too much of it, much more than what it meant in 1840. I’m sure it meant something different back then."
All these narratives – and I’ve excluded the more obviously racist and crude ones about genetic and cultural inferiority – are repeated over and over by people who seem to have no awareness at all about their own privilege, their own impatience when they don’t get the justice and respect to which they feel entitled. And when figures are flung around about the cost of compensation and restoration, we don’t look for fair comparisons. As a 2018 Stuff article pointed out, citing Treasury and Office of Treaty Settlements figures, of the $1322 billion of government spending from 1993 to that point, just $2.24 billion had been spent on treaty settlement redress, less than the $2.5 billion budget of the Auckland District Health Board for the 2019–20 year.
The 1998 Ngāi Tahu settlement amounted to $170 million. The economic losses to the iwi as a result of the Crown’s land purchases were valued at more than $20 billion. When Pākehā feel under pressure from Māori, their collective memory of the worst moments in their own history becomes ever more selective and they can begin to feel like victims who are being blamed unfairly and excessively. And because Pākehā are the dominant culture responsible for so much damage, there is nothing they can say in their own defence. They have to wait for Māori to do that.
Older Māori frequently point out that they were prevented from speaking te reo in school. The Native Schools Act of 1867 required English to be used wherever practicable and though te reo wasn’t officially banned, it was widely discouraged and students who used it were often strapped or caned. The trauma that created has left a legacy of whakamā (shame) and called for a formal apology from the Crown. In Nūhaka, the story is more nuanced. Te reo was taught in school over 60 years ago, and back in the early 1900s students had to speak English but were also taught formal Māori grammar. But the suppression of the language is remembered as if it had just happened. And Pākehā shouldn’t be surprised: the pain and insult of such a denial of culture takes generations to ease.
Comparisons between our different cultures over who is the least cruel or the most destructive, to say nothing of who is smarter or braver, end up taking us nowhere and should never serve as excuses for bad behaviour. When I see derogatory references to so-called ‘Stone Age’ Māori culture, I think of the ancient navigational and seafaring skills for ocean voyaging that culture sustained, stretching back to a time when European sailors were still keeping in sight of land for fear of tipping off the edge of the world.
But are all Pākehā criticisms of Māori explained by a deepseated and deliberate racism? There’s an institutional form of racism that anyone who is privileged inherits and expresses without stopping to think about it. And that racism is built into the forms and habits of the language Pākehā use every day. Most Pākehā people of goodwill have never fact-checked what they say about Māori, never asked them how it feels to be on the receiving end of stereotypes and insults, even if they’re unintended. I grew up with prolific unspoken assumptions about what Māori were ‘naturally’ good at doing. Well-meaning people told me that they made good drivers, of bulldozers especially, for some reason.
They were great musicians – they were the best guitarists – and soldiers, of course, and politicians, nurses, even doctors. But scientists? Probably not. Nor businessmen either, because they had too many friends and relatives they were obliged to take care of. They could be persuaded to sell you anything, provided you paid them on the spot in cash.
These throwaway lines, these memes, are used unthinkingly by otherwise well-intentioned people, as casually as online help desks ask us "How’s your day going?" The cheap labels remain in place until they’re rubbed out by personal experience, academic research and, best of all, getting to know enough Māori to discover they don’t fit stereotypes any more easily than Pākehā do. But in a society that increasingly isolates Māori through inequality, the sort of cross-cultural contact that erases these distortions becomes harder to find. Taken with kind permission from the new bestseller Becoming Pākehā: A journey between two cultures by John Bluck (HarperCollins, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide.
