Posts by Manakura
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I promise I'll read your post again, but for now I only have one question: What is it exactly that Maori want?
I reccommend you ask some of your friends with the brown faces?
I could tell you what I want as a Maori person, but I would never be the whakahihi (know-it-all) that would claim to know and represent what all Maori want. What is wanted varies hugely between iwi, hapu and individuals, meaning we Maori are just like any loosely defined community.
I agree race relations are not as bad here as they are in many other places. But we have no reasons to be smug or complacent about it, as Don Brash's electoral successes illustrate well, along with the atrocious standards of living many Maori continue to deal with. There is much good work to be done.
However my post was about political relationships more than race relations and identity politics. I think I have shown a distinct wariness over how the struggle has become about identity and cultural politics. I think the struggle is against the State and the powerful, not Pakeha people or culture per say.
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I don't quite see why Maori need to feel obliged to vote for the Maori Party against their political judgment
You misunderstand, voting with Maori Party is not some obligation to support the resistance or something. It adheres with my best political judgement because i agree more than I disagree with what the Maori Party has done/said. Isn't it the same for everyone? How many people would vote again for Helen Clark and/or Labour but disagree with say, the handling of the Ahmed Zaoui saga?
Here's an email from a Maori roll voter in Tamaki Makaurau
Ae, Kai te tika korero tena. This is what I was inelegantly trying to say about Papa Pita - I don't agree with everything he does but his integrity and mana ensures my continued support. I 'm pretty sure that if the people give a resounding no he and the rest of the party will listen.
Of course he's a politician - running for election makes you a politician straight away.
Thanks for that insight into Papa Pita's job title, to make it painfully obvious - politician in the context of my comment meant 'person who will sacrifice ideals, sense of justice and propreity to focus group polling and career ambition'.
And before the obvious is pointed out again there is no contradiction between WFD not surviving the marae and the above paragraph. Leadership from the flaxroots up is integral to the kaupapa of the Maori party, therefore dropping the idea at the peoples say-so is consistent with Papa Pita's ideals for leadership.
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O, and to address the patai in Tze Ming's post: I'm on the Maori role and voted for Papa Pita last time. His and the parties support of any WFD scheme would not be a major influence in how I vote next time. There are simply more important issues than this for Maori that I think only the Maori party can address.
In fact his willingness to risk offending his contituencies for something he clearly believes will bear positive results only makes my continued support for him more likely... despite the fact I don't necessarily agree with some of his perspective.
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Just heard Papa Pita's interview on bFM's The Wire.
It's clear he hasn't actually done anything in the way of policy work but he did provide some details.
He acknowledged the failure of the prior WFD scheme(s), citing poor design, inadequate funding and draconian entry requirements. He operated a scheme, presumably out of Hoani Waititi marae in west Akl, and said they were only allowed to provide services to people with a serious lack in formal education and/or learning impediments.
Interestingly he said people on WFD should be paid the minimum wage, which will satisfy the worker/human rights lot on cheap labour issues, but is it financially viable? My question is can a WFD union then be set up? That would be fun.
Other vague details were "other conditions to ensure transition from WFD to real work", and the WFD would be more fully combined with job seeking (actual and skills). He said only constructive projects would be approved, so its seems upskilling WFD workers would be cumpolsory for schemes.
Not sure if that will gel with the bloc of unemployed that do have huge education and learning challenges?
His justification for WFD is definitley in the vein of Ta Apirana's position about Maori welfare dependency, it's a 'work will set you free' ideal he was reaching for.
He cracked me up when he said he didn't care what his constituents thought or what National's position was - said if his power base didn't like his ideas then he'd get what he'd deserve at the ballot box. he's definitely a pragmatist rather than a politican, meaning i beleive he doesn't care about politics, but does care about policies that work.
Still waiting for details though.
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No, as the title implies its a party of (and for) Maori. The left and the right polarity of the Pakeha political spectrum is rendered largely irrelevant if your kaupapa is improve the political-economic status because
Shoud've have read
No, as the title implies its a party of (and for) Maori. The left and the right polarity of the Pakeha political spectrum is rendered largely irrelevant if your kaupapa is to improve the political-economic status of Maori people because:
Never post before the first coffee of the day, never.
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Prove they're milking, then take their benefit off them.
Great idea, the kids who happen to be lumped with 'dole bludging' parens will love it. We'd create a new class of urban hunter gatherers living off the land in a post-industrial wasteland. In the short term they will hate us middle class people with all our educated privelege but when western society finally collapses they'll thanks us for it.
Anyway, the Maori Party isn't a party of the left and won't be while Turia is there.
No, as the title implies its a party of (and for) Maori. The left and the right polarity of the Pakeha political spectrum is rendered largely irrelevant if your kaupapa is improve the political-economic status because
a. if ideas work then you promote them regardless of whether they are left or right wing ideas (i.e. pragmatism vs ideology).
and b. the political left and right of Aotearoa are not to be trusted to do right by Maori. So aligning yourself with one or the other is a waste of time.
Back to the kaupapa of the post - I grew up in a single parent family during the 80s and 90s in rural Aotearoa and I can tell you from first hand experience that right wing welfare policies do not work. Unless the aim is to teach people how to shoplift, raid the local orchard, draw and maintain maps of all availiable food sources in a 20km radius, etc etc. (I was only half joking about urban hunter-gatherers, I was one for about 10 years of my childhood after the mother of all budgets.)
But there seems little point in discussing the idea in this forum as its not policy yet so who knows what universal work for dole would actually mean. While I'm waiting for details I think I'd rather spend my time emailing my MP, Papa Pita, to tell him it sounds like a stupid idea.
Btw, this kind of hardline on welfare is a meme in the history of Maori MPs. For example Ta Apirina Ngata supported paying Maori one 5th of what unemployed got during the Great Depression. He feared welfare dependency as much as Aunty Tariana seems to. Altho his reasons may have been a little more valid - I think he hoped that the lack of welfare money would encourage Maori to stay on and utilise their land. This was in the days that Maori 'waste land' was forfeited to the governement. That hardly applies today.
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I think the problem is not that Oz doesn't have a treaty but that guys have testicles.
Heheh! Does anyone know of reputable studies that analyse bigotry in relation to gender? Not feminist theory necessarily, but rather something with a firm empirical basis.
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fstdt.com
greatest. site. ever.well so far this year anyway. I work in a space with about 20 other stressed out researchers and most of us easily 'wasted' the last 5 hours or so huddled around 1 pc lol.
Do ya reckon fstdt.com is bought us by the same witty folk as that other great fundy satire site discoverthenetwork.org?
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Lest we run away with the notion that the entire continent is mired in ill-will:
That's a nice gesture, I hope it helps reduce the atrocious number of Aboriginal kids that die 'mysteriously' in police custody.
Has anyone seen the John Safran vs God episode where he satires those Melburnian hippies? Hilarious
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How would you know that?
Because in my everyday life I tend to 'pass' as a Pakeha. So I hear a lot of things that most Pasifika, African, etc people never would. I also have a tendency to 'collect' other peoples bigotry, meaning I will often steer conversation in the general direction and see what comes out of a new acqauntainces mouth.
I also worked in hospotality for a very long time - its a profession where you get treated as if you're invisble - and the things i heard and saw are just as bad as my experiences in Aussie, America etc. Just not quite so public or overt, but after a couple of quiets the bigot beast will often rear its ugly head.
I'm also privy to what Maori say about Pakeha, Chinese, Somalis ets and its equally disquieting.
NZers definitely harbour the same prejiduces as Aussies, and probably to the same extent. The difference seems to be our choices in how we act on it - or not.