<<Maori, who make up 15% of the population, are being granted too many privileges.>>
One Nation party and Aborigenes have been in a rampage in Sidney last week too. We need some advice from the civilization in the trpocis, Goff can ask in Brazil when he goes there how we handle those issues there.
Uneasy partners
Feb 26th 2004 | WELLINGTON
From The Economist print edition
Not so boring after all
THE Labour-led government of New Zealand, which until recently seemed to be coasting effortlessly towards a third term, has been shocked out of its complacency. Don Brash—a 62-year-old former central-bank governor once nicknamed after the anti-anxiety drug Mogadon—surprised everybody when he switched to politics a few years ago. But the boring banker did not stop there. Now leader of the opposition National Party, he is turning the opinion polls upside down. His party, which only in December trailed 17 percentage points behind Labour, is now leading the polls 45% to 38%.
Mr Brash's simple line is that the Maori, who make up 15% of the population, are being granted too many privileges. “We are one country with many peoples, not simply a society of Pakeha and Maori, where the minority has a birthright to the upper hand, as the Labour government seems to believe,” he says. The opposition leader says he wants to build a society based on the notion of one rule for all, rather than a racially divided nation. He is critical of policies in education and health care—where government funding is influenced not just by need, but by ethnicity—and of other special treatment, such as Maoris' rights over land they do not own.
Maori leaders, not surprisingly, have condemned this line, which appeared to be undermined when the sole Maori member of his party's parliamentary caucus, Georgina Te Heuheu, refused to back his stance. For her pains, she was then sacked from her post as shadow minister of Maori affairs.
The government's instinctive response was to brand his plea as racist. But ministers reversed themselves when it became clear that Mr Brash's message had a powerful political resonance across party lines. New Zealanders, as the latest opinion poll shows, are unhappy with the interpretation that the Treaty of Waitangi—under which Maori chiefs ceded sovereignty to the British in 1840—created a “partnership” between Maori and other New Zealanders and gave the Maori special privileges, a position assiduously cultivated by the government led by Helen Clark.
As a result, what had been a bipartisan approach to Maori policy has now been demolished. In addition, Labour is being pilloried for becoming disconnected from voters. The government, which has invested so much political capital in the “partnership” model, could find itself in no-man's land if New Zealand's voters confirm the Brash diagnosis at the next election. |
