Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to DexterX,
“One law” advocates don’t seek equality. How can there be any equality when the rules you want the parties to abide by were written by your side?
I think that is a brilliant position - Thanks.
Yes, Scott explained it well. As does one of my fave instructional cartoons about equity (and can we add picture embedding to the future wishlist, please).
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Hard News: And we may never meet again ..., in reply to recordari,
used to love playing that Do Re Mi track #nostalgia
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Don Brash and the ACT Party are loathed around these parts
Given their usual core voting support hovers around the margin of error, you may be understating how widespread that sentiment is. Not that it has much relationship to the scale of their influence and the damage they can cause.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I’d like to hear other perspectives on his claim that Maori never speak ill of the dead.
It was fisked pretty much right away by Rangiinui Walker and others, to be fair.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to ChrisW,
I wonder whether this is an honest failure of his binary brain, or disingenuous bullshit?
I believe Brash is smart enough to be doing this deliberately, though the lack of general public understanding about the Treaty is alarming. Fear is a powerful emotion.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
even in the same galaxy
We could seriously discuss how Brash's racism relates to Hitler's - and to similarities in some of our colonial past, but I tend to agree the framing doesn't produce a useful conversation.
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And lawyer Scott Yorke takes on the core problem with "One law for all".
There’s another aspect to the issues raised by Brash’s shit-stirring over race that I want to discuss, and that is his claim that the Treaty guarantees one law for all, and that anything other than one law for all fosters Maori privilege.
Firstly, the Treaty says no such thing, and when Dr Brash talks about Article Three of the Treaty, it’s clear he’s conveniently ignored Articles One and Two. As well as the Maori version, which most tribes signed.
But the “one law for all” argument also ignores a rather obvious problem: that the one law Dr Brash and others refer to was largely an alien law imposed by the British on the locals, and based on Western European values and notions of individualism and liberty.
These values and notions have a lesser prominence in many indigenous societies, where the welfare and needs of the collective are more important than of the individual.
It is no surprise, then, that the radical individualism espoused by economic libertarians such as Dr Brash very often clashes head-on with Maori values and customs.
When cultures clash there is very often no discernible right or wrong–just difference. Who are we to say that our western model of jurisprudence and political thinking is superior?
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“One law” advocates don’t seek equality. How can there be any equality when the rules you want the parties to abide by were written by your side?
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Lew writes eloquently and concisely about Treaty relations after the Brash/Harawira screening and highlights the fundamental cultural contradiction in the position Brash espouses. A must-read.
Pākehā society, by refusing to honour the Treaty, isn’t honouring its contract with the Tangata Whenua of this land. That breach is not the breach of some airy fairy notion of being nice to the natives. This is not some set of alien strictures; it is not some Mosaic law handed down from on high, to which we must adhere for fear of divine punishment, and most certainly it is not a set of principles insisted upon by Māori in order to weaken the Pākehā bargaining position. This is Pākehā culture in its purest, most idealised form! By failing to honour the Treaty Pākehā society is in breach of its own most fundamental and hallowed principles.
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Well, I’m Pākehā, and even if those other pricks won’t live up to their own declared standards, I want to honour my agreements, and those of my forefathers; and those made by people from whom I’m not descended but from which my 20th-Century immigrant grandparents benefitted. This Pākehā, at least, pays his debts. I do not carry guilt for the 170-odd years of breaches to date — I carry the responsibility for making right. What form will that take? Well, that’s a wider question and one to be properly decided by society at large.
By failing to honour the Treaty Don Brash is in violation of his own stated principles as the representative of a party which believes in responsibility. By failing to honour a Treaty drawn up by Pākehā, on Pākehā terms and according to Pākehā custom, we as New Zealanders are, more than anything, violating ourselves.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to BenWilson,
What if it's full of Nazis?
Heh
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
"Defence matters"? Sounds like a recipe for never having to be accountable at all.
Always handy if you don't want to talk about a particular helicopter jaunt.
So I can't help but wonder what the "urgent meetings" about "security" were that Key needed to get back to Auckland that Friday evening on December 11 for.