17/09/24 NZCPR WEEKLY:
A COLOSSAL MISTAKE
By Dr Muriel Newman In a Herald interview, back in 2006, Auckland University’s Professor Elizabeth Rata warned, “The bicultural, Maori-Pakeha movement in New Zealand has been a mistake - it is subverting democracy, erecting ethnic boundaries between Maori and non-Maori and promoting a cultural elite within Maoridom.” She explained, “Many New Zealanders originally supported Maori retribalism because they saw it as a means to much greater social justice. In fact, the opposite has happened - that group of poor marginalised Maori is in the same position now.” The move towards greater social justice for native peoples originated in the 1960s in key universities around the world. Influential academics argued that the best way to improve lives was to bring ethnic group leaders into government institutions, to change the system from within. Prof. Elizabeth Rata According to Professor Rata, in New Zealand those changes, backed by a small political and academic elite, were extremely ‘subversive’: “Biculturalism is threatening democracy. You get inside a system and subvert it. Destroy from within.” In those early days, radical Maori Sovereignty activists, heavily influenced by resistance movements from around the world, adopted revolutionary strategies for New Zealand. Their goal, ‘to take back the country’, was outlined in a series of inflammatory articles published in the feminist magazine “Broadsheet” in 1982: “Maori sovereignty is the Maori ability to determine our own destiny… In essence, Maori sovereignty seeks nothing less than the acknowledgement that New Zealand is Maori land, and further seeks the return of that land… The aim of Maori sovereignty is… to redesign this country’s institutions from a Maori point of view... This country belongs to Maori…