A great take on the passport issue

It has been unbelievable that so many people have gone insane over the entirely sensible and trivial change to NZ passports where the language used by 99% of New Zealanders appears first and the language used by 4% appears second.

Both languages are still on the NZ passport. All that has changed is the order.

Ani O’Brien has a good take:

When the word Aotearoa started appearing more prominently in public life, most Kiwis didn’t mind. In fact, a lot of us thought it was a nice touch; an acknowledgment of heritage, a nod to the history of this land. We were told it was just a gesture of inclusion. That it was about respect, dual heritage, embracing both names as part of our national identity. Most Kiwis were fine with that. Shrugged and moved on.

I’m one of those who likes the increasing use of te reo, when it is done naturally. We have incorporated words such as whanau, kai, kia kaha into everyday conversation. I love the te reo version of the national anthem, and enjoy my primary school kids learning concepts such as manaakitanga.

But somewhere along the way, inclusion morphed into dominance. What began as a well-meaning effort to honour Māori language and culture has, in the hands of our cultural elites, become a tool for ideological conformity and social stratification.

It’s not really about te reo, tikanga, or even Māori. It’s about power. The university-educated, bureaucratically-ensconced, BlueSky-scrolling class have seized on te ao Māori as a mechanism through which to assert their own moral superiority over the “low-status” masses. It’s a modern version of the noble savage trope only this time, the reverence isn’t for the culture itself, but for what revering it allows them to do.

By elevating mātauranga Māori to sacred, unchallengeable status, above science, above secularism, above democratic consensus, these cultural elites get to draw a bright line between the enlightened and the ignorant. They get to be the priest class. They can sneer at the plumber in Palmerston North who doesn’t want his kids doing karakia at school, and tell themselves they’re not just smarter, but better.

This is sadly spot on. We saw this under the last Government where numerous government agencies refused to even use their English name. The Reserve Bank would out out a press release referring to four other agencies only be their te reo names, meaning that 96% of NZers could not understand it without using Google. They must have seen it as their job to force the non-elite into compliance.

I worked in the public service for a few years and I didn’t think twice about participating in karakia, waiata, and tikanga when interacting with Māori communities and iwi. Being culturally sensitive is good manners in my view. I took advantage of the taxpayer-funded te reo lessons available to us and thoroughly enjoyed them.

Where I got frustrated was when we frequently had upwards of five meetings a day (always called hui) and in each of these meetings at least the first ten minutes (but usually longer) would be dedicated to ritualistic introductions and karakia. Most of these meetings were internal or with other public servants who we regularly interacted with. I tried once to figure out how much of my taxpayer-funded time was being dedicated to sitting through these performances. In a week I might attend around 25-30 hui (yes, that is a horrendous amount but it is how the public service operates) if we play it on the conservative side and say ten minutes of each meeting was karakia and pepeha that is 250-300 minutes each week. Four or five hours each week. Now multiple that by the 600 people who worked in the same building as me.

On top of that, a few times a week there was a “non-compulsory” “lunch time” waiata practice in our unit. It was explicitly not mandatory, but socially suicidal to skip it. Led by the cabal of middle-class white women who were the most ferocious enforcers of all things Māori, they made sure that choosing not to attend was not worth the grief that came with it. Only racists and people not sufficiently aware of their own privileges wouldn’t attend. The half hour of singing was officially a lunch time activity so that if someone sent in an Official Information Act request they wouldn’t find that taxes were being spent paying the generous salaries of professionals to sing out-of-tune. But everyone took their full lunch break as well as attending practice.

We no longer have separation of church and state.