so lucky to be Maori :)

You know it's election year in NZ when the mainstream media starts saying bad things about Maori people. Well, all years are pretty awful when it comes to media representation but election years are particularly bad. These years, Maori are all criminals and violent and stupid and need some kind of heroic rescue - which is handy because then various political parties and individuals can win votes by proposing 'solutions' to 'the Maori problem.'

Oy. (As my friend Sarah would say.)

(Actually, journalism in NZ is pretty bad any day of the week, so we should expect to have low expectations anyway... and this is coupled with the underbelly of NZ racism which I admit that I forget about some days because I tend not to spend much time with people who hold these ideas.)

But, combine all of this, and it turns out that (drum roll please...) Maori people get all the special treatment in NZ... we're the lucky ones. The cute thing about this particular form of racism is that (like most other forms of racism) it is a boringly yawn-inducing cliche: the idea that the Natives are on a Gravy Train can be found all around these settler colonies.

Let's check out how this idea sneaks its way into two items in the 'news' today:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/5679886/Brain-drain-claims-third-of-New-Zealands-PhDs
This uplifting little space-filling article is such a house built on sand that the walls have no chance of standing at all, and the whole site is littered with crumbled and collapsed logics and statistics and half-thought-through guesses. It looks at the number of people who gained their PhDs in NZ in 2003 and considers how many of them are working in NZ and how many are working overseas. It manages to miss any of the meaningful factors in why people might work overseas, the entire PBRF dimension of things which places pressure on mercenary leadership to avoid hiring junior academic staff, the international trends of hiring PhDs and how these might line up with the NZ story, and (and I suppose this affects me, as a recipient of a PhD from the US) the NZ people who have PhDs from overseas in the equation. It was bad reporting, badly written. A waste of space.

The comments section is actually quite interesting - there are a few people on there who have raised some good points (about postdocs etc) and I was scrolling through these when I found this:

"It doesn’t take a PhD to figure out why a lot of people are leaving. They are sick of double standards in this country - one for maoris and one for everybody else. TOW handouts will never end. Get out while you can"

Now, I have to say that I agree with this writer. It is true there are double standards in NZ. For example, Parliament passed legislation that removes the legal right of "maoris" to investigate their property rights to the seabed and foreshore, a right (to legally investigate property rights) extended to "everybody else," and in fact the Crown unilaterally claimed the entire seabed and foreshore (a move which the UN found racially discriminatory and therefore that there was indeed a "double standard" with one law "for maoris and one for everybody else"). When "maoris" (and quite a few people who are a part of "everybody else") protested this legislation, their protests were unheeded, whereas when a small group of farmers protested legislation by which the Crown was clarifying and extending its title to a thin strip of land each side of rivers and waterways, this protest was taken seriously and the legislation did not go ahead. Yes, another "double standard." Oh, and another example would be that "maoris" make up 40% of the people tasered by police despite only making up 15% of the general population. Our schooling system has lower expectations of "maoris" compared to "everybody else" and we even get to die earlier than "everybody else." Yep, it also doesn't take a PhD to figure out how much I warmly encourage this writer to "Get out while [they] can."

Our other fun story for the night is RWC-themed.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/news/5679093/Te-Papa-in-haka-row
It turns out that an amateur historian has been very busily tracing the origins of the Ngati Toa haka "Ka Mate" which was written by Te Rauparaha, and he has found that it was not in fact written by him at all! Yes, this self-appointed specialist of "folk songs" has found some written evidence that suggests Te Papa has been taken for a ride, and through the current RWC-linked exhibition 'Ka Mate' has:
"obliterated this history in order to massage the image of a local tribe with a notorious ancestor".
Wow. So, Te Papa has done all of this in order to "massage the image of a local tribe"? What a lucky tribe! What lucky people Ngati Toa are! They get to have the All Blacks use their haka without permission for years, they get to fight to have the haka recognised as their intellectual property, and then they get a museum to "massage [their] image"!
And Te Papa is spending so much time being concerned about the image of Ngati Toa that they fully back them up when the reporter rings up to ask for a comment! Oh wait, no they don't:
"A Te Papa spokesman said the "Ka Mate" exhibition was authored by Ngati Toa, not the museum, so the historical content was the iwi's responsibility."

In a lovely sleight of hand, the journalist then writes about the recent "official" acknowledgement of the origins of Ka Mate right before talking about the length of time that Helpful Mr Archer has been 'researching,' also reinforcing the "oral" nature of the history compared to the documentary evidence preferred by Archer.
"Ngati Toa's association with "Ka Mate" via Te Rauparaha has been passed down in the iwi's oral tradition but it is only in recent years that it has gained official acknowledgement.
Archer, 70, has for decades been researching the "folk process" whereby songs are modified over generations and the stories attached to them change."
Yep you guessed it folks - there is no comment from Ngati Toa (because they didn't answer the phone - which in NZ journalism could mean they didn't ring the right number, or they couldn't spell Ngati Toa so couldn't find it in the phone book, or they called someone once and got no reply and never followed up on it all) and so the journalist and Archer both tell the Ngati Toa side on their behalf. Hmmm. This is a piece of journalism which is entirely based on an amateur historian who has an axe to grind on the basis of his bizarre and salmon-esque (ie swimming upstream) claims, and which therefore has no purpose at all except to give airplay to what could at best be described as a minority view.

And finally, to finish things off with a nice flourish and confirm that there is a difference between non-Maori 'factual' accounts of things and Maori 'poetic' or 'untrue' accounts of things, Archer comments:
"They're trying to turn Te Rauparaha composing it into historical fact, rather than an interesting poetic truth. It would be like in science classes in schools if they were to teach that Maui pulled New Zealand out of the ocean as historical fact."
Clearly Archer has no concept of the scientific (and historical) information contained in the rather complex story of Maui pulling the North Island out of the ocean... but for me I'm interested in who "they" might be... is it Te Papa? Or is this more broadly the work of these evil people who lurk around NZ handing out privileges to Maori people all the time?

 Oy.