Jim Hopkins: Wrong people get the blame for the wrong reasons

The canonisation of Maori is largely not of their own making. Maori didn't collectively seek to become dinner party saints, or classroom ones either, for that matter. They didn't incessantly demand to be represented as a tangata more in touch with the spiritual dimension. And neither did they insist on being ordained and sanctified as a race more in tune with whenua and whanau and aroha and such.

In fact, Maori people's status as latter day saints was created for them. And while their elevation may have been warmly embraced by some Maori since, there's no doubt it happened initially because others deemed it should.

And those doing the deeming were the people who deem most things in this insular little nation-city, namely the middle class, particularly those within it whose missionary gene irresistibly draws them into politics, government, education and the media.

Maori have become the unwitting repository of a numbed middle-class hunger for spirituality.

They have, in effect, been reinvented to satisfy the inchoate needs of a class notionally secular but still needing to believe in something. Anything! As long as it's not what people used to believe in.

The evidence that Maori are now an article of faith is all pervasive. It's there in the powhiri, without which no government conference would be complete. Earnest Pakeha attendees stumble awkwardly through How Great Thou Art in Maori, seemingly unaware that what they're singing is more Christian than pantheistic.

Successful and independent women, including those running the country, are told by public servants they must meekly take a back seat because culture is now a creed more powerful than gender.

And if culture is a creed, then guilt is its spur, creating a tribunal whose solemn and virtuous duty it is to right the wrongs and punish the sins of the past.

Little wonder, incidentally, that Maori are drawn to it, both as applicants and advocates. After all, there's money in the process and money at the end. Offered the same inducement, any self-respecting Celt, Dalmatian, Zulu or Swede would do exactly the same. Sensible people, whoever they may be, respond to incentives. It's as simple as that. And no one should be blamed for doing so.

Trouble is, they are. And while the simmering resentment about the "Treaty industry" should be aimed at the policy elite who've spent the past three decades diligently recasting New Zealand's first settlers as faithful guardians of a Garden of Eden destroyed by the rapacious colonist, that isn't what's happened.

The blame has been visited upon the "saints" and not those who canonised them. Maori have discovered that superior spirituality comes at a price. Like priests in the Catholic Church, they have learned more is expected of the virtuous than of ordinary mortals.

Seldom has that been more apparent than it has this week. The awful killing of two defenceless baby boys may have silenced the priests of the new church but not the congregation. Their outrage has been apparent to anyone who listens to talkback radio.

And much of that outrage has condemned Maori generally as hypocrites who may talk the talk but cannot walk the walk, at least not in the matter of child abuse. Hosts and callers alike have been vociferous in their denunciation, apparently content to demonise an entire group because of the loathsome behaviour of one or two people.

The priesthood's response hasn't helped. To the extent they've said anything, it's been to collectivise the guilt, suggesting that we're all responsible by failing to recognise "families in crisis".

This is nonsense. And while that shouldn't need to be said in a sane and sensible, modern country it does in the nation we've allowed others to create.

The blame for these disgusting murders lies squarely with those who committed them, those who allowed them to happen and, to a lesser extent, with neighbours and visitors, official or otherwise who suspected all was not well but did nothing.

But the "community" is not to blame. Or no more than it chooses to be. Only the parliament of conscience can make "love thy neighbour" an enforceable law. It is wrong for our mandarins to turn New Zealanders of every race into a social equivalent of the Department of Conservation at Cave Creek by declaring that no one is to blame but everyone is responsible.

Far better they consider how their faith has soured public life and their procedures contributed to its tragedies.

What we know about the murder of Cru and Chris Kahui suggests this was a crime of condition, not colour. References to a "party house" with numerous people drifting through implies that some on the property were connected with that great underclass that has been, if not created, then certainly sustained by the benefit system. This is a system with no moral compass, administered by people who require of themselves none of the conditions they expect of other employers.

They appear to impose few of the obligations that normally fall upon wage and salary earners in return for an income. There isn't any obvious reciprocal contract as there is with those who work. Little in the way of expectations or duty falls upon the paid, who are more or less free to do as they will - even to babies.

Providing others with a wage but expecting little or nothing in return is arguably a form of neglect. It's the equivalent of giving, in Oxfam's words "a fish, not a fishing line".

Those in the priesthood who speak so easily of families in crisis need to accept that their system is a big part of that crisis. Until they do, talkback radio will, inevitably and sadly, be jammed with calls blaming the wrong people for the wrong reasons.