She then points out there was terrible abuse at Lake Alice psychiatric hospital, and leaps to conclude the state should not lock people up. She finishes by saying: “The Government needs to share power and control and support ‘by Māori, for Māori’ solutions.”
In the world according to Moxon, things are pretty simple. It’s not much more complicated than Māori good, colonisation bad. She puts Act in the bad and colonising camp, and by Māori for Māori in the inherently good camp. If only the world were that simple.
Yet even Moxon herself shows that people are complicated. She styles herself ‘Lady,’ as she’s well entitled to do. But interestingly, the right to use this title came from the Queen awarding her husband a knighthood. That was for his work with the Anglican Church. It doesn’t get much more colonial than the British Crown and the English church.
I say this only because Lady Moxon herself is such a good example of how nobody is purely one thing or another, and we should all try to be more tolerant of each other’s complex backgrounds. So goes the Act Party.
It’s certainly true that we are critical of many initiatives around the Treaty of Waitangi. We don’t agree it’s a “partnership between races”. However, we’ve also spent more of our (sadly limited) political capital in the past 10 years on “by Māori, for Māori” solutions than any other party.
If I’m proud of anything I’ve done in politics it’s that Act, with one MP for the best part of a decade, put everything we had into Partnership Schools Kura Hourua, or charter, schools.
Moxon should know, she was involved in not one, not two, but three failed applications to operate one. More than a dozen Māori and non-Māori organisations were authorised to operate Partnership Schools over the five years that the policy operated, but not all applications had equal merit.
I say this because Moxon runs a widely respected Māori health enterprise, but that doesn’t mean you are automatically good at Māori education. The world is complex, nothing is either good or bad all the time.
That takes us to Act’s policy to put 17-year-olds back into adult court. We supported the law, in 2016, that would send 17-year-old offenders to the Youth Court; we now believe that position was wrong.
We were reassured that the worst 17-year-old offenders would still go to adult court. Then we saw a 17-year-old who beat a man to within an inch of his life, in his own home, be dealt with in the Youth Court despite protests from the prosecution. In total only 8 per cent of 17-year-old offenders go to adult court. We hate to think what they did.
Before the change, youth were half as likely as older offenders to face police proceedings. That hasn’t changed, but 17-year-olds are now in the group that’s half as likely to face proceedings. The Police Association were, in hindsight, correct to say youth who offend up to their 17th birthday will now offend up to their 18th birthday.
Moxon is correct to say Māori are more likely to be in the justice system, but if we are going to start categorising people, let’s remember Māori are also more often victims of crime. The Ministry of Justice’s victimisation survey finds 37 per cent of Māori are victims of a crime, compared with 31 per cent of New Zealand European respondents.
It could be argued that Māori are suffering more because the Government is not tough on crime, but a practical approach to solving it for everyone would be better for all.
There are only five million of us on these islands. We are not a country that can afford division.
Instead of calling each other racist, or seeing each other as members of a group first and an individual second, we should unite behind good ideas.
We should arrive at those ideas using facts and logic.
In the case of 17-year-olds going to youth court, it hasn’t worked, we were wrong, and it’s time to change back so there are fewer victims from all backgrounds.
- David Seymour is the leader of the Act Party.
