Editorial: Post-colonial stress is never an excuse

What is this "colonisation" that the Associate Minister of Maori Affairs advances to explain child abuse and other disproportionate problems among Maori? The term has been uncritically accepted in academic discussion of race relations and it was only a matter of time before somebody hauled it out to face the test of common sense. Tariana Turia has done that much, first with her interference in a report from the Commissioner for Children and now with a speech to a conference of psychologists.

Maori rates of violence, she told them, was a symptom of something she calls "post-colonial traumatic stress disorder" and compared it to the experience of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. It is an unfortunate comparison. Whatever trauma Maori continue to suffer from dispossession of tribal land and the submergence of the culture, it is not the memory of terror and the loss of family to the gas chambers.

But in another sense, many Maori would argue, their post-colonial plight is worse. After the Holocaust, Jews were given a homeland. Even for those who have not migrated to Israel, it is a source of psychological comfort and national expression. Maori might find a closer comparison with the previous occupants of Palestine, who were gradually swamped by waves of migration under British administration.

That, of course, has been the fate of many cultures throughout the ages. When Mrs Turia blames Maori offending on colonisation there is a chorus of people, tongues not entirely in their cheeks, who can cite their own ancestral trauma. The likes of the Scots and the Irish experienced English colonisation and struggled for centuries to preserve their language and culture and recover their heritage. "Quite true," Maori might reply, "and that is exactly what we mean to do."

But does a collective sense of social dispossession cause a people to commit crimes against their own partners and children? The link is assumed a little too readily by those looking to blame society for every antisocial act. The Maori who most strongly harbour a sense of social injustice do not seem to appear before the courts for domestic abuse and violence, except occasionally against property in the name of protest. And those who do appear to answer for the cruelest crimes do not seem to be strongly imbued with a sense of historic grievance.

Mrs Turia would change that. She has mentioned that she counsels Maori offenders by acquainting them in some way with their "colonised" predicament. The results, she says, are generally good. She should tell us more about that. Most people would imagine that the last thing a violent individual needs is to be given a social excuse for his behaviour - particularly those who abuse their children and partners. They are often all too adept at rationalising their loss of control to themselves.

It should be acknowledged that when Mrs Turia intervened in the report of the Children's Commissioner and spoke to the phsychologists' conference, she was not talking to Maori in particular. She was trying to tell the whole community that it cannot absolve itself from concern for Maori children and families. And it cannot. But the reason is not "colonisation." It is that Maori are an integral element of New Zealand society.

Maori statistics of employment, health, education and crime are so much worse than average that they demand an explanation. As Mrs Turia says, the explanation cannot be genetic. But nor does it follow that the explanation therefore must lie in historic experience. The difficulty of discovering the cause is no reason to seize the most convenient theory on offer. The fact is, British colonisation was a good deal more benign than the trauma which tribes had previously caused each other with invasions, slaughter and enslavement. Colonisation could have been better, fairer and left Maori with more land, a stronger language and enduring tribal supports. But let nobody pretend the past is an excuse for battering women and children today.