Another tired old round of debate over the use of te reo Māori kicked off this week thanks to these two.
Luxon got the ball rolling when he attended a public meeting in Birkenhead, where he made a couple of statements that picked up traction on social media. He criticised the renaming of government departments, saying it was difficult for people to “navigate”. The crowd at this meeting must have lapped that right up, because Luxon then went on to say it was “dumb” to spend money on bilingual road signs instead of fixing the thousands of potholes.
This sentiment was echoed by National’s transport spokesman Brown, who later attended a Bay of Plenty meeting about transport infrastructure. When asked for his opinion on Waka Kotahi’s plans to replace cyclone-damaged road signs with new bilingual signs featuring both English and te reo Māori, he had this to say. “My view is it will make signs more confusing … we all speak English, they should be in English.”
Here we go again, another stupid and pointless debate ensues. Quickly turning into a culture war of sorts that plays right into the hands of those who refuse to accept that greater biculturalism is the inevitable future of Aotearoa New Zealand.
It’s the laziest kind of political signalling, but appealing to a racist underbelly of redneck voters seems to be a favourite tried-and-true tactic for certain members of the conservative right.
This formula is as stale and pale as most of the politicians who choose to keep picking this low-hanging fruit and I can’t help but notice that the fruit is starting to pass its expiration date. You know how it goes, once one fruit starts rotting, it can ruin the whole fruit bowl.
I wonder how these antiquated ideas around race and cultural identity will affect the polls this election.
I know politics is essentially just one big popularity contest and we, the public, ultimately have to decide who takes first place. However, what happens when that winning formula many conservative politicians cling to actually appeals to a group of voters who are quite literally becoming extinct? For example, unlike her boss, the much younger deputy leader of the National Party, Nicola Willis, recently expressed her excitement over the fact her two children were both learning to speak te reo Māori in school.
Data from the 2021 General Social Survey (GSS), collected between April and August 2021, showed that three in five New Zealanders believed that te reo should be a core subject in primary schools. Since then, te ao Māori (the Māori world) and te reo Māori, one of the official languages of this country, continue to be embraced in all sorts of cool ways. Last year marked the first official public holiday to recognise te ao Māori as the country celebrated Matariki, the Māori new year.
Of course, there are still those who refuse to acknowledge that our indigenous culture and language should be allowed to thrive, but it’s increasingly obvious that these views are fading. I recently watched an interview at Parliament where a group of reporters were grilling some of the National Party members about their colleague Brown’s comments, and it struck me how they were all back-pedalling and trying to distance themselves.
At this moment of great change and existential challenges, do the people listening to the likes of Luxon and his ilk think we need a leadership of statesmen (by their definition) or are they satisfied with the soap opera of cynical politics we’re watching play out?
