Going in like a bulldozer is the best technique for a new boss intent on making change, some management gurus believe. They say it grabs attention and puts people on their mettle. Quite obviously, it is an approach to which Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres subscribes. He has virtually admitted as much, saying his speech marking the beginning of the United Nations Day for Cultural Heritage was a deliberate "wake-up call" for New Zealanders. But that strategy will garner respect and the required response only if the words and ways espoused by the new manager are sound and sensible. Regrettably, that is where Mr de Bres falls short in his depiction of what he calls "a sorry litany of cultural vandalism".
In particular, the commissioner likened New Zealand's colonial history to the Taleban's destruction of the sacred Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. There is no logic in that comparison. The Taleban's vandalism was driven by their persecution of a religion not to their taste. What European settlers brought to New Zealand was not such religious intolerance but colonial cultural insensitivity.
And if native culture was overridden here, such was a constant theme as Europeans migrated to the farthest corners of the world. Even as governments were being, as Mr de Bres would have it, "egged on by land-hungry settlers", missionaries were spreading religion and its message of tolerance, to be embraced by many Maori. There was no oppression, as practised by the Taleban. And nothing the settlers perpetrated could be equated to the destruction of sacred symbols in Afghanistan.
Certainly not the way Mr de Bres claims governments "threw some of their most visionary and peaceful cultural leaders into jail without trial, belittled their culture and actively discouraged the use of their language". Settlers lacked the humility and wisdom to pay due regard to native culture. As did their counterparts in, say, the United States and Australia.
Likewise, the ransacking of Parihaka, to which Mr de Bres presumably refers, was a grievous error. But, again, it is drawing far too long a bow to relate such behaviour to the gross actions of the Taleban. Not that, as Mr de Bres demands, we should shy away from the challenge of examining our own record. Or, indeed, our present performance.
In the past few weeks the very idea of wahi tapu - Maori sacred places - has been ridiculed. The same arrogance that promoted a disregard for matters of Maori spirituality among the first settlers survives in some quarters. Yet wahi tapu are no different to European graveyards or cenotaphs, and carry the same status under law. They are due respect, not mockery.
Unfortunately, that part of Mr de Bres' message will be overwhelmed by his Taleban comparison. He may claim that reference was but a tiny part of his speech. But, as he has conceded, it was deliberate and was bound to monopolise attention.
It was also bound to open him to valid accusations of extremism, the very criticism he would level at red-neck members of the community - the type of people who refuse to have any truck with wahi tapu or the Treaty of Waitangi and whose dogmatic opinions his office should be seeking to ameliorate.
Mr de Bres' comments are extremely counterproductive. Wrong in fact and ill-judged in substance, they will simply harden attitudes. The backlash can only be a backward step, both for society and for an official charged with cultivating race relations. Mr de Bres has achieved the attention he craved. But when bulldozers blunder, the damage can take a power of mending.
Full text of the Joris de Bres speech