I was hoping to write about something other than someone from Wellington saying something stupid or ignorant. Alas, there’s no rest for those hoping for such a reprieve.
The latest example was at an event where a middle-aged Pākehā man heard another middle-aged Pākehā man behaving like an obnoxious dickhead, turned to him and said, “Shut up, you dickhead.”
The first middle-aged Pākehā man was Don McGlashan, songwriting rangatira with a side hustle in recognising obnoxious dickheads.
What drew McGlashan’s ire was the obnoxious commentary coming from the seats behind him.
McGlashan, who’s a renowned chill dude, recognised a dickhead when the evidence was clear but didn’t recognise the identity of this particular one. It wasn’t until after he’d told the dickhead to shut up that he realised it was Chris Bishop, cabinet minister and leader of the House.
What kicked off the exchange was a performance by muso Stan Walker at the Aotearoa Music Awards, sung in te reo and accompanied by a kapa haka group and a few flags and banners.
Dickhead couldn’t cope with this overt display of Māori identity and pride, which led to him declaiming loudly that it was all a “load of crap” and political branding. Which provoked McGlashan to rather brashly tell the dickhead to shut up.
Bishop looked even more of a dickhead by wearing a Fur Patrol T-shirt to try to appear hip. The band’s lead singer, Julia Deans, thought he was a dickhead, too.
Bishop gave one of those apologies that’s not an apology, whining that he was just frustrated that it was all so politicised.
Newsflash: the banner you find so frustrating bore the words Toitū Te Tiriti, which translates as (drum roll please) Honour the Treaty.
What a scandalous and irritating thought – honouring the document that gives the crown its authority to govern (I’ll leave the bit about sovereignty to one side for the moment), which gives Bishop his title as a minister of the crown.
Does he think honouring the treaty is some kind of optional extra, some slogan that belongs only on a placard at a protest and then you put it away for 20 years? Where does he draw the line on when Māori get to be Māori? Only on the marae? Is there a designated day each year where Māori are allowed to protest, and outside of that they just need to sit down and shut up?
If Bishop wants to know what frustration is really like, he might like to read the various treaty settlements over the years. Each of those settlements represents a lot of things, but one is the ongoing fight that literally spanned generations as injustices were fought generation after generation.
The treaty isn’t just a contract you get to break and then settle on terms that are convenient to you. It was a promise by the crown to Māori rangatira and their descendents in perpetuity. If you want to opt out then opt out completely. Otherwise, honour it.
Bishop is too busy shooting his mouth off to realise that for many of us, our identities are inescapably political and we don’t get to neatly separate that from the personal. My life trajectory was determined by a piece of legislation that banned traditional Māori adoptions, thereby making the option of being brought up by my Māori whānau legally untenable.
That cut me off not just from my identity but my large whānau, including a sister I didn’t meet until middle age. Is that political? Someone in Parliament wrote that piece of legislation and it got voted through.
That experience led me professionally to look at why so many Māori men were in prison, only to find that many of them had also been taken by the state and put through institutions where they suffered extreme violence including rape and torture. Those crimes were hidden and denied by the crown that Bishop is a minister of. Is that political?
Bishop might want to get used to young brown people being far more assertive than he is used to. About 40% of children in this country are Māori and/or Pacific. A lot of Pākehā males over the age of 40, like Bishop, still think the world revolves around them. Which probably explains why he turned up at an event where he’s in the minority and expected to dictate proceedings.
It’s a bit rich for Bishop to whine about something being politicised when he’s part of a government that has politicised anything Māori to appeal to middle-aged and ignorant Pākehā. But that demographic is not the future.
Bishop might want to get used to the generation of brown kids who have been raised not to kowtow to Pākehā, as their elders were virtually brainwashed to do. My father’s and grandmother’s generations were whacked for being Māori. Their moko, nieces and nephews have come through kōhanga and kura and don’t take shit from anyone.
Thankfully, there’s also a few old Pākehā geezers out there who recognise a dickhead when they see one and aren’t afraid to tell them to shut up.
