Those liking' Pakeha Party beware what you wish for

"We stand for equal rights for Pakeha," came the battle cry in the Pakeha Party's latest Facebook posting.

"If the Maori get it, we want it too! No matter WHAT it is!" This is a demand now echoed by more than 50,000 individuals on Facebook. The support for this 'party' is growing by the day.

Indeed, while Peter Dunne sends out emails asking for paid membership to United Future with the persistence of a Girl Guide on a cookie selling mission, the Pakeha Party appears to have won thousands more supporters with each and every photo of the HMS Endeavour they post.

As many have pointed out, the logic behind the cries of injustice by this party are rather absurd.

Its supporters ask for all that Maori get, for Pakeha. Rightly, the question is asked whether these same people would like the higher crime rates, lower education completion rates, lower life expectancy, higher suicide rates, high rates of illness, and the variety of other negative social statistics that, sadly, are what so many Maori born in New Zealand have to contend with.

Demands for this basic 'equality' are blind to the realities that face Maori as individuals and a collective.

As the page's popularity and prominence has grown, the views of the creator seem to have morphed slightly. From a starting point of demanding for Pakeha all that Maori have, "no matter what it is", the person behind the page has made great efforts to convince its followers that all he wants is "complete anti-racism in New Zealand for all".

And there are legitimate arguments for racially-blind social welfare which, owing to the nature of Maori representation in lower socioeconomic brackets, would assist a greater proportion of Maori than non-Maori. In the past, I have argued that Maori assistance mechanisms are failing because they are consumed by Maori elite. But the problem with this party is that it is grounded on a deeper level; a level that encourages its supporters to respond to the assistance that Maori receive by advocating for themselves and their own ethnicity. On the simplest level, its name espouses this belief. Such a belief can never achieve equality. Such a belief says that each ethnic group in New Zealand must exist to serve its own interests and advance only those.

Such a belief, taken to its conclusion, can lead only to some kind of racially-based political arms race, in which everyone is out for themselves and is represented politically by skin colour.

This type of politics creates a mindset which doesn't just make politics a race-based game of competition, but one antithetical to the society-wide progress away from racism and discrimination which delivers lasting change.

Those in the Pakeha Party say they oppose the existence of the Maori Party. Yet they are creating a political divide that tells young Maori they must buy into the latter, and that your ethnicity defines your political allegiance.

The page's creator is probably right in one statement he makes: "it's a subject that's always discussed behind closed doors".

Pages which place them in the public sphere enable refutation, as we have seen occurring. And some supporters of the group have attempted to moderate its more extreme members, reasoning with them in a way that was not possible when these views weren't aired.

We need a better discussion about how we help Maori rid themselves of the statistics that plague their community.

Sadly, before we do that, it seems we have to spend time convincing people these statistics do exist and do place Maori in a severely disadvantaged position.

Those clicking 'like' on the Pakeha Party would not want all that Maori have in truth; but neither do Maori themselves.