Māori Under A 100 Day Attack

National’s 100 Day Action Plan is dog whistle politics targeting Māori in every way possible, and we will not lie down and take it.

Many of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s 49 actions are merely a disguise for what is really going on which is an attack on all things Māori, including gangs, those on benefits, those waiting in line for adequate and targeted healthcare and job seekers.

This Government are actioning mandates that directly affect Māori and accelerating the schedule to prevent us having a direct voice in the conversation.

Not only are they planning to dismantle Te Aka Whai Ora, they have moved up their timeline to have it tabled in the House as early as tomorrow avoiding public consultation. This will also defeat the right of the judiciary to have an inquiry which was due to occur this Thursday and Friday. That is dictatorial. These actions are not only dishonourable, they are the largest attack of our constitutional democracy since Muldoon. No public consultation on legislation abuse of the use of urgency, and to top it off, denial of a judicial inquiry.

If this Government was doing it to farmers, there would be a revolution. If they were targeting one group of people in society continuously and without consultation, there would be revolt on a massive scale. Look around because this is happening to Māori all the time, so much so that wider society have become used to it and then look sideways at us for refusing to accept it lying down.

From the time they removed the Reserve Banks right to set the Official Cash Rate by taking away the impact that would have on employment, they made war on us as we make up a significant number of unskilled workers. And that is something forced on us decades ago when Māori were urbanised after being displaced from their own land.

So it goes from macroeconomics all the way down to being beat up on the street in little ways and it continuously steam rolls from Māori beneficiaries to Māori gangs and so forth. One thing we know for sure, it isn’t white folk being targeted, it’s all those naughty, nasty hori’s and a narrative regularly referenced by Winton Peters, Shane Jones and David Seymour. And it has to be supported by the Prime Minister because he’s the boss.

What we need to do is collectively use our mana. We have to stand up and get ready to defend what we have to defend, and that list keeps growing. We have the right in any democracy to a fair and open protest and that will start to occur shortly. You either lay down and get run over, or you stand up and keep standing up because they keep coming.

It’s one thing to stand on the marae and cast aspersions when we are going on at Ratana and Waitangi, that’s easy to do for certain leaders. But when they ask, “What are you going to do now?”, they’ll have to wait and see.

Our right to push back is almost always received with a lot of eye-rolling and racist slurs, again that’s not new to us. These detractors need to widen their tunnel vision so they can see and attempt to understand the bigger picture. Māori are not creating the friction. We are not making war on others. Over 54 years of endeavour we have attempted to incrementally painfully and slowly, educate others, who share this country by consent, not by conquest.

And for the day that a minority comes in and tries to run over the top of all of that, you either suck it up, or you don’t. This is the problem we are confronted with and this is not of our making. This is actually one of the first times that we are all coming together and we’ll have to wait and see how that evolves.

The multiplicity of attacks across the whole framework from macroeconomics down to an attack on our solo mothers on benefits. We import 250,000 workers and then you vilify our people on the dole when you just pushed them straight to the bottom of the heap. This isn’t anti-immigration this is pure mathematics.

This is a non-stop assault on one part of this society solely because of our Treaty-based rights and our race. It is as blatant and obvious as that.