Cash for conquests

We are about to get a taste of the new Government’s approach to Treaty negotiations, and it looks like this National-led Government is going to be as generous in doling out taxpayers’ money for imagined slights as the last National-led Government .

The Ngati Toa deal is instructive.  Only in modern New Zealand would copyright protection for an unpublished chant extend back nearly two-hundred years (as long, at least, as you have the right skin colour), and taxpayers’ money and an apology given to the descendants of a stone killer for the treatment of said killer.

Ngati Toa are about to be given buckets full of taxpayers’ cash to apologise for things those taxpayers haven’t done, along with an apology for the “kidnapping and detention of 18 months” of Ngati Toa chief Te Rauparaha – the “kidnapping and detention” of whom was the consequence of his having tortured, slaughtered and murdered in cold blood from Waikato to Taranaki to the Horowhenua to Kapiti to the Cook Strait to Wairau to Kaikoura to Kaiapoi to Akaroa.

He went everywhere, man, and a trail of corpses was left behind him – and the bucketfuls of cash now promised are paying for what those corpses bought him.

Te Rauparaha’s Akaroa slaughter gives you the character of this “warrior” still so revered by the tribe*.  The argument with the Banks Peninsula Maori began when Te Rauparaha exhumed and ate the decomposing body of their chieftain’s grandmother, which must have tasted grand after being dead for several months, and concluded with a carefully planned torture and slaughter of the chieftain and his family and the sacking of his pa – after which he headed home carrying “500 baskets of human flesh … destined for cannibal feasts at Te Rauparaha’s settlement on Kapiti island,”* a settlement he had stripped from the inhabitants only a few years earlier after an earlier slaughter, and on which he maintained slaves “scraping flax” to be traded for arms and ammunition for further conquests.

It should be no surprise that Te Rauparaha was an enthusiast for the Treaty – he reasoned that after his two-decade reign of terror he could use the Treaty and the protection of naive British governance to “confirm his dominion” over his recent conquests – all of which had been seized in two decades of war before the Treaty was signed, and many of which he had conquered only in order to onsell to New Zealand Company agents (who, to their disgrace, were the knowing beneficiaries of his blood lust).

Little did he know how successful his ruse would be, or for how long.  His blood-soaked “dominions” are being paid for still, just as this murderer had hoped, since for the most part it is those very lands he obtained by bloodshed for which his descendants are today being  rewarded with our largesse.

Such is modern justice in New Zealand.

Aren't we over the bloody haka yet?

Making the mistake of watching Mark Sainsbury last night, in the vain hope of hearing an intelligent question asked of NZ's medal-winning Olympians, I was amused to see that after winning gold, silver and bronze medals in the toughest competition in the world, they got back to their athletes' village to celebrate and were met by a bunch of savages beating their chests -- or, more specifically, a bunch of highly tuned athletes who should know better impersonating a bunch of bloody savages beating their chests.

Aren't we over the bloody haka yet?

It gets done when visitors arrive.

It gets done when they leave.

It gets done before sports games.

It gets done after sports games.

It gets done to show respect.

It gets done to show disrespect.

It gets done to say, "Good onya."

It gets done to say, "Fuck you."

Oddly, based on the actual origins of the haka, it's only the last of these sentiments that is even close to 'appropriate.' Waving your arms around and poking your tongue out now seems to be the 'right on' thing to do on every bloody occasion, no matter how pacific, regardless that is was traditionally only performed as a portent of cannibalism.

And how ridiculous are most of the hakas anyway? The most well known, the 'Kamate Kamate' rigmarole in which boys from Kings College like Ali Williams get to roll their eyes and poke their tongue out, is about a 'warrior' whose bravery consisted of hiding in a food pit underneath an old woman's skirts while his enemies looked in vain for him up above. (Apparently it was unthinkable that a warrior would hide in a food pit, and a woman's genitals were thought to have a shielding effect -- when Ali chants "Tenei Te Tangata Puhuruhuru," what he's actually saying is, "Who is this hairy person?")

Top stuff, huh?

Time to let the haka go.

Similar posts:

• Excusing 'the bash
• Brains v braindead
• A 'new' haka. Yawn.

Brains v braindead

Any decent coach is going to find ways to get inside the head of his opposition. A really good coach will be aware his opponents will expect it, yet he'll still find ways to fuck with their heads.

Every way Bernard Laporte devised to fuck with All Blacks' heads worked for him.

The bleating about doping several months ago. The reminders of the 1999 factor. The new black French jerseys (how dare they!). The kerfuffle over the playing strips (what colour are they going to wear?) The derision over the haka (seriously, what colour jerseys are they going to wear? Red? White? Blue?)

The players wearing silver and black stood there arrogantly poking their tongues out at players who were quietly self-confident because they knew their coach had already given them a chance, and a game plan that could win. (And seriously, as a couple of commenters here have suggested, isn't it time to give up the haka? There's brains over on one side thinking through what they have to do; and there's arrogant posturing on the other side chanting "Kill, kill, kill" and thinking it's going to be a walkover.)

And once the game started, Laporte's kicking game (which Laporte was careful to telegraph in advance) was answered not with intelligence and possession and pace, but with Leon bloody McDonald kicking the ball back like the braindead automaton he's always been. Did he notice we were winning our lineouts, and some of theirs, and could settle things down by kicking for territory? Did he realise that (him apart) we had a running back four who could return the ball with interest, and punish the game the French started with? Or that our forwards had dominance, and could rumble up and tire out French legs, as we should have done to start with? Did he think? Did anyone?

Did they notice in the second half, for example, that the French game plan changed in an instant (after NZ were given their half-time instructions and then switched their brains off again), or were they lulled by a first half kicking game and several days of having Laporte send telegraphs about how Les Bleus were going to play, and disarmed by a Frenchman who realised that Les All Blacks are easily needled and unable to think on their feet? When the French game breakers came on, did any All Black notice, turn his brain on and wonder if this presaged something different? A very different game, perhaps?

Did they hell -- All Black brains weren't switched on at all, just as Laporte knew they wouldn't be. This was a game in which the braindead were beaten by brains. Once the brain-fog of mourning subsides, you can only sit back and admire how it was done.

Excusing 'the bash'

An unusually patronising article appeared in yesterday's NZ Herald purporting to explain once again why, as one do-gooder put it the other night on 'Campbell Live,' "we're killing our chooldren" ( which once again had me yelling, "What's with the 'we,' white man? You speak for yourself. I didn't kill them!")

Anyway, the article by Simon Collins entitled 'Salvation Through Racial Pride and Self-Awareness' was as thoroughly racist, collectivist and wet as it sounds from that title, and full of excuses for Maori who bash their kids, and for women (and men) trapped by the "male will for power and control."

"Why are we still where we are?" asks one "former drug dealer" who has now exchanged dependency on drugs to a dependency on racial identity and the supernatural (he is now a pastor who, he proudly says, "chose the Charisma church because its pastor was Maori"). Once again, you might ask "What's with the 'we'? " This chap's 'insights' seemed to be included as some sort of expert or specially insightful commentary on why "we Maori" are killing "our" children -- and a better example of pathetically inept group-think on such a tragic topic would be hard to find.

"The way we think and the way we see things is totally different to our European brothers and sisters," says this idiot as some sort of excuse for 'Maori alienation in a Pakeha world', echoing no doubt what he's heard from group-think academics in counselling sessions over the years.

It's just different values. So with a Maori, you can drop in at your [relative's] house, sleep for the night, have a big feed, because we have been brought up in the same community.

With Europeans you have to ring them up, make an appointment for Sunday at 10am, and don't overstay your time. So we are different.

As I write this I hear sounds of cleaning up coming from my kitchen, where friends are cleaning up after dropping in unannounced last night (as they so often do here) and staying over for a big feed. The proposition of this Charisma church bigot is so fatuous it hardly even serves as an argument, yet these are the sort of paper-thin 'differences' between Maori and non-Maori that are frequently cited by blowhard academics and their fellow-travellers like Collins to argue that "after years of assimilation, differences like these" need to be recognised, or "the bash" is the inevitable result. Hence the nauseating title of the patronising piece: Salvation Through Racial Pride -- about as vile a proposition as one could imagine.

As P.J. O'Rourke points out so pithily, the very idea that racial differences are so important is absurd.

Finally, people are all exactly alike. There is no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian aborigine have fewer differences than a lhasa apso and a fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. I wish I could say I found this out by spending arctic nights on ice flows with Inuit elders and by sitting with tribal medicine men over fires made of human bones in Madagascar. But, actually, I found it out by sleeping around. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly."

It is those terrible circumstances all commentators are trying to explain, but the focus on race has made too many I've read in recent days ignore P.J.'s important point, and two very important things that underly his point.

The first is Maori culture itself -- as distinct from the race of Maori -- and the failure of that culture yet to fully embrace individualism. As more than a few Australian rugby coaches and commentators pointed out last week in relation to the haka, it is -- or at least has been -- a tribal culture that values savagery and bloody violence. About that those Australians were accurate, and if 'we' weren't so bloody precious about things we'd recognise that.

As Alan Duff points out in the Herald, in a piece that appears opposite Simon Collins's apologetics (in more ways than one), the "base line" for the Maori culture "is a Stone Age societal model which patently does not work in the modern world."

Most of this is due to not developing as individuals, which includes of course taking responsibility as an individual [says Duff with unerring accuracy]. If the group says no, we’re okay, we don’t have to change. Then no change occurs.

To continue with the collective, whanau, hapu, iwi societal model is a fatal mistake. A fatal mistake. For in not developing individuality we continue down the declining slope of anonymity in a collective. Of no-one willing to make decisions – especially unpopular decisions – for fear of standing out from the crowd, going against the collective will. Individuality is as fundamental to a society’s development as property rights.

The quality of debate in this country on Maori issues is poor, cowardly, non-analytical, and none of it serves the Maori people well. Like social welfare, which many of us have warned about for years, every government benefit takes another breath of the recipient’s self-respect away. Until they choke on self-hatred and maim and kill themselves and others.

Which leads to the second point, one too often ignored, the very faculty that underpins individualism: the fundamental human quality of free will.

It is our ability to make choices -- moral choices -- that is part of what makes us distinctly human beings. We -- none of us -- are merely the helpless playthings of blood, of genes, of upbringing. Adult human beings have the power of choice. We have free will.

No one, has to bash their children, they either choose to, or they chose to take the actions that led to that. Commentators talk glibly of a 'cycle of violence,' but not every person bashed by their parents goes on to become parents who bash; not every "poor working class Maori" bashes their kids. People who do are not depraved because they're deprived -- they're just depraved. Not every human being who grows up in despair is trapped by that. It is fundementally a matter of choice.

Positing race or upbringing as a reason for bashing children or for avoiding the responsibility of becoming an adult human being merely provides an excuse to those who refuse to exercise any free will in their own lives, and to make any positive choices themselves. Alan Duff is right, as he has often been right before.

LINKS: "We"? - Not PC (Peter Cresswell)
Cue Card Libertarianism - Individualism - Not PC (Peter Cresswell
Nature v nurture: character is all - Not PC (Peter Cresswell

RELATED: Racism, Maoritanga, New Zealand, Ethics

Springboks lose the game, but ...

The, ah, Springboks are playing the All Blacks this weekend. Out of courtesy I won't mention last week's 49-0 scoreline (a record routing).

I come instead offering advice: The Laka. This website allows you to put together a 'Lions Haka,' which as Tomahawk Kid says is taking the piss out of somebody. Perhaps the Boks could put together a Baka, so they might say, "We lost the game, but we won the Baka"?

It worked for the Lions. Didn't it.

LINKS: Put together your own British and Irish Lions haka: The Laka - Sure for Men

TAGS: Sport, Humour

Ka mate ka mate FIAT, FIAT

PLANET RUGBY: New Zealanders are up in arms over a television commercial in Italy which shows black-clad Italian women doing a Haka...

Are they really? Unless both I and the news media have missed it, the only New Zealanders who've said they're upset are a bunch of wallies from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture who said it "could be seen as culturally insensitive" and who just need to get over themselves, the chap who wrote the All Blacks' new haka (who was touting for this gig) and some commenters at the Herald site who were invited to have a good whinge.

A storm in a B-cup really. Have a look at the ad if you haven't already seen it. Personally, I'd have preferred a bit of opera. Having had a FIAT myself (FIAT as we know stands for Fix It Again, Tony), the haka looks too much like the sort of carrying on FIAT-owners get up to on the mornings when their car won't start.

TAGS: Sport, Political_Correctness, Humour, Sexism

Ten Worst New Zealanders

A few bloggers have listed their ten worst New Zealanders, predictably including the likes of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson (or proxies for them) even though the economic golden weather we are presently enjoying is in many ways due to the reforms they both instituted (and which have been left largely untouched by the Clark-Cullen Government) -- and unpredictably including the likes of Sarah Ulmer. Sarah Ulmer for goodness sake!?

Another difference from the other list-compilers (apart from a sense of perspective) is that with very few exceptions I don't believe there have been any truly evil NZers in public life (well, maybe just the last two on my list). For the most part they've just been either bumbling mediocrities or slimy power-lusters who as a result of their meddling and manipulation have made others lives more difficult than they needed to be, (or in the case of Robert Logan or William Massey spread disease inadvertently).

And I've only selected nine, still leaving one spot for your own suggestions. Come on, convince me.

• Robert Muldoon - an easy target, to be sure, and a deserving one. For nine years he lay across NZ's political, commercial and social life like a dead weight. Once his Government was finally deposed, the feeling of fresh air sweeping through the country was almost palpable.
• Simon Upton - this poseur brought in and administered the worst violation of property rights since the war, the RMA, and presided over and was responsible for the tragic contaminated blood scandal. Asked before the fragrant fool headed off to a Paris sinecure whether he regretted anything in his political career, he proudly declared, "Nothing gnaws at my soul."
• Lord Douglas Douglas Graham - speaking in the wake of giving millions of dollars of taxpayers' money to Ngai Tahu for things those taxpayers hadn't done, Graham declared: "The sooner we realise there are laws for one & laws for another, the better." No one did more for separatism in NZ than this former Minister of Apartheid and certified pompous arse. When first selected in the safe seat of Remuera one of the selection board confided afterward that it has always been considered that National could win the seat if it put up a donkey as a candidate - "and that's just what we've done this year," said the worthy gentleman. It is a fitting epitaph.
• Julius Vogel - a Keynesian before Keynes, and a Muldoonist before Muldoon. An inveterate booster and meddler and a believer in big government -- we largely have him to thank rather than the later Fabians for beginning NZ's accelerating growth of government -- his profligate borrowing to pay for 'Think Big: The Vogel Years' almost bankrupted the small, young country, destroyed lives and dreams, and led to almost twenty years of depression. Unlike many of the others in this list, Vogel at least had the shame to leave NZ and retire in disgrace -- but not before extracting a taxpaid pension from the bankrupt government.
  
• Russell, McVeagh, Simpson, Grierson, Bell, Gully, Sue, Grabbit & Run, et al - simply gruesome all of them. Hip-deep in sharp practice, legislative chicanery and monopolistic bullying the lot of them. Dick Cheney did a good thing when he shot one of their breed. I like to think it was intentional on Cheney's part.
• Marie Clay - a turner of minds into mush. The woman whose 'Look-and-Guess' approach to reading taught three generations of New Zealanders how to be illiterate.
• Colin McCahon/Ralf Hotere - producers of Emperor's' New Clothes for those too blinded by pretension to see it.
• Pick a missionary - any missionary. Introduced native New Zealanders to Western mysticism when they were still enmired in their own, before earning their trust and using it to sell them out.
• Te Rauparaha /Hongi Hika - these two stone killers murdered, enslaved, raped, looted and had eaten thousands of pre-European NZers (and more than a few Europeans as well), ceasing only when they could call on law and a new Treaty to protect their conquests. Truly evil.

UPDATE: Strong contenders for the tenth position so far: Graham Capill, Bert Potter, Bob Semple, Morton Coutts. Keep those suggestions coming.

TAGS: History, New Zealand

More things I don't care about

• What Helen Clark said to the airline pilot
• What Roger Kerr said to Don Brash
• What the Insurance Council said to Don Brash
• What Helen Clark does with her microwave
• Whose hand Rodney Hide is shaking this week
  
• How many many married men Cathy had sex with this week
• Who Russell Crowe hit this week
  
• How fast Helen was going
  
• Conspiracy theories about oil prices
• The Da Vinci Code
• Sin City
• The Simpsons
  
• The new Dr Who
• The old Dr Who
• The new James Bond
  
• Sam Neill
• Nicole Kidman's new movie
• Jonny Depp's new movie
  
• New movies
  
• The MTV Music Awards
• NZ Idol
  
• Idiots that can't write a song of their own
  
• Idiots that don't have a brain of their own
• Bloggers who can't generate an original thought of their own
• Bloggers that are just party stooges (Hello Jordan)
• The Hectors Dolphin
• People who can't tell the difference between racism and removing racial privilege
  
• People who can't tell the difference between getting welfare and getting your taxes back
  
• People who want something for nothing
• People who think they can vote themselves rich
• People who think that being a consultant with a government contract means they're self-employed
• People who think that being a resource consultant means you're supporting yourself
  
• People who wont say what they really think
  
• Politicians who are bold with other people's money
  
• Steve Maharey's blameless life
• Steve Maharey
• The new haka
• The old haka
• Hakas
• Who the Maori Party are going into coalition with
• Who the Maori Party won't go into coalition with (National? What a surprise.)
• Who Winston thinks he's kidding (is he kidding anyone, apart from the National Front?)
• The softcock centre-right
• The dripping wet centre-left
  
• People who don't question details before believing every poll that is put in front of them
• The ramblings of undergrad philosophy students
• The ramblings of bloggers who really should know better
• Who J-Lo is married to this week
  
• Who Britney Spears is not married to this week
• Why Jennifer Aniston is not married this week, and how she feels about it
  
• Who are these people anyway?
  

And have you noticed:

• how the results of a dodgy ACT poll whose methodology has still not been revealed has all of a sudden appeared everywhere like some sort of Prague Spring?
• how every party blogger of every stripe hits their marks so efficiently, and in such a coordinated fashion
• how National haven't mentioned it was they who introduced both the NCEA and the RMA
• how Labour haven't mentioned that it was National who introduced both the NCEA and the RMA
• how ACT's Ken Shirley hasn't mentioned he helped write the RMA
• how the Labour hacks are becoming increasingly shrill
  
• how Destiny billboards just don't stay up very well
  
• how Nick Smith and the worm have both thankfully become invisible
• how Paul Holmes sadly hasn't
• how Susan Wood is ^%$(&&) ... sorry ... I nodded off there for a moment and fell face down on my keyboard
• how if Don Brash read out the phone book then headlines, podcasts, video interviews, and Scoop scoops would quickly appear about how it means he's planning to send our boys to Iraq on a nuclear warship paid for by enslaving all Maori and by selling off all the schools and hospitals to American mates of the Roundtable. Or something.
• how manly Peter Davis looks in his Peruvian sweater
  

A 'new' haka. Yawn.

What does it mean when two teams line up to begin a game that at its highest level demands intelligence, skill and athleticism, and one of those teams then starts dancing about in a celebration of tribal savagery while the other looks on in quiet amusement. Tribal primitivism on one side; brains on the other. And on the sidelines, lots of idiots excited at a new display of thuggish aggression.

It's not my idea of good sporting entertainment, and as I usually go to the bar when my team starts dancing around like that I missed the 'new haka,' which was no doubt just as primitively tribal as the previous haka, which celebrated as I recall a bloke hiding under his wife's skirts. You can see the new haka if you must here at the NZRU site, and read the 'lyrics' here.

Remember when David Campese once kicked a ball around behind the goal posts while the All Blacks grunted and groaned down the other end of the field? Remember how upset everyone got about his 'disrespect.' I look forward to the Wallabies doing something similar this weekend while their opposition waste their time threatening violence upon themselves. It might be one victory that would be possible for a Wallabies team otherwise unlikely to be challenged by needing to deliver too many after-match victory speeches.

A nail-biting weekend of sport

The best thing about watching England play Australia is that you want them both to lose, and one of them usually will. With the competitive way they're both presently playing cricket the Ashes series has now presented three results, out of four games, that have gone right down to the wire, and given results each time about which a NZer can feel very happy.

The weekend's Ashes contest delivered another nail-biter, as much of one as Saturday night's Tri-Nations victory over the Jaapies. But am I the only one who enjoyed the rugby more than the new haka? Sheesh, what a lot of talk about a new celebration of savagery.

When capping stunts were funny

It's becoming clear that the Foot and Mouth scare on Waiheke Island is a hoax, and possibly part of a pretty poor capping stunt. TVNZ story here, and a Chinese report here. Phew.

What idiot thought up a stunt that could have cost the country billions? Perhaps no coincidence that the Vet School is in Palmerston North from where the letter was reportedly posted? Massey University Students' Association president Iain Galloway said it is possible the foot and mouth threat could be a capping stunt but "it's pretty out there". It's not 'out there,' it's just dumb.

But can you remember a time when capping stunts were actually funny? Most of those I remember were enacted by Auckland's Engineering School: The dumping of 'toxic drums' in Queen St that had been marked up with toxic warnings and set to leak dry ice; the placing of a 'guided missile' in the QEII Square fountain to greet morning traffic; the infamous Engineer's haka ... (well, I laughed).

My favourite was the stunt in which passersby were asked by white-coated students wielding clipboards and an earnest look to help them fill a sperm bank whose levels were, as such things can be, dangerously low and in need of new 'deposits' to help fulfil struggling couples in need of this magic bullet. The response to this altruistic call was as amusing as it was enthusiastic.

Pity none of the deposits were needed.