LINDSAY MITCHELL: A Confused Country

New Zealand is a hopelessly confused country where people talk past each other, use the same words to mean different things, and can't distinguish between sentimentality and sanity. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad and dangerous.

TV and social media imagery is overloaded with couples of mixed ethnicity. We cling to that old desire to see-ourselves-on-the-screen, a hangover from the days when our TV content was all imported. Who remembers New Zealand's early efforts like Pukemanu, described as portraying "the lives of rural, bi-cultural townsfolk, earning praise for its authentic depiction of boozy, blokey characters in swannie attire"?

The bi-cultural images aren't a problem. They reflect statistics ie fact, that more Maori partner with non-Maori than with Maori. There is something quite appealing and endearing about them. New Zealand is a country where the first settlers welcomed and joined together, literally, with the later settlers.

But change screens and consider the next image:

Decide together, Thrive together.

Decide together to be Separate? It's like deciding together to a divorce.

Separate rolls for Maori. Separate wards and separate electorates. By any stretch of the imagination, that is not togetherness.

The inevitability of mixed couples is mixed children ... and more mixed children. Generation after generation, of which there are already very many. Will they have to pick one identity over the other in perpetuity? For as long as there are different civic frameworks for Maori and non-Maori, that is what these children and unborn children are being condemned to.

It has to stop.

Today many New Zealanders embrace different cultural heritages featuring their own languages, faith, and social networks. But only Maori can choose to have advantageous separate representation based on race. Only Maori have their very own courts, jail wings, health providers, educational quotas, schools, and more, provided by the state. None of these 'privileges' are improving matters incidentally.

Yet there are people who continue to insist that separatism is somehow "thriving together."

To thrive together requires individuals to put their humanity before their ethnicity. That is what thousands have done by partnering and raising families together. There cannot be a stronger expression of togetherness.

But if ethnicity trumps humanity, all we face is a future filled with conflict. New Zealand will continue to be a country of hopeless confusion rather than clarity of common purpose.

Lindsay Mitchell blogs here