LINDSAY MITCHELL: Time for some perspective
- Administrator
- May 11, 2024
- 2 min read
A lack of perspective can make something quite large or important seem small or irrelevant.
Against a backdrop of high-profile, negative statistics it is easy to overlook the positive.
For instance, the fact that 64 percent of Maori are employed is rarely reported. For context, the employment rate for all New Zealanders is 68.4%. The difference isn’t vast.
In excess of 400,000 Maori have jobs, provide products and services and pay tax.
Maori are over-represented in the manufacturing, and utilities and construction workforces. They are disproportionately service workers, labourers and machine operators. As such they perform crucial roles.
97 percent of Maori aged 15 or older are not in prison or serving a community sentence or order. Over 99 percent of Maori are not gang members.
Yet as an ethnic group Maori take a lot of heat.
Their pockets of failure (which occur across all ethnicities) overshadow their success because it suits certain political aspirants to promote the negative. The predominant individualist culture wants Maori to get their act together and exercise greater personal responsibility. While the collectivists want the community to take the blame for Maori failure and fix it via redress. The finger-pointing at colonists as the culprits, which has ramped up immeasurably over recent years, has resulted in a great deal of misdirected anger towards Maori, the bulk of whom just want to get on with their lives. (To boot, this simplistic description ignores that since the early 1800s Maori and non-Maori have become indelibly interlinked by blood and it has become impossible to identify which finger is pointing in which direction, such is the absurdity of modern-day racial politics.)
It feels safe to say that most people want to live peaceful, happy and productive lives. We share those basic desires regardless of race. It’s that commonality that makes race irrelevant.
And yet New Zealanders are being increasingly divided, forced to take sides, to figuratively identify with black or white when life is mainly grey. Without some measure of compromise, contradiction and capitulation, society couldn’t exist.
The flipside to poor Maori statistics reminds us that as contributing members of New Zealand we have far more in common than ever divides us.
Lindsay Mitchell blogs here
References
EMPLOYMENT
IMPRISONMENT
COMMUNITY SENTENCES AND ORDERS
https://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/statistics/community_sentences_and_orders/community-based_sentence_and_order_facts_and_statistics_-_march_2024
GANGS
Breaking News!
"A group of iwi representatives have been successful in their appeal to challenge a High Court decision setting aside a summons to the Children’s Minister to appear in front of the Waitangi Tribunal."
Time for a bill to be passed under ungency to elimate the Waitangi (gravy train) tribunal.
The Crown should immediately take it to the Supreme Court, or change the law.
The general tenor of this article supports the proposition that the Maori seats are overdue for abolition. They were introduced in 1867 as a concession to Maori men who were ineligible to vote due to the property ownership test. Maori men thereby obtained universal franchise, a privilege not extended to non-Maori men until 1879. The Maori seats were intended to last 5 years but they logically reached their use-by date in 1879 when the property qualification was abolished and all men over the age of 21 gained the right to vote. Unfortunately, like so many temporary measures, the Maori seats somehow turned into permanent fixtures. MMP created a second chance when the Royal Commission recommended they be abolished, but i…
That is the best summation of the situation I've had the pleasure to read.
Every damned person living in new Zealand just wants one thing.
That one thing?
To be left alone and be free of needless intervention from a corporate of mindless stupidity, we are all new Zealanders for Christ's sake, every fucking one of us , and we deserve better.
I couldn't give a flying fuck about a,progressive and subsequently regresive veiw they have that happens to be , their vision for our future, because believe you me it's blacker than midnight in a,fucking mndshaft . The left and their vision for all new Zealanders horrifies me, it's soul destroying, it's treason on future generations and i…
Well done Lindsay - following the same line of logic we can conclude that Te Pati Maori who seem to be driving much of the discontent, have such a tiny number of supporters, that they are irrelevant. The noise they make, and the attention they get from our “news” media are way out of prortion to the number of folk they represent and they should be ignored as we would any other non-maori crack-pot splinter group.