Here are four things David Seymour said last week about Te Pati Māori:
Parliament had to close after their antics.
They are a group of people obsessed with their race.
They are opposed to democracy.
They are not that keen on New Zealand.
Having turned a moment of spirited expression of personal conviction and identity into a question of race, he then purported to be the bigger person, the visionary, the voice of reason, by saying this:
Every step forward in civilisation has been a step away from judging people by birth, and toward judging them by merit.
And then he declared:
We. Must. Keep. Them. Out.
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David Seymour never misses a chance to manipulate, to catastrophise, to vilify. He is forever taking something decent and sincere and reframing it, demonising it, using it to divide.
Here are all the reasons he is wrong; here are the reasons he is guilty of the thing he accuses them of.
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On the face of it, his idea of civilisation might be the full fruition of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason and so on, and what’s not to admire, etc?
But we know what he most likely means because the aspect of that, the part he’s most into — going by his unfettered admiration for the free market — is capitalism. You know, that thing that was turbocharged by the Industrial Revolution; exploitation; and the slave trade.
Capitalism undeniably brought wealth and prosperity. But it also brought us Victorian England, where you had to scrounge for pennies to rent space in a coffin to sleep. It brought us a Big Tobacco that saw all those reports about cancer and went right on marketing cigarettes. It brought us derivatives that roiled into a GFC. And it has emitted its way into a climate crisis.
It’s been great for delivering stonking piles of money, but it has consistently necessitated the intervention of parliament or similar to express moral objection and come to the rescue of innocent people.
But maybe it’s not his beloved Capitalism he means when he says Civilisation. Maybe, and this is where it gets most dire, maybe he is using it in that most disagreeable of traditions: none-too-subtle code. He means: the enlightened progress of white people that dark-skinned people should embrace and be grateful for.
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There was pearl-clutching aplenty over Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke’s haka, and Speaker Brownlee got all freshly huffy about the dignity and propriety of Parliament this week when a haka broke out in the public gallery to endorse the swearing-in of Oriini Kaipara as the new Tāmaki Makaurau MP.
Then Seymour had his go, because of course he did.
I’m all for respecting our institutions and the rule of law. It’s a pity this current crowd of law-makers and un-makers under urgency don’t seem to share that sentiment. But it’s especially rich when they get all sniffy about uppity Pati Māori doing it. Because that’s what this is.
I said this a while ago, I’ll say it again now:
Rip up a bill, lead a haka are words to live by, an entirely proportionate response to a duplicitous scheme to strip away rights and undo the nation’s founding document.
Why can’t they show some common courtesy??? brayed all the usual suspects.
The ACT people tried to draw a false equivalence between etiquette and decency, called this rawest purest strongest expression of feeling theatrics and thuggery.
You can be talking in your best drawing room manners and still be the vastly more disrespectful person if what you’re peddling is social vandalism.
There is a reason her haka has reverberated around the globe: people could see it for what it was, an expression of deepest most heartfelt emotion, the very spirit of life.
In the process it has alerted the greater world to the low designs of some bad people. Maybe that won’t change anything but it’s heartening to see it happen all the same.
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How dare they judge us by race demands Seymour.
Buddy, you’re the one who’s actually doing that.
We. Really. Should. Vote. You. Out.