Caution is the superfood of institutional racism
So, of course, despite nationwide angst over Treaty overreach, separatism, and apartheid, the only people to literally experience apartheid in Aotearoa were Māori.
Apartheid was why Māori rugby players weren’t allowed to tour South Africa as All Blacks as recently as 1960: left at home to avoid upsetting the whites-only apple cart. Later, through the 1970s, Māori and Pasifika players were allowed to travel as ‘honorary whites’, a brilliant technical loophole that managed to simultaneously defile everybody’s intelligence and moral decency. The burp-into-a-megaphone echo of this stupidity, 40 years later, still makes my ears ring.
READ MORE: * Manawatū council revokes earlier recommendation and introduces Māori wards * Andrew Little says he moved to create Māori Health Authority without reading report Judith Collins says inspired it * Echoes of the past in Judith Collins' speech * Judith Collins issues race relations warning, says Labour planning 'two systems by stealth'
Opposition leader Judith Collins ditched a cautious race relations approach to instead kick off about separatism, iwi control of water, and some secret Government plans to create an extra-brown Upper House of Parliament. He Puapua, an old Cabinet paper, was yanked out from under a table leg as proof.
