At times like this, when we have a serious discussion in one thread that postulates that fascism is 'better' than communism, I think it's time to resurrect what the Orew speech really said. No one actually heard the speech, really, apart from a handful of soundbites. I think the vast majority of New Zealanders never even heard a single word from Don's speech, yet they all knew that it rejected the notions of egalitarianism in New Zealand racial affairs, and using an awfully colonial term, wanted to ignore Maori history in order to create a "south seas culture".

What really did anger me was Don Brash's totally unnecessary attacks on Maori history and culture.

Even if those facts are true, why did Don Brash need to bring them up here? Is he trying to make Maori look like uncontrollable savages? Why does he need to attack romantic notions of the Polynesian past if he involves himself in Romantic notions of New Zealand's past?

[To sidetrack, and to explain how Don Brash involves himself in Romantic notions, I will give you a short portion of his speech:

If anyone knows much about NZ's past, or even talks to their parents, they will now this is absolute bullshit. My mother vividly recalls seeing a sign at an Auckland hairdresser downtown in the late seventies saying 'No Maoris Welcome', and I think the fact that very, very few Maori were university educated at the time tells you something. Additionally, this Romantic view ignores the HUGE wealth inequalities that have consistently been present between Pakeha and Maori, and that have only started to seriously close up again.

I find one particularly objectionable part of the Orewa speech is the total racism of Don Brash talking down to Maori, especially in examples like this:

Who the fuck does Don Brash think he is, the spiritual father of Maori? Especially the latter paragraph that assumes that Maori are like savages who care nothing for the rest of the country, and that Maori somehow are some magical hole for the work of the Good White Man.

Holy shit. This is so incorrect on so many levels. All I see here is ignorance

What Brash is doing is offering a different kind of vision of New Zealand to the currently dominant bicultural model. His vision has much, in fact everything, in common with the model of Post-WW2 nationalist New Zealand, articulated most clearly in the histories of Keith Sinclair and W.H. Oliver.

These histories, and thus this vision, rely on a particularly Western conception of New Zealand, and more importantly of the individual subject. This conception is based on an economic trope -- the contrast of savagery and civilisation, and the difference between the two being the ability to make exchanges.

The ability to make exchanges (of ideas, goods, services) is what makes for a civilised individual, and by extention a civilised nation/state. This discourse reduces cultural complexity to economic truths, and is effectively part and parcel of a strongly capitalist hegemony ('one-nationism' and multi-culturalism are different slants on what amounts to the same thing here, BTW). The idea is that the economic individual precedes any other type of individual, so that, for instance, Maori culture is reducible to something performed on top of normal economic practice. It's not so much that one is Maori, but that one does Maori things.

Colonisation in New Zealand, in this vision, is really a matter of developing an economy where there was one, making the land productive, and thus the marginalisation of Maori from their land is actually seen as a good thing, or at least as an inevitable thing (because economy is always better than no economy, and this vision of the past doesn't believe in the existence of a sophisticated Maori economy, contra James Belich).

This is classical liberalism, really, and part of a long-standing Western tradition that stretches back to Hobbes. Indeed, the first quote you use demonstrates this -- the 'hard, brutal and short' is a clear echo of Hobbes' 'nasty, brutish and short', in which he describes a 'state of nature', where contracts are unenforcable, and thus exchanges, particularly economic ones, are not viable. Hobbes, really, is the political philosopher at the beginning of this link between economic exchange, the state, and the Western individual, so it's fitting, or at least telling, that Brash should invoke him in this context.

So yes, Brash is trying to make Maori look like savages, but it is a particular kind of savage --one that has no system for economic exchange -- that Brash is invoking. This was articulated much more clearly by Bill English in his recent speech at this university.

What is going on here is a challenge between two models of New Zealand -- the bicultural :helen: , and the 'one-nation'/nationalist model :brash: (I only call it nationalist because it comes out of the nationalist general histories of the early 1960s; I accept that one can be a 'cultural' or 'bicultural' nationalist). At stake is a question about how we articulate self-hood - through economic or cultural paradigms.

It's all very interesting, and will provide much food for thought for historians in 30 years time.

Anyone who says that their was not a serious injustice against the Maori people is a blithering idiot, that much is crystal clear. There has been decades and decades of inequality and persecution, which is only now being righted. However, having said that, is it the right way forward for our nation to become hung up on these issues?

Its one thing to correct the inequality and injustices, its another to allow the things to swing in the completely opposite direction - that is not equality.

do not confuse equality and equity

Maybe, but it depends on what you think 'equality' is. How do we know when we have equality? What is the measure, and what about being is reducible to the point where we can say that two beings, let alone many, have attained equality.

The same thing goes for justice -- justice may well be a term produced by Western ideologies, by Western juridical thought, and thus the question of 'historical injustice' needs to be thought of as an historically determined, and not natural or transhistorical, category.

Which is to say that if our discourse about New Zealand and New Zealandness is constantly being located within Western norms, and Western assumptions about selfhood and right, then we can continue to expect that there will be resentment and dispute over New Zealand history. If we are to subsume Maori into Western ontological categories (of economy, for instance), and to allow debate to proceed on these terms, then it seems to me that Maori are going to resist, particularly if they operate on different ontological assumptions.

This is going to be particularly problematic so long as the vast majority of New Zealanders continue to believe in a version of New Zealand history that forgets New Zealand's status as a colonial state, and lives in the future perfect tense -- one where the anxieties of settlement are well behind us. In other words, the very idea that we should have a 'way forward as a nation', which inevitably rests on resolving issues of settlement, presupposes that the answer to these questions lies in breaking ourselves off from our history, in ending our relationship to our colonial past, so that we may finally 'become' New Zealand (even though it also presupposes that we 'became' New Zealand at a particular point already. We seem to need both).

My question, then, is how is forgetting the colonial past, and forgoing our responsibilities to that past, any kind of 'way forward'? Indeed, I would suggest that the 'way forward' that Brash was proposing would have, infact, led us back to the political protests, occupations, and hikoi of the 1970s. The 'economic man' that I argued for above is an essentially ahistorical one, I think, in that these exchanges do not require a memory of past exchanges (at least, not in the abstract). Rather, if this economic man's primary concern is with profit, then he is likely a futurist, putting store in the value of tomorrow -- a speculator, to borrow a term from our colonial period. Indeed, like culture, the past is ornamental to this one-nation vision of history, and the responsibilities of economic man to the colonised subject, if he accepts any at all, are economic ones. Brash's ahistoricism (and he is an economist, after all) is neatly captured by his citing of Belich. Belich's Making Peoples, from which Brash's example comes, is almost uniquely bicultural -- and yet Brash's understanding of the text is completely out of context, and at odds with the basic argument of Belich's book.

The point, then, is not that Brash is 'wrong', or a 'racist', or 'paternalistic', but that his assumptions about history, and being, and particularly being in history, are mediated through particular ideas about the self. These ideas are themselves ahistorical (except in the sense that they can be historically situated in the European Enlightenment), and lead to a vision of the past profoundly at odds with recent historiography (which is usually bicultural) and cultural politics. This is where the debate should be taking place. We should be asking questions about how we should think about history in New Zealand, and how we can think of ourselves as historical subjects, rather than arguing about rights we think we have, and coming up with endless examples of 'political-correctness gone mad'. Personally, I don't think these colonial issues will go away, and I think it's good that our national day is a site of conflict. It's the one sign I see that we live in a vibrant democracy. I certainly don't think that by pretending we have a thing called 'equality' is any kind of resolution to 'historical injustices'.

Very, very true Maus, though I particularly dispute the fact that you dispute he is paternalistic: you can be a paternalistic liberal, and I think the scope of Brash's vision for inter-cultural relations in New Zealand is a paternalistic vision where Western ideals are imposed (perhaps the wrong word) on the population via government public policy, through the education system, etc.

Don Brash serves to remember his idol Lee Kuan-Yew (yes, he said that) here, who created unprecedent cultural harmony in Singapore, and I seriously doubt Brash's total romanticisation of mid-20th century life in New Zealand and thus the rejection of any form of acknowledgement of the role that pre-20th century has to play in modern New Zealand nationbuilding is actually going to be viable long term solution, as Maus you yourself pointed out, as it is simply looking backward and likely to lead to racial tensions and outward struggle by sidelined groups.

However, as you justifiably point out, my calls on Brash are not necessarily entirely accepted even by those on the left. Nevertheless, I think it's terrifying that last election, and potentially this election, we are again going to have this utterly backward obsession with culture and race, and yet again proves that so many are unable to move on and form a post-colonial New Zealand society.

Well, what I was getting at was not that Brash isn't paternalistic, so much that his paternalism springs from a particular set of assumptions. He might also be racist, and wrong, but we have to ask ourselves on what grounds we can describe him as any of those things. From where do we speak, and from where does he speak? There seems to be a great deal of talking across the void in political debate; it's a failure of comprehension of differences in world-view -- what is obvious and natural to us is not necessarily so for others, and this difference can often lead to hostility. This is not just the case for cross-cultural divides, where world-views are obviously different, but also divides within the political spectrum. I guess I'm just trying to understand why he might say these things, and why he thinks that they're true.

That's interesting about Lee Kuan-Yew, though. Did you know Brash's wife is from Singapore, and that she's his greatest number one fan?

As I said, though, I think that it's a good thing that culture and 'race' are debated, although I tend to get disappointed about the terms of the debate, and I definitely don't think that it should be a tool for populist electioneering. I'm not entirely sure, however, about New Zealand being a post-colonial society. Again, it's part of a settler futurism, except this time from the bicultural side, and I'm simply not sure what the term means in the context of a nation which is still governed by and for the colonial class. As Bobbi Sykes wrote, 'Postcolonialism... Have I missed something?... Have they gone?' I worry that in the context of white settler colonies, the idea of postcolonialism is used by Pakeha to disguise the colonial history, to circumvent that discussion, to put the ghosts of colonisation to rest. I don't think that's a good thing.

To be clear, I'm not really on the left on this issue, because I'm deeply suspicious of the bicultural narrative as told from a Pakeha perspective. I think it's a colonial narrative, just like Brash's. I think the claims it makes to indigenous Pakeha culture are all about appropriating and assimilating Maori experiences, and neutralising Maori claims to tangata whenua status. These claims are exemplified in Michael King's Being Pakeha, and, frankly, they're dodge. While I definitely support the continuation of the Waitangi Tribunal, I don't think that that process will the be the end of it, and I don't think that the main parties' 'winding up' the process is going to rule a line under the colonial process, and put an end to it.

I guess I'm looking for a new way of imagining New Zealand history, but I'm trying to do so within an episteme dominated by this discourse about biculturalism, multiculturalism, and one-nationism. I guess that makes me a futurist as well... :shrugs:

When I say that I am on the left of this debate, I am on the Jessonian/Republican left, in that I loathe the idea New Zealanders simply appropriate, totally artificially of course, elements of Maori culture in order to satisfy those who are unable to acknowledge that there already exists a dominant New Zealand culture. I believe it shows a fundamental lack of purpose when people think that by inserting Maori phrases into their language, they somehow think they are resolving conflicting views on national identity.

Like Bruce Jesson, I'm not particularly a fan of the left establishment currently in New Zealand, and right now I sure as hell am not responsive to the bizarre, awful mix of anti-muliculturalism, anti-nationalism [Yes, anti-nationalism on the right] and extreme free market capitalism in the political establishment of the right.

Muldoon, Winston Peters, Gilbert Myles and Jim Anderton are the New Zealand politicians I admire the most. Muldoon, the most flawed of them all in terms of a lot of his stances (In particular the utter embarrasment he caused to New Zealand by the Springbok tour), still has my respect from his economic policies and many of his social policies. It's particularly poignant to note that at his funeral, the gang of which he was the patron, the Mongrel Mob, had it's Maori members kneel along the streets at his funeral. The other politicians (with the above about Muldoon applying equally to some of Winston Peters unnecessary anti-immigrant comments) luckily have less flaws than Muldoon, but sadly have never been able to fully purport their nationalist social and economic policies fully whilst in Government and have basically been sidelined historically.

I see Don Brash, like Bruce Jesson pointed him out in 1982 to be an extreme supporter of financial institutions, as a challenge to New Zealand nationalism and a challenge to a coherent New Zealand identity, through both his stances on cultural and identity issues, but also particularly in terms of his economic ideals, which absolutely terrify me.