“Aotearoa is regularly used as a name of New Zealand,” Speaker Gerry Brownlee said in a ruling on Tuesday at Parliament in Wellington. “It appears on our passports and it appears on our currency.”
Ricardo Menéndez March, from the left-leaning Green Party, used the name Aotearoa during a question to a government minister. The composite word means “land of the long white cloud” in te reo Māori, the Māori language.
Winston Peters — who is deputy prime minister, foreign minister and leader of the populist party New Zealand First — objected in a point of order.
A flamboyant politician who is New Zealand’s longest-serving current lawmaker, Peters favors populist policies and has been decried before for remarks about Asian immigration to New Zealand. Peters, who is Māori, opposes initiatives intended to advance Māori people and language.
The dumbing down of politicians is a world-wide phenomenon.
The only thing I can think of when reading that is “traitor”.
Or “conservative”. I got mine, so fuck you for trying.
They’re the same, just different scales of treachery.
Look, I get it, but people are allowed to have complex relationships with their language and history. I don’t know the specifics of this guy and I’m not exactly defending him (or his complaints, which seem petty), but nobody owes anything to a language because if their blood.
I’m Irish, and the oppression and near-loss of our language is a real pity, but I can’t deny either that we have have 150 years of real, actual Irish people speaking, writing, creating, singing, dreaming in English. Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Heaney, Lynott, Sinead O’Connor, Samantha Mumba… they’re not less Irish for having created or performed in English.
It can be hard for Irish, native-English speaking people (i.e. to a statistical approxination, literally everyone) to understand the amount of effort and resources that are poured into funding Irish-language art that the majority of our modern nation cannot read or understand, in a language that they associate mostly with an abusive and failing school system and patriotic guilt, while English-language art in general struggles with the odd and cold assumption from our society that the ready market for English-language Irish art and culture abroad will pay for anything with actual reach. If you have a weird niche idea, you’d better make it even more niche by sticking a cúpla focail in it - now a tiny fraction can enjoy it, but at least you get paid.
The same applies every time I am frustrated with the state of our healthcare system in a waiting room and pass a tall stack of pointless support resources and documentation in the Irish language, the cost of which could have paid for at least one dose of medicine.
We have very little going for us resource-wise in Ireland, but by christ we can write in the global language at least, whether it be for job opportunities or art. If someone sticks a knife in me I shouldn’t be called a traitor for keeping the knife.
It’s ok not to have a warm relationship with your nation or it’s language. But attacking them and trying to cause harm? That’s completely different and not to be allowed.
I do know the specifics of this guy and he is an absolute boot-licking uncle tom dickhead who made a lot of money becoming a politician and selling out his own people (and everyone else in Aotearoa) and he can go fuck himself.
Edit:
Uh, maybe, but you could also just make the tech companies pay a tiny fraction of taxes and then you could have both
Ah the classic “self hating
JewMaori”If he’s the same Maori politician I’ve seen speaking on such subjects before, he doesn’t want Maoris to be treated with special privileges. He wants all people to be treated equally.
Seems fair enough to me.
Except they haven’t been. Sounds like the same argument against affirmative action
…because it is the same argument. It’s equity Vs equality.
And that means the Maori name for the country shouldn’t be used? Something’s backwards here.
I was only responding to that single quote from the article. Not the overall topic.
Arguing about names is pointless.
And what you said about him seems to be easily disproven by the article.
The problem with what winston is fighting against is that Maori signed a treaty with the crown and Winston wants to remove all that they were promised.
Its not about equal rights its about signing a founding document then backstabbing.