He aha koia te tikanga Māori mō te whakaora i te iwi? I koneki ka mātakitaki tātou ki te kūao a capitalism nei, arā, ko “equity”.
Imagine a large cauldron filled with a stew of people from many different backgrounds. To put it succinctly, around 25 per cent of Māori, 30 per cent of Pasifika, and 14 per cent of Pākehā live in poverty. Numerically, most are Pakehā (the race of those in poverty only matters due to the way people who push equity use race, as how they determine who gets and is denied help, instead of class).
This stew was created and is maintained by a gargoyle called capitalism. Since arriving in Aotearoa, it has been picking winners and losers. The winners it chooses become part of an increasingly small elite. A report released this week noted that roughly 150 families now own as much wealth as the bottom 2.4 million people in this country.
Capitalism loves diversity but hates equality. It is happy to change the colour of those admitted into elite circles, but it resists anything that challenges the economic system upon which its power depends. The people in the poverty cauldron now face a new injustice. Under the language of “equity”, We are encouraged to decide who will be lifted out while leaving the underlying conditions that produce poverty intact.
This approach is often championed by sections of the Māori professional and its allies. My objection is not that Māori are doing the choosing, not even that Māori are those being chosen. My objection is to the acceptance that some can be lifted while others remain behind.Let me say here that equity for Māori would be better than nothing, as we say on the marae from Te Matua Tangata “he pai ake te ngaringari i te kore” something small is better than nothing). but this article is about pushing for something bigger. The same criticism would apply if Pākehā or Pasifika were prioritising only their own. This is how capitalism works: it allocates advantage to some while leaving others behind. Yet this logic is fundamentally at odds with the tikanga of the marae, where everyone is cared for and no one is discarded. The principle should be simple: poverty itself should be abolished, not merely managed.
Koineki taku tūmeke i te hunga unga i tō tātau taha Māori, inā tonu ko taua āhua tuku iho unga i a ia, engari kia mahua ētehi, ka hewa i kona. Me whakakotahi mārire tātau, ka hinga i a tātau te rēwera whakatīwehe nei.
I get surprised by some who advocate for our Māori well-being as we have all been raised to do, but to be exclusive in that work and leave out everyone else affected, I think we get it wrong there. I think we need a unified front of all people to take down this system that separates us all.
Many advocates use disparity statistics, which are misleading because they don’t establish causation. That is, a poor white or Pacific person would have similar statistics to those of a Māori person; therefore, obviously, class is a common factor of circumstance, not race, as you’re led to believe when people rattle off these disparity stats. It leads us to understand that Māori have had a terrible history of oppression in relation to the Crown. If we were to look at Pacific and many pakeha also have terrible stories too, to end up represented in poverty statistics, the point is not to look through and pick or choose someone’s story to arrive at poverty, it’s to end it. I find many people in our country seem to only have heard and only champion the Maori story of Raupatu, while either being unaware or disregarding other people’s histories and, what’s most important, their current situation.
Since arriving in Aotearoa, capitalism has created the very social conditions we now live under. Yet increasingly we use its logic to advocate for Māori advancement. In doing so, we conform to the values of capitalism rather than challenging them. This can be seen in the operation of many “settlement’ organisations and the growth of their commercial functions, while significant numbers of Māori continue to experience poverty and deprivation.
Socialism offers one māramatanga that can help us recognise how deeply we have been shaped by the psychology and logic of capitalism. It provides a language through which we can critique those assumptions and realign ourselves with the more intuitive and collective values of the Māoritanga many of us were raised with. Rather than asking who should be selected for advancement, it asks how the conditions that produce poverty can be transformed for everyone. From that perspective, the goal is not to create a more diverse elite, nor to relieve poverty only on certain conditions, but to build a society in which inequality is minimised and eventually private ownership (the heart of capiltilism) is put to end which is in line with traditional Maōri tikanga (there is a reason Māori were labelled socialists and communists by early Pākehā), a place in which no one remains trapped in the poverty cauldron.
“He unga i te rawa kore katoa o Niu Tireni”
“To advocate for all in poverty in New Zealand”
E aku rangatira, pai mārire.