WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND (MAY 22, 2005): The arrangements for the Pakeha Electoral Option have now been decided. After the 2006 census, the process of redrawing electorate boundaries will begin with a four-month Pakeha Electoral Option.
   During this period, electors on the General roll who indicated on their enrolment forms that they are of Pakeha descent will be sent a letter asking them to choose which type of roll they want to be registered on. These electors can choose to be on either the Pakeha electoral roll or the General electoral roll.
   Once they have made their choice, the person cannot change the type of roll they are registered on until the next Pakeha Electoral Option is held in five years time. If Pakeha who are already registered as electors do not make a choice during the Pakeha Electoral Option period, they remain on the type of roll they were already on. No correspondence will be entered into.
   The results of the Pakeha Electoral Option form the basis for calculating the Pakeha electoral population and the General electoral population. The results also affect the number of Pakeha seats there will be for the next two general elections.
   The number of Pakeha electorate seats can rise or fall depending on the number of Pakeha who choose to be registered on the Pakeha electoral roll. A change in the number of Pakeha seats can affect the number of General seats in the South Island and the number of list seats.
   The Pakeha Electoral Option also affects the boundaries of all seats—General and Pakeha. As a result, the process of re-drawing electorate boundaries cannot begin until the Pakeha Electoral Option has been held.
   The next Pakeha Electoral Option will be held from April until August 2006.

 Is Bill English, leader of the opposition National Party, correct in what he said this month that the existing Maori electorates in NZ are a form of affirmative action? Does he even know what affirmative action is? Or are the Greens and the Labour Party correct in that these seats must be retained for Maori to achieve better political representation?
   Isn't there something that's maybe a little bit insidious that vested interests in Maori society coupled with white NZ's liberal attitudes towards Maori leads to the retention of what is basically a racially-based system of elections? And aren't racially based systems of elections the kind of thing that all Marxist, leftist, feminist and anarchist pluralists battle staunchly against?
   Can anyone name another country that today—in the 21st Century—still retains an apartheid form of democratic elections?

About a year ago I attended a life-altering event: the Ngati Kahungunu Incorporated Economic Development Summit. I got to hob-nob it with the hoi polloi of Maoridom. This one was special: it was to be in Wairoa. Aunty Tumanako, now in her 90s, lovingly gave me day two of her conference pass. When I picked it up, she was stripping paint. I smiled, and I drove on out to the event on a shivering midwinter's morn.
   Everybody who was everybody was there. Mana Wairoa was out in force. I made my way in past two dozen Aunty hugs plus one Uncle asking me why I wasn't married and settled down with a nice wahine and ten kids yet. All the national figures were there, too. I watched newly slim Donna Awatere, MP⁶⁷  flitter by. She chattered and was flattered by other wahine who were impressed both with her new look and the fashion show extravaganza she'd put together the night before. I sat outside in the sunshine eavesdropping on Sir Tipene O'Regan and his latest Kai Tahu multi-million dollar dealings. He looked so erudite with his vaporous pipe. I chatted over tea with one of Winston Peters brothers about all the scandalous elements of being a NZ First MP, and he assured me its all "Lies, Lies, Lies!" (or, on second recollections, didn't he say its all "True, True, True!"?).
   The crowd was pretty much 99.99% Maori. Lunch was a hangi. The hongi snob meter was on high. As the day wore on, I noticed a tone start to emerge from both the audience and the speakers that began to bother me. Pakeha bashing. White people are the problem. They are the cause of all our ills. Their handouts hold us back. They are killing us with kindness. We must embrace western business models of success. Develop our resources. Sell ourselves to tourists. Lots of talk like that.
   The anti-Pakeha sentiment was rather subtle and insidious to start with, but it came to a rather intoxicating crescendo with the much heralded arrival of Hon. Winston Peters, MP, leader of the New Zealand First Party, and public speaker extraordinaire. Hon. Peters had been running late, but his chartered flight to Wairoa airport arrived just in time for the audience to give him their full attention. No one seemed to mind his tardiness, though to me the late arrival did seem a wee bit choreographed.
   Winston did his usual rant against Treaty settlements. That Maori in Australia just get on with it, so why can't Maori here do the same⁶⁸? That Maori are lazy dole bludgers and just need the opportunity to move past all the past grievances for the glorious future that lies ahead. And who did he blame for all of this? Not Maori. Not past Crown illegalities against Maori. Not any past racist colonialist imperial crown governments. No, there was one target, and one target only to blame: Sickly White Liberals⁶⁹.
   He ranted on about Sickly White Liberals keeping Maori down on the dole. Sickly White Liberals with all their Nanny-state programmes that hold Maori back. As any former resident of San Francisco (undoubtedly, the Sickly White Liberal Capital Of The World!) would be expected to do, I hissed at him. Loudly. Hsssssssssssssss. I was singular in my voice. I looked around me, and I saw a Maori audience entranced by what he was saying. It was pretty much 90% charisma, 10% ideas, but the message was clear: White people are to blame for Maoridom's⁷⁰ troubles. They're far, far too generous. And it must be stopped!
   I was glad when he got off the stage, glad that it was over and done with. He gave pat answers to a number of quite penetrating questions, a slick Winnie with all the patina of a lawyer and a politician. I thought all this ickiness was all over, but then what happened? An employee of Industry NZ (a division of the Ministry of Economic Development) got up and started to rant on at how Winston was so right, using the "Sickly White Liberal" term in an all too liberal fashion. Everyone nodded their heads in agreement. I was ready to walk out.

Looking back at the Kahungunu conference, the lesson I learned is that one is foolish to generalise or make sweeping statements about Maori society. Speakers at the event ran the gamut from an overly intellectual Maori academic who went right over everyone's head to engaging ex-sportsmen who had demonstrated solid application of their sporting dedication to economic development in the private sector.
   That a Maori lawyer who advocates abolition of the Treaty and anti-immigration rhetoric could achieve such a rousing reception says something. What exactly that "something" is, is something I'm still trying to work out. There's more there, I think, than just "Winston" charisma and magic.
   Meanwhile, our mainstream NZ media continues to muddle through. This from Tapu Misa in the NZ Herald, arguing against some of those advocating for the abolition of Maori seats:

   I've got a great deal of respect for Ms. Misa, particularly as a minority Pacific Islands writer making a place for herself in the mainstream press. But the above statement totally missed the point. The fact is, is that the six NZ First MPs *are* Maori. Just because they don't support Maori causes—and can "Maori causes" be generalised into one sweep, anyway?—does not mean that these Maori MPs lose their Maori-ness. They are ethnically Maori. They are descendants of the original indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa NZ. And whether or not they support generalised mainstream "Maori causes" or not cannot change that. They remain Maori.

NUHAKA, AOTEAROA NZ (MAY 22, 2003): I began this week's article with another reality slip courtesy of Naked in Nuhaka. By suggesting that all European people should be ethnically categorised and given the "opportunity" for representation in Pakeha Electorates I've attempted to point out the patronising nature of an electoral option that I—as a person of Maori descent—would prefer not to have⁷².
   The history of the Maori seats is not a proud one. Until the early 1990s, there was always only the option of four Maori seats—no matter how disproportionate the number of Maori voters in each seat was compared to general electorates.
   Even when that issue was resolved and the number of seats was increased, it was still the Pakeha bureaucrats who wrote the rules. You can only change from the General Roll to the Maori Roll once every five years, following each Census. Why the link to the Census? People who fill in the Census form are not filling in an enrolment form, are they? Why aren't people given the right to change between rolls whenever they feel like it? If they were given this right, might they perhaps flit back and forth as they felt like it? And, perhaps, might this point out the hypocrisy and extreme insince rity of a racially-based, self-defined electoral system.
   Why does nobody point out the fact that all the Members of Parliament who have general electorate seats effectively only represent non-Maori constituents? They do not represent Maori resident in their electorates. Local MP, Janet Mackey, represents the East Coast electorate where close to a third of the residents are Maori. She speaks often of the good work she does for Maori in her electorate. But, the fact remains, they are not her constituents.
   Danny Keenan⁷³, also in the NZ Herald, wrote about the lengthy travesties of injustice in the history of Maori seats. He wrote of how in the 1860s, for fear that "Maori voters [would] interrupt the process of land dispossession" creation of four special (as opposed to electoral) Maori seats took place:

   Though he expresses mixed feelings given the history of the Maori seats, Mr. Keenan concludes that they should remain: "The Maori seats provide a guarantee, albeit a meagre one, that Maori access to Parliament will continue."
   I, speaking as a person of Maori descent, wish to state that its only dogs who eat scraps. And that is exactly what the Maori seats offer Maori. Those on the left and who purport to be supportive of "Maori causes" (and I place these two words in quotes quite deliberately) suffer from a form of aporia. The right wing of the Englishes and the Peters' of the world say "Abolish Maori seats! Abolish Maori seats!" Therefore, the only response from the progressive left can be "Retain Maori seats! Retain Maori seats!" The response is automatic, because no alternative is offered which does not seem to sell Maori short, that does not lose what little scraps Maori have been given to date.
   In this week's column of Naked in Nuhaka, I have offered an alternative. A truly progressive alternative.

The Pakeha Electoral Option.

Postscript: One reader of Naked in Nuhaka, who wishes to remain anonymous, responded to the question of whether they could name another country that retains an apartheid form of democratic elections.
   She told me that the closest example of a racially-based electoral system is Fiji, and referred me to a paper written in 1989 and available online⁷⁴. The author argues that the Colonial Administrators prevented the introduction of a common roll because it would have allowed Indians to outnumber Europeans on the colonial council at a time when indigenous Fijians were governed under a separate administration. It appears that Europeans continued to raise the bogey of "Indian domination" to divide them from Fijians, who would have gained most from a common roll under a single administration up until about the 1960s, when Indo-Fijians began to outnumber them.
   There are other countries which have quota systems for various groups. For example, Pakistan has a quota for women and, until recently, had a quota for non-Muslim religious minorities (abolished in 2002). In addition, the government decreed that all candidates for the October 2002 elections should be university graduates (though it is unclear whether the latter was fully upheld)⁷⁵. Israel also apparently has a restriction on the number of seats that Arab Israelis can hold⁷⁶. South Africa abolished its racially-based electoral system when it abolished the Apartheid system on Freedom Day, 27 April 1994.
  This puts New Zealand in an interesting league of so-called democratic nations with Israel, Pakistan, and Fiji—hereafter otherwise known as the Axis of Apartheid.

THE PAKEHA ELECTORAL OPTION
Nuhaka, Aotearoa New Zealand (22.5.2003)