Photo: Waitangi National TrustIt’s a truism of column writing for the tabloid press that, if you want to attract a decent-sized readership, you can’t afford to be too rational or too even-handed. Writing in a considered way or seeing both sides of an issue is likely to lose you not only your audience but the job as well. What your editor wants is stuff that will stir readers up and have them reaching for their pens or laptops – outrage! Given that brief, it’s difficult for the tabloid columnist to go too far. Michael Laws, who appears to view himself as the only pure-bred in a society of ferals, might seem to be an exception, but in fact represents the finest qualities of the breed. One might have thought that Paul Holmes was a different kettle of fish. He is after all hugely intelligent, extraordinarily well-read, a talented writer in my estimation, and an award-winning columnist. His column in last Saturday’s Weekend Herald, headed Waitangi Day a complete waste, reveals none of that. It is an appalling piece of offensive, unintelligent, uninformed racist claptrap that makes his ‘cheeky darkie’ reference to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan seem innocuous.
Here are some quotes. Judge for yourself:
‘Waitangi Day produced its usual hatred, rudeness, and violence against a clearly elected Prime Minister from a group of hateful, hate-fuelled weirdos who seem to exist in a perfect world of benefit provision. This enables them to blissfully continue to believe that New Zealand is the centre of the world, no one has to have a job and the Treaty is all that matters… ‘Well, it’s a bullshit day, Waitangi. It’s a day of lies. It is loony Maori fringe self-denial day. It’s a day when everything is addressed, except the real stuff. Never mind the child stats, never mind the national truancy stats, never mind the hopeless failure of Maori to educate their children and stop them bashing their babies. No, it’s all the Pakeha’s fault. It’s all about hating whitey. Believe me, that’s what it looked like the other day…
‘No, if Maori want Waitangi Day for themselves, let them have it. Let them go and raid a bit more kai moana than they need for the big, and feed themselves silly, speak of the injustices heaped upon them by the greedy Pakeha and work out new ways of bamboozling the Pakeha to come up with a few more millions.’ Were you drunk when you penned this racist diatribe, Paul? I hope so. That at least would be an excuse. In this morning’s Herald a man often himself dismissed as a racist hothead replied. Hone Harawira described Holmes’ column as ‘a nasty article from somebody who must have known it would hurt a lot of people.’ ‘It was mean and mean-spirited. It was deliberately offensive and uncaring, and though he might claim that it was written to spark debate, at the end of the day it was just mean and nasty.’
Harawira then proceeded to give Holmes a history lesson. There was anger in it but the anger was contained. It spoke of the historic and contemporary injustices that Maori have faced since 1840, but it did so largely without rancour. And it ended with this charming and positive response to Holmes’ claim that Waitangi Day should no longer be New Zealand’s national day: ‘I’d also like you to know that along with a whole lot of other people (Maori and Pakeha), I enjoy going to Waitangi every year. ‘I enjoy the company, I enjoy the politics (both the Maori stuff and the Pakeha stuff), I enjoy the banter, I enjoy the people (both Maori and Pakeha), I enjoy having the kuia tell me they love me even when they’re telling me off, I enjoy watching the kids playing sport, I enjoy the kapa haka groups, I enjoy the kai, I enjoy the march up to the top marae, I enjoy the church service, I enjoy seeing people I haven’t seen in a while,
I enjoy the occasion … and yes Mr Holmes, I even enjoy the protest, because protest is every bit a part of Waitangi as anything else. ‘Waitangi Day is our National Day Mr Holmes. It is rightly commemorated in many different ways in many different parts of the country, but it was at Waitangi that a group of people chose to sign a Treaty that was to be the foundation of our nation, and it is to Waitangi that we rightly return every year to see how well we’re doing. ‘It’s not always going to be strawberries and cream, but it will always be a part of who we are. ‘Maybe I’ll see you up there next year, Mr Holmes.’ I thought that was generous. On its front page today the Herald billed the two columns Hone v Holmes. In those terms Holmes was outclassed from round one – a brawler who should never have stepped into the ring with a real boxer. As for the case which Holmes presented, its greatest weakness seemed to me to be its failure to recognise that the social ills which beset Maori today are the same social ills that beset all colonised peoples. If you want to allocate blame, look to that.
