Kim Webby, documentary director and producer. (Photo supplied)
The ripples of racism from Tākuta Ferris’s comments shouldn’t be ignored, writes Kim Webby.
As a half-Chinese New Zealander, I have felt the sting of racism since I started school and heard the chanted taunts from children as young as five or six. Chink, half-caste, Chinese, Japanese, you wear nappies, and so on.
Māori Party MP Tākuta Ferris’s recent outburst is equally ill-educated. He ranted online that it “blew his mind” that “Indians, Asians, Black and Pākehā, were campaigning to take a Māori seat from Māori.” He was referring to a multi-ethnic group of Labour Party MPs and supporters, campaigning during the recent Tāmaki Makaurau by-election, which the Māori Party won.
Te Pāti Māori’s leaders made it clear that Tākuta Ferris was speaking for himself and not the party, and he was told to take down the post. They also apologised for any hurt caused. Unfortunately, Tākuta Ferris doubled down on his attack in a late-night video a few days later.
Tākuta Ferris was off course in so many ways. “Asians,” which includes people from the Indian sub-continent, have their own history of subjugation to white supremacy and British colonial rule. Perhaps that’s why many feel aligned with Māori aspirations.
The first Chinese person to settle in New Zealand, Appo Hocton, arrived in 1842, just two years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. More Chinese from south China’s Guangdong province arrived in the South Island goldfields from the 1860s onwards.
In 1865, the Otago Chamber of Commerce actually invited Chinese to come to the goldfields. Chinese came because England had brought southern China to its knees in the two wars known as the Opium Wars. England had then banned export trade from Canton (Guangzhou), crippling the economy.
People were starving, that’s why they took up the offer to come to Gum Sarn (New Gold Mountain). They loved their home. They had to leave behind wives and children, but they came here to seek gold so that they could send money home, so their families in China could survive. Those who made enough money on the goldfields eventually returned to China. But many did not make their fortune.
One such person was Joe Kum Yung. In 1905, at 68 years old and crippled, he was shot and killed in Wellington by Lionel Terry, a white supremacist. Terry had written a manifesto for a White New Zealand. At the time, his views were mainstream. There was a White New Zealand League, and Chinese immigrants had to pay a poll tax of 100 pounds to enter New Zealand.
Tākuta Ferris might not know any of this because such history is not taught in our schools. As we know, Māori history has barely been taught in our schools either.
Our education system was so ignorant of Joe Kum Yung that, in 2020, a poem by Lionel Terry was included in a school exam, with no mention that he was a white supremacist murderer. It took a student, Cadence Cheung, to alert the education authorities and point out that this was pretty rude.
People from the Indian sub-continent have also been in New Zealand since the 1800s, and have faced discrimination from the start. Edward Peter, known as Black Peter, arrived in 1853. It’s now recognised that Peter told Australian Gabriel Read where to find gold at Tuapeka in Otago. But it is Read who was long credited with the discovery.
As for Tākuta Ferris’s rant that “Indians, Asians, Black and Pākehā, were campaigning to take a Māori seat from Māori”— the seat was going to stay Māori, whether Labour or the Māori Party won the byelection.
And if Peeni Henare had won the seat for Labour, he would likely have vacated his list seat in parliament and cleared the way for Georgie Dansey (Ngāti Tūwharetoa) to take his place in the House. One of Georgie’s ancestors, Harry Dansey, was New Zealand’s second Race Relations Conciliator.
In his defeat speech on by-election night, Peeni Henare said he was proud of all his volunteers who ran an inclusive campaign.
“Some might slander and some might denigrate them, but I want to be very clear. In this waka, you are all welcome — all shapes, all sizes, all races, all creeds,” he said.
If Asians, Pākehā and others want to help Māori to campaign in a Māori seat, surely that’s a good thing and the essence of the partnership that bound Pākehā and Māori through the Treaty of Waitangi?
If Asians and others want to support the goals of mana motuhake and tino rangatiratanga, then surely that support is welcome — especially at a time when many things Māori are under attack from the current government, and many gains made over the last 50 years are being eroded or erased.
I didn’t want to write this column because it hurts to have to focus on racism. But I believe that racism has to be called out whenever it happens, and whoever the perpetrator is.
We can’t just look away or turn the other cheek, because that silence lets racism fester. The more we learn to understand each other and our histories in Aotearoa, the more unified and stronger we will become.
Kim at a park in Guangdong province, South China. (Photo supplied)
Kim Webby is a veteran documentary director and producer whose career spans over 30 years of film, television and journalism.
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I see this issue more simply and without any racism involved. Takuta Ferris was correct……..Simply, 2 parties Te Pati Maori and Labour, representing 2 different parties, one being very definitely Maori values, the other the more homgenised values of Labour, representing our colonial system.
The various groups supporting Peeni Henare were ignorant of the history of our Maori seats in Govt and what and who they represent.
This is why it is important that all immigrants into our country have an introductory course on Tiriti of Waitangi and of our electoral system and hopefully eliminate this phopah from happening again.
The controversy over remarks made by Takuta Ferris in relation to the Tamaki Makaurau by-election confronts us with two issues. One is the nature and role of the Maori seats in the New Zealand Parliament. The other is racism. We need to talk about both issues, but we should start with the question of the Maori seats, because that was and is the substantive issue.
The Maori electorates are Maori because only Maori can enrol to vote in those electorates, and because historically they were a provision made for the representation of the Maori people at a time when they had no other rights of representation within the colonialist system of government. For that reason many Maori hold fiercely to the right to retain the Maori seats as Maori seats.
However the Maori electorates are also a colonialist construct which does not fit neatly into the Maori system of hapu and iwi governance known as rangatiratanga. The electorates are geographically defined and uniform with respect to the number of constituents. That does not fit at all well with Maori systems of governance in which hapu and iwi are defined on the basis of whakapapa rather than place of domicile, and where the size of hapu and iwi vary greatly. Geographic electorate boundaries necessarily split up the members of all hapu and combine many hapu that have limited common interests.
Yet despite that, Maori electorates function through the mechanism of hapu, iwi and marae. Although not authentically Maori they are made to function in a Maori way.
In other words, the Maori electorates are a chimaera, and it is this contradiction in their character which sparked Takuta Ferris’ remarks and the consequent raruraru.
Under rangatiratanga, outside interference in the selection of a rangatira or leader for a hapu would be inconceivable. There would be no way for outside interference to exert itself, and the very notion would seem ridiculous to all concerned. But in the Westminster system outside interference is the norm, and has been for at least the past century. National political organisations, media and individuals with no connection to an electorate wade into every local electoral contest and assume that they have a right to do so. (They are rather more circumspect about local body elections, which indicates that they are at least capable of recognizing that there is such a thing as a sensitivity to the idea of an authentic local democracy).
So Labour’s “multicultural” intervention in the Tamaki Makaurau by-election sparked a furore between those who see Tamaki makarau as a Maori seat and those who see it as simply one of the chess pieces on the board we call the House of Representatives, a pawn to be played by one party or another in the great game of politics.
Let’s be clear. We do not know for sure whether some or indeed all of those shown on the Labour Party campaign poster were enrolled in the Tamaki Makaurau electorate. But we can be sure that the purpose of image was to show that “we are all one people” and that therefore a multicultural intervention in the by-election was not only justified, but was positively a good thing.
Two totally opposed perspectives collided, ending in unnecessary rancour.
The big question now, is “Where do we go from here?”. Do we persist with the colonialist system of governance, or do we return to rangatiratanga? The latter is actually the only way to unite us as a people. It is the only way to ensure the racist legacy of colonialism is erased forever. It is the only way that Chinese and other ethnic communities can find a way out of their long history of subjection to colonialist rule, and it is the only way in which our people as a whole can avoid being dragged into new colonialist wars and atrocities on a global scale.
Interesting explanation thank you. Intuition said one represents a pakeha political party and the other a Maori response to?! Besides I respect Ferris blunt calls, the offence is from deep shame and a great motivator to fight for change. While I appreciate the racism all minorities have experienced I do not feel it can be used to deflex that Maori don’t have any other culture or place to identify with – they didn’t migrate and face racism, it came to them. None of it good at all of course.