Photo: Waitangi National Trust

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 2003 ‘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.

stuff.co.nz

The iPad comes close to providing Judy with her limitless supply of books, courtesy of Kindle and at a fraction the price you’d pay in the shop for “the real thing”. Curiously, I’ve started reading more thanks to Mr Jobs’ wondrous invention. It may be that the illuminated screen suits me better than the printed page. And there’s the added advantage that I don’t have to go searching for a dictionary when, as is often the case,  there’s a word I don’t understand.

This was particularly helpful as I ploughed my way through Christopher Hitchins’ memoir Hitch-22. “Ploughed” is the right word. This is heavy going, but every now and then you dig up a thought gem that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Hitch, a take-no-prisoners atheist, would have been as entertained as I was, when I returned home, to read that Kereama Pene , a senior minister of the Ratana faith believes that Hone Harawira may be the fulfilment of a prophecy by the Church’s founder, T.W. Ratana.   

“What [he] basically said at Ratana Pa is: If all the lights go out or all the people lose hope, the prophet said ‘turn your eyes to the north, a young man will rise up carrying the Treaty’.

“This is the first young guy who has said ‘I’m going to carry the Treaty, that’s going to be my first korero (thought) and that’s going to be my last korero’.

“I guess we’re driven by our own prophecy, there’s no doubt about that.”

I have no desire to offend Mr Pene or the Ratana Church, but it really is difficult to treat the idea of Hone Harawira being the fulfilment of a prophecy with any degree of seriousness or respect.

Even to the most credulous believer, it must surely seem preposterous. To the atheist, who regards all religious dogma as mumbo jumbo for,  as Hitchins puts it, “those whose pressing need it is to woo and win the approval of supernatural beings”, it can be nothing less than the quintessence of absurdity.

Many years ago I interviewed Hone’s mother, Titewhai Harawira. In the course of the interview I put it to her that she was consumed with hatred for the Pakeha. She vehemently denied it, but the language and tone of her reply merely served to reinforce the truth of my accusation.

Titewhai’s blood runs in Hone’s veins. But I sometimes think he is conflicted. There is, I divine, a decent and warm human being in there, a nice person. The cognitive dissonance of the voices in his head may go some way to explaining his Jekyll and Hyde vacillation between belligerence and appeasement.  

But even if I believed in prophecy, I would still find the idea of Hone as “the chosen” or “the anointed one” too incongruous to embrace.

It would certainly be unfortunate if this nonsense were, as Mr Pene hopes, to influence the outcome of the Te Tai Tokerau by-election.

 Rodney Hide, leader of ACT,  the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, has apologised for bilking the very people his party purports to represent – taxpayers.

Photo: Mark Mitchell

Hone Harawira has reportedly sent an email to the Maori Party apologising ‘unreservedly’ for any harm he had done to it in his ‘choice of words’ to  former Waitangi Tribunal director Buddy Mikaere. The ‘choice of words’ included ‘white man bullshit’  and ‘white motherfuckers’.

I was reminded by these events of my Northern Irish Protestant mother’s uncharitable interpretation of confession in the Roman Catholic church - that you could sin on Monday, confess on Tuesday, commit the same sin on Wednesday and so ad infinitum.

Confession of that sort would be worthless since it would not be motivated by genuine remorse or real intention to change one’s ways, but would  simply be a device to get oneself off the hook.  

Hide and Harawira’s ‘apologies’ strike me as equally worthless.

Harawira may actually be less culpable than Hide, since his outburst was motivated by the rage against Pakeha which flows in the very veins of the Harawira family. There was passion in it. He may also feel genuine remorse for any harm his words may have done to the Maori Party, and it is solely to them that his ‘unreserved’ apology is directed. No one who has followed his career could possibly believe that ‘white man bullshit’ and ‘white motherfuckers’ were anything other than true expressions of his feelings towards the European colonists of Aotearoa.

Hide is a different cup of tea. His apology is worthless because it lacks credibility. He has apparently had an epiphany. He wants us to believe that for an entire week he believed he had done nothing wrong. Then the light suddenly came on and he realised that tripping around the world with his girlfriend at taxpayers’ expense ‘was wrong’. He wants us to believe that he had been blinded by ‘the challenge, the hard work and the excitement’ of his ministerial job’ and had ‘lost sight of’ the awareness that every dollar the Government spent came out of the pocket of a New Zealander.

This is the equivalent of a policeman saying that ‘because of the challenge, the hard work and the excitement of his job’ he momentarily ‘lost sight of’ the fact that it was illegal to shoplift. Not breaking the law would always be uppermost in a policeman’s mind. Not ripping off the taxpayer would always be uppermost in ‘perkbuster’ Rodney Hide’s mind, and it is inconceivable that he did not consider the wisdom or the morality of what he was doing when he decided to charge the taxpayer for his girl-friend-accompanied trips to Europe, the US and Hawaii. He did and he calculated the risk as low. He was wrong.

These apologies have nothing to do with remorse. They are self-serving and self-interested responses to public and media outrage designed to salvage Hide’s and Harawira’s reputations and make things right with the public, their parties and coalition partners. Harawira will no doubt be taken back into the Maori Party fold, but, if immediate public reaction to his declaration of ‘remorse’ is anything to go by,  it is extremely doubtful whether Hide will ever be able to salvage his reputation.