“Aotearoa is regularly used as a name of New Zealand,” Speaker Gerry Brownlee said in a ruling on Tuesday at Parliament in Wellington. “It appears on our passports and it appears on our currency.”
Ricardo Menéndez March, from the left-leaning Green Party, used the name Aotearoa during a question to a government minister. The composite word means “land of the long white cloud” in te reo Māori, the Māori language.
Winston Peters — who is deputy prime minister, foreign minister and leader of the populist party New Zealand First — objected in a point of order.
A flamboyant politician who is New Zealand’s longest-serving current lawmaker, Peters favors populist policies and has been decried before for remarks about Asian immigration to New Zealand. Peters, who is Māori, opposes initiatives intended to advance Māori people and language.
Even blatant racists from Alabama and Mississippi can manage to use indigenous place-names; it’s not that hard. Just ditch “New Zealand” completely and be done with it!
Of course it was Winston Peters. He’s such a cunt. He has become so much more maga minded after covid.
He constantly panders and flames racist white peoples fears.
Maga minded?
Make Aotearoa Great Again?
Peters, who is Māori, opposes initiatives intended to advance Māori people and language.
The dumbing down of politicians is a world-wide phenomenon.
Ah the classic “self hating
JewMaori”The only thing I can think of when reading that is “traitor”.
Or “conservative”. I got mine, so fuck you for trying.
Look, I get it, but people are allowed to have complex relationships with their language and history. I don’t know the specifics of this guy and I’m not exactly defending him (or his complaints, which seem petty), but nobody owes anything to a language because if their blood.
I’m Irish, and the oppression and near-loss of our language is a real pity, but I can’t deny either that we have have 150 years of real, actual Irish people speaking, writing, creating, singing, dreaming in English. Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Heaney, Lynott, Sinead O’Connor, Samantha Mumba… they’re not less Irish for having created or performed in English.
It can be hard to understand the effort and resources that are poured into funding art that the majority of our modern nation cannot read or understand, that they associate mostly with an abusive and failing school system and patriotic guilt, while art in general struggles with the odd amount cold assumption from our society that the ready market for Irish art and culture abroad will pay for anything with actual reach.
If he’s the same Maori politician I’ve seen speaking on such subjects before, he doesn’t want Maoris to be treated with special privileges. He wants all people to be treated equally.
Seems fair enough to me.
The problem with what winston is fighting against is that Maori signed a treaty with the crown and Winston wants to remove all that they were promised.
Its not about equal rights its about signing a founding document then backstabbing.
And that means the Maori name for the country shouldn’t be used? Something’s backwards here.
I was only responding to that single quote from the article. Not the overall topic.
Arguing about names is pointless.
And what you said about him seems to be easily disproven by the article.
Except they haven’t been. Sounds like the same argument against affirmative action
…because it is the same argument. It’s equity Vs equality.
