Hate speech proposals should have started with Te Tiriti
Friday, 2 July 2021
OPINION: Violence is like God’s wine. Its memories sing with age, as we smugly reflect on our survival, fortitude, courage. A few seconds back into danger, however, and reality returns with all those bitter tannins: chest-crushing fear, heavy breathing, stale sweat, like it never really ended.
What I’m saying is that it’s too easy to forget about fear and pain.
The Ministry of Justice has released a discussion document, seeking feedback on proposed changes covering hate speech.
The proposals haven’t been welcomed universally, but this doesn’t mean we should consign violence to memory – move on after the Christchurch attack without considering changes.
I do, however, believe the proposals have a foundational problem. The ministry should have started and finished with te Tiriti o Waitangi in its process.
Shouldn’t tangata whenua, of all people, have had a hand in co-authoring proposed changes to hate speech law?
In 2019, the Ministry and Human Rights Commission met groups “likely targeted by hate speech”. In December last year, the Royal Commission into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch Mosques released its report.
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But in only a single paragraph, the discussion document tells us the Treaty is relevant to the new proposals. Māori are already covered by existing law, but the likes of takatāpui Māori (LGBTQ+ Māori), added under the proposals, would gain new protection.
I can’t tell you what some truly Māori solutions to the issue of hate speech would look like.
But despite what the likes of National MP Paul Goldsmith would say, we have not had a great run with colonisation.
I know you might suggest Māori stop dwelling on the past, but unfortunately the past has not yet finished dwelling on us.
The violence of colonisation still permeates every part of our lives – we never got to forget it.
If you want specifics, then just look at the Māori Party’s call for a joint task force to investigate anti-Māori hate speech.
It was forced by what the co-leaders, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, described as an unprecedented upsurge of violent online anti-Māori rhetoric.
The thought of these videos, the evil rage they contain, makes my gut start churning.
While the patch-it approach to legislating against this behaviour is problematic, I do realise a te Tiriti-based strategy would drive a handful of idiots to consider doing the very things the law sets out to prevent.
And here we reach the overarching problem.
The latest terror-inducing threat to Aotearoa (oh my God – not the “A” word!) is a cultural invasion from within: Māori culture, language, history. It’s a brown freak-out, and what its opponents fear is not violence, but justice.
I was born about 18 moral panics and three cultural invasions ago. We survived them all. I don’t speak only Mandarin (but I wish I could). I was never a Satanist or a Stalinist, I can assure you. I’m not a video-game-induced serial killer. I’m not a zombie, hooked on television. I mean, television? We’d love if our kids would join us for the now-quaint habit of sitting together to ignore each other in front of a single screen.
Those were the days: before even communal isolation got fragmented.
It’s a lonely place online. There are only individual actions, actors – blips seen from space like ghostly cities.
We live in an information world, and the worst thing about it is that it doesn’t even really exist. Information doesn’t resolve anything. It just piles up alongside the dozens of abandoned passwords we lost track of years ago.
A true partnership with te ao Māori, dedicated to community, whānau, connections to each other, the world, our past, would be a tonic to the indecency of extremism and isolation.
To be Māori is to know you’re not alone.
Joel Maxwell is a former Stuff senior reporter.