More Ethnic Seats

Tariana Turia is quoted in the Dominion Post as saying she wants Pacific Islanders to be able to move onto the Maori Roll, or have their own seats.

This is very revealing about Turia (and should ring some warning bells about the Maori Party). She actually supports further parliamentary seats being allocated on race – not just for Maori. Now many people are okay with the Maori seats because they think (mistakenly) that there is some sort of Treaty obligation to have them or on the basis of indigenous rights or simply because we already have them and don’t want to offend by removing them..

But if you argue for other races having seats, you are advocating for a race based parliament and society – a Fiji or South Africa model. This is one reason why we should move to end the Maori seats also – it does create a bad precedent.

So what would NZ’s 120 seat Parliament look like on a Turia model, where races get to have reserved seats for them. It would be:

NZ Europeans 66
Mäori 16
New Zealander (open to anyone) 12
Chinese 4
Samoan 4
Indian 3
Cook Islands Maori 2
Tongan 1
English 1
Korean 1
Dutch 1
British 1
Australian 1
Niuean 1
European 1
South African 1
Filipino 1
Scottish 1
Irish 1
Japanese 1
German 1
American 1
Fijian 1

I hope Turia’s comments receive widespread scrutiny. The Maori Party have had glowing reports of their first year in Parliament (which is deserved) but when their co-leader comes up with such an obnoxious and repugnant proposal, it should be publicised, scrutinised and decried.