May 10, 2024 4:00pm by David Farrar

Words do matter indeed

MPs from both major parties are calling for political debate to cool, after a Te Pāti Māori MP said the Government’s changes to Oranga Tamariki showed a “mission to exterminate Māori”.

The MP for Te Tai Tokerau, Mairiameno Kapa-Kingi, made the comments during Wednesday’s general debate. Speaking about the removal of Treaty principles from the Oranga Tamariki Act, she said this showed the Government wanted to remove Māori children from their whānau, iwi and hapū.

“This Government will not waver in its mission to exterminate Māori,” she said. …

Radio NZ also reported:

Kapa-Kingi repeated her comments about extermination on Morning Report and said that previous words she used like colonisation, seemed to fall on deaf ears.

“If [extermination is] the word that has people sit up and take notice of what it feels like for our mokopuna and our whānau, what it sounds like, the tone of the discussion on a daily basis in the house.

So this MP thinks colonisation and extermination are interchangeable terms.

While it is good the media are finally covering what she said, she is still getting little pushback.

There are some people who push a theory called the Great Replacement Theory which is that white people in Europe and the US are being replaced by non-white immigrants as a deliberate policy to eliminate the white race.

Anyone who says such a thing is labelled a far right conspiracy theorist, and generally will be shunned by all media outlets.

What Kapa-Kingi said is the equivalent on the left of the Great Replacement Theory. Yet all she gets is a story mildly saying some have criticised her language.

Kapa-Kingi seems to be implying she just uses the term extermination as hyperbole. Apart from the insult that does to people who have faced actual extermination via government policy, consider what the likely impact is on some people who hear her rhetoric.

If you genuinely believe the Government is set on exterminating your race, then violent resistance would be morally justified. So her words are effectively an incitement to violence. You can’t say that the Government wants to exterminate 600,000 New Zealanders, and expect that the only response is for people to sign a petition.