Entry 2321, on 2024-02-01 at 18:12:49 (Rating 4, News)
A recent incident in Invercargill was reported like this: "An Invercargill city councillor has publicly revealed his disdain for the use of te reo Maori in names after making an incorrect assumption at a meeting. The incident occurred on Tuesday as councillors worked through a report on fees and charges, one page at a time, during an ordinary meeting. When elected members reached a section on the soon to be built Te Unua Museum of Southland, mana whenua representative pointed out the complex had been incorrectly titled 'Southland Museum and Art Gallery Te Unua' in the report."
In response the councillor said "Are we going to reverse all these European names and put the Maori names first on everything? Because I'm going to object every time."
And so he should. This ridiculous fad of giving everything a Maori name, or at least of having a bilingual name with the Maori first, is just mindless politically correct virtue signalling.
Note that I have no objection to using Maori names where I think it is appropriate. For example, I call the Maori Studies department at the local university "Te Tumu" even though I don't know what that means, but I won't call Dunedin Otepoti, because this is primarily a city established by Europeans. I don't mind that Otepoti is a secondary name which might be used in some situations where no confusion would result, but I have never seen any need to use it myself.
There are plenty of places in the country which already have Maori names, including regions, landscape features, and towns and cities, so why is there this infatuation with renaming everything else? The answer is obvious: pro-Maori activists (and by that I mean people pushing a Maori perspective who might not even be Maori themselves) like to force their own political ideology onto the rest of us.
No doubt my attitude will be branded as racist by many people, and I'll be accused of wanting to eliminate the Maori language, or of cultural genocide, or white supremacy, or of being a coloniser, or some similar drivel, but who cares? I only worry about other people's opinions of me when those people deserve respect, and these clowns certainly don't.
So universities, museums, sport stadiums, roads, and cities are Western creations which should normally have English names (although, as I said, I'm happy to accept the existing exceptions). Anything more related to Maori culture, like a Maori music festival or other event or object, can have a Maori name.
For example, I will call a Maori weapon a taiaha, but I will call a car a car, not some sort of waka!
The title of this post might be interpreted as me saying that anything to do with Maori is BS, but that would be a (perhaps deliberate) misinterpretation of my position. Some Maori issues are BS and others are fine. Unfortunately, in the current political climate (even though it is improving a bit with the new government) there is an awful lot more BS than good, rational stuff.
Note that in the reporting it was suggested that the person had "disdain" for the Maori language, but that is an assumption the reporter made which isn't necessarily supported by the facts (a pretty standard outcome for the mainstream media now). There are other, pragmatic reasons for preferring English to be the main language used in naming things, and disrespect for Maori isn't necessarily involved, although I concede it might be.
And it's hard not to feel a certain degree of disrespect for Maori culture in the current political environment, because of the way it is being forced on the population in general. And that's not the fault of most Maori. It's just the activists who are causing this division. One thing we don't need is more Maori BS!
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