More views sought on race matters

Press, 10 April 1980, Page 3

More views sought on race matters

PA Auckland The Human Rights Commission is using last year’s haka party incident at Auckland University as a starting point to try to prevent multiracial disputes and disharmony from arising again. It has aired submissions from New Zealanders on the incident and on race relations generally. It emerged that New Zealanders are divided on the Maori’s place in society and on the extent to which the Maori has a right to his own culture. The commission now plans to travel New Zealand seeking further views before making recommendations to the Government and appropriate bodies. Last May a party of Auckland University engineering students practising a haka charade was attacked by a group calling itself He Taua, meaning war party. He Taua resented that the students were allegedly making fun of Maori culture. Complaints and suggestions poured into the Auckland Race Relations Office and the office’s parent body, the Human Rights Commission, invited public submissions. Yesterday the commission released the views of the 306 people who responded, in a 20-page booklet. The submissions were fairly equally divided between people who were pro-Maori culture and those who were less sympathetic to the Maori view. The editor of the booklet (Mr A. Blackbum) said he had been “extremely upset” by some of the attitudes expressed but that there was no point in filing the submissions away. The views were sincerely held and

should be published so that there could be further public discussion on the issues. The idea of the report was to show what people were thinking and in the longer term to try to bring them together and map out a plan for the tuture. His assessment of the submissions was that nobody was either tolerant or intolerant in New Zealand but just did not care as long as others did not bother them. The next step was to travel New. Zealand seeking further views. Auckland’s Race Relations Conciliator (Mr E. Te R. Tauroa) said he saw New Zealand as a beautiful forest in which the rimu was not crossed with the totara. All the trees were separate but together. New Zealanders had to look more closely at what they had, and face some of the things they did not like. They had to go past the stage of being passively tolerant to one another to the point where there was active understanding of different cultures. The chief executive officer of Mr Tauroa’s office (Dr P. R. Sharpies) said that for too long New Zealanders had pretended that there were no racial sores. The only way to progress was to discuss these issues. Many people did not think New Zealand was anywhere near a multi-racial society, nor did they think it should be. If things such as the haka party issue were not discussed ?uch incidents would happen again and again. The booklet, “Racial Harmonv in New Zealand: a Statement of Issues,” said the commission no longer saw the haka incident as an issue but that it had been used as a focal point for all other issues which had emerged from it. “It is the cause of multicultural disputes and disharmony that we are now interested in as we attempt to prevent such events arising again,” it said.