‘Search for positive action’

Press, 20 September 1982, Page 25

‘Search for positive action’

PA Wellington The Race Relations Conciliator. Mr Hiwi Tauroa. believes an initial "anti" reaction to his office's publication. “Race Against Time,” has turned into a search for positive action. The trend was now for searching for ways things could happen, with calls to the Race Relations Office for advice and suggestions, he said.

Mr Tauroa told the Lower Hutt City Council, at a special meeting called to discuss the paper and how local authorities might implement its recommendations, that certain industries and other groups were inviting people to talk to them about “Race Against Time.” Judges, journalists, lawyers, teachers, and others were visiting maraes, and the Maori people were gaining representation on some bodies and reviews. Mr Tauroa also said that while Maori people had a low self-image at present, it was starting to grow. Greater cultural understanding would not just “come down like mana from heaven,” Mr Tauroa said. The community had to work for it. Mr Tauroa recommended to the council a Maori Affairs Department publication on town planning, and said that facilities were often put in areas with the most political power rather than ones with greater needs, use, and

numbers. If a country was not educated about different racial groups, minorities would remain outvoted in perpetuity, with decision-makers not understanding their points of view, he said. Mr Tauroa told the council that until New Zealand was educated, those points of view might only be represented through co-opting people.

However, if decision-mak-ing bodies picked “good" Maori or Samoans they knew well, the co-opted person might not be acceptable to his own people and it could lead to assertions of tokenism.

Mr Tauroa said that schools needed to “get cracking" and teach about things in New Zealand. “Some of it includes 'The Charge of the Light Brigade.' but not all of it,” he said.

He did not believe compulsory Maori language in secondary schools was the answer. ’ Maori should be iearnt to use in speech and not as an examination subject.

Maori language should, instead. be used in every play centre, kindergarten, and primary school playground as a “talking language.” In suburbs with large numbers of other ethnic groups, it should be just as natural for children to use some Greek, Samoan, Chinese, or other words.