REPLY TO PROTESTS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26776, 20 May 1948, Page 6

REPLY TO PROTESTS

GOVERNMENT BLAMED FOR POSITION

P.A. AUCKLAND, May 19. The remarks made in his sermon were not an attack on the Maori people but upon Governmental maladministration of Native affairs, said the Rev. Mr Moore, when replying to the protests against his statements. He said that the information about in-breeding was imparted to him unsolicited by a member of the Labour movement who was very concerned about the matter and quite certain that the allegations were true. Mr Moore referred to a complaint made by the Rev. A. B. Kena in Gisborne recently that the Maori clergy and people were not treated sympathetically by the Church of England in the Auckland diocese. Mr Moore recalled the assistance he had given Mr Kena when he was in Auckland: Very few Maoris, however, had responded to Mr Kena’s work. He said the majority had substituted politics for their religion, and this was not in tne least surprising when one considered how much the Maori people had been exploited politically. As a correspondent in a letter he had received put it, the Government, in its anxiety to retain office, was willing to concede anything or give anything for votes. Those who blamed the Church for neglect admitted demoralisation, said Mr Moore. That there was demoralisation among pakeha people went without saying, and that Maori vices were copied from the pakeha was a matter of common knowledge, but the rapid moral deterioration of the Maori race since 1935 was also common knowledge* and the blame for that lay at the feet of the Government. “The Prime Minister has stated that Maori New Zealanders are equal in all respects with our New Zealanders of European descent —socially, politically, legally, educationally, culturally and in citizenship status and rights,” said Mr Moore. “ I frankly do not believe that they are, nor do I think there are many New Zealanders of European descent who really believe that they are, but it should surely be the aim of every New Zealander to strive for the day when they will be. I also believe that in that striving the Maori people will play their part if they are not utterly ruined in the meantime by political machinations.”