Here’s a new government of New Zealand statement by Kelvin Davis, the country’s Associate Minister of Education as well as Minister for Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti, Minister for Children with responsibility for Oranga Tamariki, and Minister of Corrections.
It announces the building of a school (“wharekura”) that focuses mostly on science, and will be connected to indigenous ways of knowing (mātauranga Māori), which are a combination of practical knowledge, legend and oral tradition, superstition, religion, morality, and tips on how to live better. By now I know most of the Māori words, but only because I read this stuff all the time and look up what I don’t know in a Māori dictionary. Remember, this announcement is supposed to be directed at all the citizens of New Zealand, not just the small percentage who speak Māori.
The announcement (indented):
A new Year 7-13 designated character wharekura will be built in Pāpāmoa, Associate Minister of Education Kelvin Davis has announced.
The wharekura will focus on science, mathematics and creative technologies while connecting ākonga to the whakapapa of the area. The decision follows an application by the Ngā Pōtiki ā Tamapahore Trust and a consultation process.
“The wharekura will initially have a maximum roll of 72 ākonga. Its establishment recognises the importance of Wairuatanga that is deeply embedded within the marae communities of the Bay of Plenty – Waiariki District,” Kelvin Davis said.
Teaching at the wharekura will be conducted in te reo Māori and will deliver a science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) programme supported by mātauranga Māori. This reflects Ngā Pōtiki ki Uta Ngā Pōtiki ki Tai – mai ngā kāhui maunga ki te moana: Tauranga Moana, Tauranga tangata: Te Arawa waka Te Arawa tangata: Mai ngā pae maunga ki te moana.
“Boosting Māori education is a focus for the Chris Hipkins’ Government, as shown in the recent Budget where $225 million went into areas including more classrooms and learning support,” Kelvin Davis said.
“Our goal is to grow the number of Māori learners in Māori Medium and Kaupapa Māori Education to 30% by 2040, and new wharekura like this will help us achieve this.”
“We are pleased to make this announcement in partnership with Ngā Pōtiki ā Tamapahore Trust as we continue to work collaboratively to foster increased participation, engagement and success for Māori through Māori immersion education,” Kelvin Davis said.
The next step is the appointment of an Establishment Board who will be tasked with developing the vision and direction of the wharekura and appointing staff.
Can you understand that? Even if you’re a Kiwi you probably can’t because, according to N.Z.’s Newshub, only a very tiny fraction of the country’s population speak Māori:
Te reo Māori [the Māori language], listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization as ‘vulnerable’, is only proficiently spoken by around one in 100 New Zealanders. Another 2.7 percent are able to hold a basic conversation, according to census figures – all up that’s around 185,000 people.
Since only about 16.5% of New Zealanders identify as Māori, that means that about 80% of the indigenous people don’t even speak this language, even in the ability to hold a basic conversation.
Are Māori-laden statements like this, then, a big attempt a virtue signaling, or does the government hope that by issuing them it will drive the whole country to learn the indigenous language? I doubt it, because a paper from the Royal Society suggests that, without intensive intervention, the demographics of the country will doom Māori as a language.
But more important, what is being proposed, once you translate the announcement into English, is a school that will teach science only in Māori, will use the principles of matauranga Māori, including the “whakapapa of the area” (whakapapa is a Māori-specific term reflecting the privileges and duties of your tribal ancestry), and will involve a lot of money. I may be wrong, but given the paucity of Māori-speakers, and the prevalence of scientific literature and texts in English, not to mention the issue of matauranga Māori not being science but including some practical knowledge—given all this, shouldn’t they just educate the children in English, and reduce the influence of a largely superstition-and-tradition-based knowledge system on a science curriculum?
New Zealand absolutely should educate Maori children in English and encourage excell-ence..
Residential schools in Canada and the United States taught indigenous students in English because no one in the outside world spoke traditional languages and few indigenous people speak them even today except as ceremonial incantations. These languages, like Maori, lack words for the modern concepts that form the backbone of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and, yes, art. There is no word in any pre-Contact indigenous language for iron, wheel, electricity, glass, oboe, or perspective, much less nuclear magnetic resonance laboratory and CRISPR. But the schools are criticized today for suppressing indigenous languages as an act officially recognized as cultural genocide. Mr. Davis probably wants to avoid the same calumny that befell Duncan Campbell Scott and Egerton Ryerson. Cancelled.
The problem was those schools were intended to wipe out their culture. The idea of modern education is great, but the agenda wasn’t so much giving them a strong foundation in the outside world for their people but destroying their culture.
Both can be done today if it were tried. I’m all for great cultural heritage organizations. But also of public schools for all that insure one can live and work in the greater world as much as anything else.
That is a modern reading. The cultural clash between the Plains Indians and settlers in the 19th century was inevitable. If your culture is to roam the plains hunting bison, which have disappeared, and you resort to shooting (with your western science rifle) whatever animals you encounter, that is going to put you in conflict with the rancher whose cow you just shot, or the farmer whose wheat field you are helping yourself to. “Nobody owns the earth’s bounty!”. “Wrong. We do, and you are thieves.”
Indian culture was seen as maladaptive toward the goal of teaching them to be wage slaves who could save enough to look after themselves in their late years, in the century before Social Security and the still later idea that not working for a living at all was an actual life option for putting food on the table. Much of the assimilation attempt was contained in Canada’s Indian Act of 1869, still on the books which gives indigenous people tax-free status on Crown Reserves which they don’t own but get to live on rent-free. The idea that Indian culture had features of great symbolic significance and power, like the potlatch and the medicine wheel, got an eye-roll from the sharp-faced Protestant men in Ottawa trying to keep the actual flesh-and-blood Indians from being perpetual alms-seekers. A Canadian settler education was absolutely part of that mandate and it did allow many indigenous people, who even said so, to have opportunities in the wider world that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
This isn’t a brief for residential schools as that would be off topic. I’m only trying to point out that as soon as you set about educating people, you are asking them to leave their old culture and ways of knowing behind. That’s why teaching STEAM in Maori won’t really teach it. The Maori expressions are inherently culturally anti-science.
Maybe, maybe not. The clash was as everywhere else going to happen regardless, the bison were wiped out, in part from the early conflict.
Doesn’t mean one’s heritage shouldn’t be forgotten. And all I’m remarking on is that those schools regardless of their original intentions didn’t exactly end with their desired results and child abuse was common.
Forcing it is the only problem. Now it’s about facing here in New Zealand, and that is no better.
None of this makes sense to me, but I also find it difficult to get exercised by it. Getting more Maori kids in STEM* is a good idea, and I suspect they’ll conclude for themselves that traditional Maori “ways of knowing” offer very little when it comes to STEM.
*I’m not fond of the addition of “arts” in STEAM, because I consider “arts” as pretty much anything not STEM. (A history major graduates with an “arts” degree, no?)
In a professional capacity, I have sponsored STEAM programs. Though I agree that there is value in keeping STEM programs, I have witnessed the benefit of adding the A for “arts.” The arts in this case could be more properly considered artifices, that is, technical skills such as design, drafting, and construction. Some students favor a kinesthetic, or hands-on, approach to learning, and these artifices play to their strengths.
I like!
Foreign languages are not arts. History is not arts.
That paper from the Royal Society is super interesting. Uses a model of cultural transmission similar to models of disease transmission. Compares models of the spread or loss of Maori to models for Welsh. Good comparison because both are the only indigenous language of the country. They find Welsh is likely to thrive but Maori is likely to die out, and suggest some tactics that might prevent that outcome. The model ignores big confounding factors like immigration of Asian people who need to learn the dominant language to get along and may have little interest in learning Maori as well (comparable to new immigrants to Canada for whom English is necessary but French is a bridge too far). The authors note that attaching prestige to the indigenous language can promote uptake, but don’t say how the Maori culture or language could be made to appear prestigious among New Zealanders.
Welsh survives only with a vast infusion of English loan words. When travelling on the train from Swansea to London, one can hear quite a bit of Welsh spoken, but it is jarring to hear the frequent English words. When living in Wales, I bought a Welsh-English dictionary. It was pretty thin. I guess that Maori will go the same way in order to be useful in the modern world.
Regarding the 2019 Royal Society paper, its corresponding author is Dr Michael Plank. He appears to be a mathematician, and he became well known on TV / newspapers from 2020 onwards as a covid modeller. Some trivia : he speaks with an obvious British accent, unlike my own NZ accent. But this isn’t trivia, because during his fame as a covid talking head, whilst talking much sense about covid modelling, he perpetrated some appalling statements as soon as he stepped out of his domain of expertise.
Plank constantly claimed all or almost all ethnic disparities in NZ health outcomes were due to ‘structural racism’ ; in fact, Plank constantly bandied the term ‘structural racism’ to any credulous journalist as if he were the oracle of all things ethnic. I wrote in 2021 to his academic email in protest, stating my degree ( MB ChB Otago ), plus the fact that I actually had spent one year at the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, studying the 19th- 20th C development of neuroanatomy / anthropology , and its application to peoples colonised by Europeans. [ My supervisor was the medical historian Roy Porter.] In other words, I actually had a formal tertiary educational background researching ‘scientific racism’, while his own CV noted no such expertise. So I asked Plank via email how could he justify his assertions that all ethnic disparities were due to ‘structural racism’ +/- ‘colonialism’, and if so, considering South Asians were colonised for hundreds of years longer by Europeans etc than Maori, Samoans or Tongans, how come ethnic South Asians did rather better in tertiary education in NZ?
Did Plank reply to my doctor-to-doctor academic query? Of course not! So maybe Plank could reply in print here as to why all ethnic disparities [ including transmission of languages ] are due to ‘structural racism’, and how come he isn’t advocating for affirmative action for South Asians whose forebears had been colonised by the British since around, oh, 1740 onwards — a full century longer than Maori?
That’s true of many languages, especially English. Languages evolve and invent new words or borrow them from other languages as a matter of course.
I’m somewhat opposed to the idea of trying to preserve languages simply for the sake of it. If a language is dying out, it’s because nobody wants to speak it and the only way to preserve it is to force people (usually children who have no say in the matter) to do something they don’t want to and the will have no use when they grow up.
As has been pointed out, if you are really interested in communicating, you don’t go out of the way to disguise you meaning. This is demoting Maori to the level of cant.
It’s demeaning.
When the Swiss government has reason to discuss the opening of (say) a new Italian-medium school in a German press release, anyone think write the equivalent of “The wharekura will initially have a maximum roll of 72 ākonga”?
Speaking for British Columbia, where I live, administrators at all levels cannot replace Anglo signs fast enough. This is the name of a new local library branch: sxʷeŋxʷəŋ təŋəxʷ. No clue how to pronounce that. Every day it seems that a sign is removed and replaced with something in presumably a local indigenous language (even though the actual construct of local indigenous languages is extremely recent, particularly in written form). Street names, school names, place names, et cetera, all this generated from a demographic that forms 3.6 percent of the population of BC, but which demographic holds a lot of power, and with the recent signing into legislation of UNDRIP, a rapidly growing power, especially given the propensity of “settlers” to grovel.
The fetishizing of international phonetic alphabet seems to be another luxury adopted by insiders to signal status. IPA doesn’t help anyone else, including most aboriginal people who can’t read IPA any better than non-aboriginal people.
Does anyone here know why New Zealand adopted that customized rendering of Maori language in text? It’s not IPA. I thought Maori was an oral language only, but maybe not?
Early in the 19th century missionaries translated the Bible into English using the closest English sound/letter approximations, long before IPA; since then macrons (or sometimes vowels are doubled) have been added, but I haven’t noticed any signs of the IPA otherwise.
Māori has a limited number of phonemes, more or less similar to English, but pronunciation is complicated by dialect differences, changes in English pronunciation of the same graphemes since it was written down, and the difficulties mother tongue speakers of one language have in clearly hearing the sound subtleties of another language to which they are infrequently exposed.
Thanks! I assume you mean “missionairies translated the Bible into Maori…”. That makes sense – the Maori rendering predates IPA.
Your discussion of how few proficient Maori speakers there are in New Zealand may explain the sense of these policies. If they decided to teach superstition in English (creation science, etc) many students would be able to follow the instruction. That would be bad. By teaching creation science in Maori at least most students will have no idea what they are talking about. If there is some fundamental New Zealand desire to teach superstition, maybe it is best to teach it in Maori.
The alternative to this theory is frightening, however.
Let them do whatever they want , as long as they don’t force this on people who aren’t interested and want to learn real science in English . They will probably blame colonisation when they realise this approach means they can’t compete with everyone else .
You don’t keep up, do you. THEY ARE FORCING THIS ON ALL PUBLIC SCHOOL CHILDREN IN NEW ZEALAND.
Some years ago, there was a minor kerfluffle in the US about African American Vernacular English, also called Ebonics. This might be considered the language of a minoritized US population, analogous to Maori in New Zealand. The use of Ebonics raised problems in the legal system, including the following from Wiki: “A 2019 experimental study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, NYU, and Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity, found that court stenographers in Philadelphia regularly fail to transcribe AAVE accurately, with about 40 percent of sentences being inaccurate, and only 83% accuracy at the word level, despite court stenographers being certified at or above 95% accuracy.” Ebonics has pretty much dwindled by now, and US educrats have not taken to using it in official documents, unlike their Kiwi counterparts. Needless to say, the talk about Ebonics stimulated consideration of my own ancestral and favorite dialect, called Hebonics. See:
https://www.gluckman.com/harry/hebonics.htm
You have to wonder what the long term goal is here. It’s hard to imagine the entire population transitioning to the indigenous language and culture, particularly as there are so few Maori speakers. Additionally, New Zealanders surely want to be part of the modern world of culture and commerce. (Don’t they?) Again, what does the government think it’s doing? Perhaps with this new school in operation, Maori speakers and other interested students will self-select toward this new school and reduce the pressure on the rest of the educational system. (That seems unlikely, given how far things have gone already.)
I’m at a loss to understand the long term goal for the country as a whole—what the vision of New Zealand is for 50 or 100 years from now. Does anyone know what New Zealand is trying to accomplish?
I am not an educator but as a NZ”der of Maori and English heritage watching this from the outside I think unfortunately in the main, it is trying to address two problems. Maori student failing within the education system (with all the social, economic fallout that comes with it) and obligations to the Treaty of Waitangi. Commentators here grasp what is happening but miss the influence of the Treaty and how Maori use it to guide all their interactions with the crown. The all too human qualities of honor, status, (read mana) respect, it is very tribal and very much on the surface. Look at how Democrats and Republicans behave when it comes to the Constitution and rights… some GOD given.
But back to the point, the Treaty obligations cannot be ignored and given the debates globally of indigenous rights, colonialism, and racism concerns, governments of the day like our Labour Party are going out of their way to seemingly address them. I think a lot of resources are going to go west before it retracts to sane policies that work to help Maoridom. That for me would be knowing the limitations of Maori culture in the modern world and start dealing with the realities, recording and recognizing their heritage and contribution within the history of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Just two points, directed at certain comments here: (1) The IPA is an exceptionally useful pronunciation guide, and really, is best taught to everyone (maybe in middle school) both in British Columbia and elsewhere. (2) “Language” and “lexicon” should not be used interchangeably. For example, English is a Germanic language, but a significant portion of its vocabulary is Latinate. That doesn’t make English any less of a Germanic language than it had been before the Norman Conquests. More to the point, it is not a shortcoming of the language that Maori is infused with English words. These being said, I do find the Disneyfication of the Maori culture in New Zealand (as I do, for example, the Disneyfication of Native American culture in that country’s southwest, and that of the dead Jews in Poland, etc., to be verging on a metaphorical form of necrophilia. But most distasteful–and most consequential, of course–is the encroachment of religion into the New Zealand state, and the resulting damage to civil liberties, to scientific advancement, and to culture in general.
Did you overlook this part of Davis’s announcement?:
‘As part of informing diverse space policies and sector development initiatives, the New Zealand government will engage mātauranga Māori expertise….
‘Mātauranga Māori and space are deeply connected, with space representing whakapapa (genealogical links to the beginning of the universe), wairuatanga (the spiritual connection between Earth and the universe, derived from Māori cosmology), and tātai arorangi (Māori knowledge of astronomy). The New Zealand government encourages inclusive collaborations with individuals or groups who are currently underrepresented in the space sector (including but not limited to Māori) and for these collaborations to work toward sustainable outcomes. The New Zealand government will also strive to further understand and assess representation across the space sector, to best direct inclusive collaboration opportunities.’
Damn! No, I did see that and was going to add it to the post as a second part, but then forgot. I may put it up separately soon. Thanks for reminding me. You must have read pretty thoroughly, as you have to go to two other links to get to that.
This is priceless! Surely space scientists well versed in tātai arorangi and wairuatanga will help the New Zealand space program to design the sort of outrigger canoes needed to reach marama (the moon) and other nga waahi o te rangi (places in the sky).
No,… I cheated. I just looked at this blog that monitors government press releases: https://pointofordernz.wordpress.com
It is not a matter of what New Zealand is trying to accomplish, but rather what its professional educrats are trying to accomplish. Moves in the same direction (e.g., the ethnomathematics memes in some K-12 education proposals) are not unknown here. The goal is to establish a professional credential structure based on one kind of word salad or another distinct from knowledge of an actual subject under discussion.
Then, individuals can claim the status of say, Physics, by having a course, or a degree, or an appointment, in such subjects as MM Physics, or DEI Physics, or in “Physics Teaching”. We already have this sort of thing in the “Mathematics Education” world of operators like Jo Boaler and Rochelle Gutierrez, who are regularly quoted in the media as “mathematics profs”. In New Zealand, there is the added wrinkle of a more or less exotic indigenous language, a few words of which can be sprinkled into the word salad to add spice, and further obscure the absence of subject matter content.
I’m all for preserving language and promoting it. But yeah, this probably won’t end well and would be millions wasted on a few again.
Whakapapa does have many legit elements of classical genealogy though, but it does connect to rocks and mountains as well (Wikipedia). Family and ancestry is one thing, but the spiritual part is not.
Edit: I meant this in reply to the comments at #7.
The way I read the press release is that the new school is aimed at ethnic Maori students (akonga) in a traditionally Maori enclave. Instruction will be in the Maori language. Wiki says one of the primary schools in this now-large suburban town is already “Maori immersion”. Much is made of incorporating learning with the whakepapa (genealogy) of the traditional Maori settlement locally.
I can’t see this stuff resonating with white or Asian-extracted settlers and I can’t imagine such parents consenting to have their children educated in Maori, any more than ours would want Cree immersion no matter how noble-hearted they are. Even French immersion (voluntary except in Quebec where it is mandatory and English is banned) is going out of fashion in English Canada. When the release talks about the Hipkins government’s desire to boost Maori education, I took that to mean get more ethnic Maori to attend school, not teach more to everyone in the Maori language. Still, it should be taken in the context of NZ education generally as to what is coming down the road.
So long as they’re getting some useful life skills, who cares? We all need an education and if this works, and if it doesn’t, whatever.
Because the Maori language will be next to useless for almost all of the children being forced to learn it.
Maybe so. I do believe it should be preserved and so on.
I don’t see French immersion going out of style where I live (my wife teaches French immersion in elementary school), but I will submit that the reason most parents sign their kids up for FI is not because they want them to learn French. If schools offer immersion programs in other languages you would see interest in FI dwindle for sure.
Where I live in BC it’s widely understood that French immersion is the poor man’s private school: self-selects for families with involved parents, kids willing to work a little harder & stand out as a little nerdier. Almost all are not francophone, but other immersion programs (e.g., Mandarin) tend to fill up with native language speakers (e.g., kids from Chinese families).
Sorry for overcommenting.
Given the nonsense that’s being said about MM being co-equal to science, I get your concern, Jerry. But care is also needed. There are good reasons for establishing schools that deliver teaching in te reo Māori, including (as the press release states) to boost Māori education.
I do shudder, though, at the statement that the school “will deliver a science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) programme supported by mātauranga Māori”, not because there’s anything wrong with putting those two things together in one classroom, but because on the evidence we’re seeing, what’s being called “support” here may well be more like “studied and assessed through the lens of”.
The shame of it all is that teaching in te reo could make a real difference to Māori education levels – something NZ has been shamefully indifferent to – but equating MM with science will undermine so much of that work. My point is that one shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Te reo schools? Fantastic. And let’s also ensure they deliver the high quality of education that all our young people deserve.
Hi Ken,
if the press release states that ‘teaching in Maori language will boost Maori education’, this is a statement that can be scrutinised through international non-maturanga science. What does ‘boost maori education’ mean? Well, it could mean 1. ‘boost Maori pride’, 2. ‘boost the continuation of Maori as a language’, 3. ‘increase the academic ability of the entire cohort of Maori students compared to what they would have achieved, IF the cohort were given the SAME resources in terms of money and were educated in the English language’.
Interpretation 2 is a tautology, since obviously teaching any language from Maori to Tokharian B [ google ], will allow Maori to Tokharian B to be spoken more widely.
Interpretation 1 is probably true, but interpretation 1 does NOT, ipso facto, lead to interpretation 3.
Interpretation 3 : where is the proof, or in current government-speak, ‘where is the business plan that proves this is value-for-money’?
Now, where I live in central Auckland, there are a disproportionately high number of Asians in these schools within 4 km of me : Auckland Grammar, Epsom Girls, St Cuthbert’s, Kings, Baradene. None of them offer intensive Gujarati immersion, or Hindi immersion, or Arabic immersion, or Mandarin immersion, or Cantonese immersion. All of these schools offer more instruction in maori than Asiatic languages. Yet Asians here are still more likely to be in the upper half of the class academically. My point here is that IF language immersion in X promotes higher educational academic results for peoples for whom X is their cultural tongue, THEN this statement should apply widely to MOST languages.
The studies that ALLEGE Maori-immersion schools lead to better educational outcomes are riddled with flaws, eg student cohort studied receives more monetary funding, Maori-instruction charter schools [ before these were abolished ] whose student bodies had a cohort of parents who were more educationally involved than the comparison cohort from state schools, or the fact that the ‘outcomes’ were helped by affirmative action – for instance at Otago medical school the minimum % mark for general entry for a White or Asian is around 91 to 93%, while for Maori or Pacific the students only need to exceed 74% on the same test.
In fact, the main international determinant for educational outcomes of progeny has been proven to be, time and again, the educational level of the mother, and the involvement of the mother in her child’s education. Nothing to do with language spoken.
PS As I am 2% Denisovan, I hope people can understand my feeble command of English prose, as I never attended either a current Asian-language or Denisovan-immersion school.
Well said. And even in regular high schools the Te Reo teachers can be very respectful and supportive of students from any background. They were in my time at least despite the fact I was a hopeless aspie, and it was a subject I was even more hopeless at.
The irony of “separate but equal”!
What is the explanation in Maori-think for the seasons on earth? Does wakapapa state that the earth is round and spins about it’s north and south poles but this spin is 23.5 degrees from perpendicular to it’s orbit about the sun and this explains our seasons?. (23.5 degress tilted away from the sun is winter and 23.5 degrees towards the sun six months later is summer) And because the earth is round winter and summer are opposite in the north and south spheres? And show the experiments that proved that it is about 23.5 degrees? And the math and observations that prove the earth rotates about the sun to begin with? Because wakapapa, wakapapa and more wakapapa only goes so far. And if I mispelled wakapapa I don’t care, I give it the same respect it gives science, none.
I am all for saving small languages, and I think a Maori-language science school would be a good idea, but it should really teach science.
The reason for this (and I’m commenting as a New Zealander with extensive experience in the tertiary sector and business, and a keen observer of politics for many years) is to achieve the following:
1. shore up support for the Maori members of the ruling Labour Party
2. throw a bone to the Maori Party, who they will certainly need to go in to coalition with to win the next election in October
3. appease the growing Maori radical voice they are enabling through Uber-woke policies
4. assuage their Professional Managerial Class white guilt – this sort of thinking is endemic now in the NZ government bureaucrats, and they truly get off virtue signalling to each other how much more inclusive they are than the smelly proletariat they so despise (i.e. anyone not like them, especially working class people)
You may think I exaggerate with point 4 but it’s sadly 100% accurate. Our entire education bureaucracy (over 4000 staff for a country of 5 million!!!) is responsible for the terrible new science curriculum that Jerry has thankfully shone some light on. Most NZ’ers don’t know what’s going on and how these people operate, but I’ve had the misfortune to come in contact when them a few years ago and the level of arrogance and stupidity I found was astounding. They are truly an insular little PMC community that believes forcing a racialised curriculum down kids throats will make the world a better place, and they have no understanding of science or technology.
It makes me weep for my country.
I think this is, sadly, an accurate analysis.
No I don’t. It’s the only explanation why, in the press release, instead of providing Maori and English versions, they just decided to do find/replace on the English text.