If you think you’re beleaguered by political correctness in America, just thank your lucky stars that you’re not living in New Zealand. There you are increasingly surrounded by demands that you abide by the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, but, worse, you can be demonized or fired simply because you think it’s outdated and there needs to be court-mandated interpretation of what it means, or, worse, adopt a New Zealand Constitution.
For in that country, which I love, virtually area of endeavor is subject to Equity Demands and Diktats that you respect indigenous “ways of knowing.” Today the subject of discussion is pharmacy, which is being rapidly colonized by this ideology. But note the bit about real estate at the bottom.
An anonymous New Zealander sent me this article from The Breaking News site in that lovely but increasingly benighted land.
You can verify Kennedy’s claims by going to the official pharmacy standards site (click on link to get pdf).
As you can see from the top headline, it’s a bit of a rant, but everything that Mr. Kennedy says about the pharmacy standards is true.
First, the aim of the Pharmacy Council is a general one: to help all New Zealanders. From pp. 3-4 of the second document:
Through skilled and safe practice, pharmacists contribute to better health outcomes for New Zealanders. We aspire to have pharmacists operate at the top of their scope of practice and to not only be competent and professional in their roles but to continually work towards being the best pharmacist they can be.
. . . . The purpose of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act (HPCAA) 2003 is to protect the health and safety of the public by providing mechanisms to ensure that health practitioners are competent and fit to practise their profession.
So consideration #1 should be merit: the quality of service provided by pharmacists. However, if you look at the first three “domains” of competence (there are seven), you see this:
Yep, the very first thing in which you must be competent as a pharmacist is understanding the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (“Te Tiriti o Waitangi”), which of course says nothing about pharmacy. The treaty simply guaranteed the indigenous Māori their lands, gives them all the rights of British citizens, and places governance of the indigenous people to England. There are several versions of the treaty, not all Māori tribes signed onto it, and it’s used to justify all kinds of stuff which are not in any of the texts but fall under a recent interpretation “Māori are to get at least half of everything.” That includes having their ways of knowing taught in science classes. And remember, just 17.8% of New Zealanders are Māori, while 17.3% are Asians (67.8% are of European descent. Somehow the Asians got left out of the pharmacy standards.
So once again the most important aspect of “competence” you need as a New Zealand pharmacist is respect and understanding of the Treaty, along with deference to the indigenous people. Extreme deference. The first four paragraphs below are Kennedy’s take (and his bolding), while the rest are word-for-word from the second source above.
Unfortunately the Pharmacy Council NZ has gone all woke and racist and apparently now thinks that practicing safe, competent dispensing of medicine and advice depends on a deep knowledge of 27 different aspects of Maori customs, beliefs, traditions, practices, superstitions, intergenerational historical trauma, familiarity with mana whenua and kaumatua, the Treaty of Waitangi, structural racism and colonisation and many other alleged Maori-related issues – such is the depth of knowledge required by pharmacists of Maori culture, beliefs and Te Reo etc. etc., that it would seem that every pharmacist who achieves all these competencies that are totally, completely, categorically, undeniably and irrefutably unrelated to safe dispensing of medicines will have earned a Bachelor’s degree in Maori Studies!
This is racism on steroids, the woke, totally unnecessary, unwarranted imposition of irrelevant culture and beliefs on a professional group whose sole focus should be on the safe practice of pharmaceutical medicine!
The Minister of Health needs to stamp down immediately on this repugnant, racist, woke over-reach by the Pharmacy Council and weed out any of the incompetent and/or radical members of the Pharmacy Council!
Following is the list (from page 31) of the essential competency standards for all pharmacists, according to the Pharmacy Council: [JAC: as I say below, I’ve put in italics everything that seems to me completely irrelevant to competence as a pharmacist]
● being familiar with mana whenua (local hapū/iwi), mātāwaka (kinship group not mana whenua), hapū and iwi in your rohe (district) and their history,
● understanding the importance of kaumātua,
● being familiar with te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nū Tīreni,
● advocating for giving effect to te Tiriti at all levels,
● understanding the intergenerational impact of historical trauma,
● understanding of the role of structural racism and colonisation and ongoing impacts on Māori, socioeconomic deprivation, restricted access to the determinants of health,
● being familiar with Māori health – leaders, history, and contemporary literature,
● being familiar with Māori aspirations in relation to health,
● developing authentic relationships with Māori organisations and health providers,
● having a positive collegial relationship with Māori colleagues in your profession/workplace,
● being proficient in building and maintaining mutually beneficial power-sharing relationships,
● tautoko (support) Māori leadership,
● prioritising Māori voices,
● trusting Māori intelligence,
● be clinically and culturally confident to work with Māori whānau, [JAC: family groups]
● understand one’s own whakapapa (genealogy and connections),
● have a basic/intermediate understanding of te reo Māori, [the language; and most Māori themselves don’t understand it]
● have a basic/intermediate understanding of the tikanga and the application of tapu (sacred) and noa (made ordinary),
● be familiar with Māori health models and concepts such as Te Pae Mahutonga9 and Te Ara Tika10,
● have a basic/intermediate understanding of marae (community meeting house) protocol,
● be confident to perform waiata tautoko (support song),
● be proficient in whakawhānaungatanga (active relationship building),
● integrate tika (correct), pono (truth), aroha and manaakitanga into practice,
● be open-hearted,
● be proficient in strengths-based practice,
● be proficient with equity analysis,
● practice cultural humility,
● critically monitor the effectiveness of own practice with Māori.
Only 1 out of 4 standards (7/28) seem to me at all relevant to competence in pharmacy, and I’m being generous.
Now I can understand that there should be a section in pharmacy school about “indigenous medicine” so that pharmacists can understand where a local is coming from if they want an herb rather than an antibiotic. But most of this statement It is simply irrelevant fealty to the indigenous people; a form of virtue signaling or “the sacralization of the oppressed.”
I needn’t go on, as you can see that most of the requirements for competence in this section are irrelevant to the aims of the Pharmacy Council. Poor New Zealand!
But wait! There’s more!
Lagniappe: New Zealander loses realtor’s license for refusing to take Māori-centered DEI training. Click on the link to go to the New Zealand Herald article:
An excerpt:
Janet Dickson, the real estate agent facing a five-year ban for refusing to do a Māori tikanga course, has lost a court bid to block the threatened cancellation of her licence.
Today, the High Court turned down her request for a judicial review of decisions about agents’ professional development requirements, which required her to take a 90-minute course called Te Kākano (The Seed).
The module focused on Māori culture, language and the Treaty of Waitangi and was made compulsory for all real estate agents, branch managers and salespeople in 2023.
Agents who do not complete professional development requirements risk having their licences cancelled. People whose licences are cancelled cannot reapply for one for five years.
. . .She has called real estate work a vocation and a calling, citing her Presbyterian values. In her court case, she said the course’s references to Māori gods sat uncomfortably with her own monotheistic Christian belief.
She labelled the course “woke madness” in a Facebook post and vowed to fight “to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else”.
She told the court she considered the course would not add any value to the performance of her real estate agency work.
Poor New Zealand!
Fun fact: a certain number of tech billionaires have bought estate in NZ, where they hope to decamp in case of nuclear holocaust.
So should their brand new King Donald cause the apocalypse they could be compelled to put up with the only remaining Wokeland on Earth. They’re lucky there are no para-dinosaurs down down under,
otherwise (spoiler alert) they would end up like the rich politicians in “Don’t Look Up”
Could tuatara (Sphenodon s) be considered a para-dinosaur? But they’re too small to eat the rich.
Tuataras do have quite a nasty bite, though.
Thank you for highlighting this stupidity happening here in New Zealand – it is still going on. You certainly are a very good beacon in a very dark tunnel. The powers driving this don’t listen to reason, the powerless only have ridicule left.
Fortunately, it hasn’t hit my professional body engineering yet, though I think they are trying to introduce it. If it does, I am resigning as I don’t need it. They are making engineering students do a compulsory Maori culture course at Auckland University though. Absolutely no value for 99% of the graduates and bound to help push students to other universities.
WEIT’s attention to this is almost unique outside NZ and incredibly valuable.
There seems to be no push back in NZ at all unlike the US where Trump – like him or not and I’m not a fan – is at least halting the madness.
D.A.
NYC
There is pushback in NZ, eg, from a pressure group, Hobson’s Choice, which has supported legal action, attempted to place advertisements, op-eds and letters in newspapers, but these are often characterised and rejected as far right.
I’ll be writing to the relevant minister later today on this matter.
I can’t believe it.
“These replace the standards published in 2015 and are enforceable from 1 April 2024”
Early April’s fool?
EDIT: It’s not enforceable in the past. The blog post assumes it’s April 1st 2025, but the original document says 2024 and it seems to have been published in 2023 (even the URL attests so, and the page https://pharmacycouncil.org.nz/pharmacist/competence-standards/ states “published 15 June 2023”
The pharmacy “competence standards” (which far exceeds the possibilities of satire) raises a sociological question: how much of this stuff is due to the actions of Maori (or part Maori) individuals—and how much to Pakeha careerists riding te tiriti o Waitangi, tikanga, and all the other buzzwords as status vehicles? In the case of the NZ Pharmacy Council, the answer seems obvious.
In the galaxy far away, a generation of academic Biology careerists rode the similar vehicle of “Michurinism”, with well-known results. But there, at least, they weren’t filling drug prescriptions on the basis of “Michurinist” word salad.
Tho’ the c. 30 million people who starved to death due to Michurinist policies would have had a much more negative view.
From Wikipedia (on closely related Lysenko):
Soviet scientists were required to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko, and criticism was denounced as “bourgeois” or “fascist”. The Ministry of Higher Education commanded all biological institutes to immediately follow the Lysenko orthodoxy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
New Zealand is heading that way. The same thinking is also in Canada.
As far as I know, the number of victims was considerably smaller, and their deaths were caused by Stalin’s goal to crush resistance to collective farming and to decimate the population of Ukraine.
Point taken.
I have no data for this Jon, so take it as it comes here, but my feeling is that the power behind NZ’s recent decline is driven by liberal mainly white young women.
NZ heroine Professor Rata in NZ sat down with Peter Bogossian about this lately.
D.A.
NYC
In Canada, natives and part natives are heavily involved. The government media outlet CBC carries their message.
It also appears to be the case that women who stand up against the nonsense are the ones who suffer some of the harshest penalties in NZ. Immigrant women to NZ who do not genuflect before all things Māori get particularly harsh treatment. Immigrant men who speak up are badly treated too, but less so than the women. (There is a growing literature on the culture of bullying in NZ. The researcher David Lillis writes about it, with careful referencing.)
Rather than saying the nonsense in NZ is driven by liberal mainly white women, I’d suggest that it is driven by Māori activists and by educationalists, where the latter group is mainly older women.
The old ways are just another way to feel special and unique (disclaimer, we’re all the same with different habits and stories). You have science and you have the rest. Science stops at what seems to work at this moment in time and adapts when new discoveries change that view – there is proof of result in statistics. The old ways are just that … the same mumbo jumbo the old ones did, unchanged, whether there are proven results or not. It’s hypocrisy because when they’re really sick they’ll end up with medical science and not some scented smoke and incantations because they KNOW they risk death. This goes for any “old way” anywhere on this planet. There is a reason we don’t sacrifice animals for rain or prosperity any more (well most of us anyway) … it does NOT work
Where is the respect for white indigenous knowledge, like, for instance, the miasma theory of infectious disease (believed in by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
I used to like reading about such “white indigenous knowledge”. I was feeling happy that we have left it behind forever. Now, I am not so sure.
The question is what will come first: the brain drain or the backlash?
..aaand further down the toilet for this country I’m also fond of from my childhood.
With these boluses of bad news from NZ I often run through in my mind the countries whose economies have been damaged or entire countries destroyed by civil wars by just this kind of ID politics they’re so taken with in NZ: Malaysia, Fiji, Sri Lanka, Uganda, South Africa (still… and worse than before) and one I watched its destruction: Lebanon though there the ID politics is religious not racial like the others. I wish they’d read Thomas Sowell’s book about ID politics around the world. He talks about this a lot.
NZ is such a lucky, lovely country which I REMEMBER last century had excellent race relations. So to see its decline is heartbreaking. Kiwis travel a LOT, they have one of the highest passport holding rates in the world. You think they’d learn.
D.A.
NYC
— again I note the “17% Maori”. That’s self ID in an environment where Maoridom is encouraged and there are a lot of gvt benefits for. Like the 8 fold increase in “Aboriginal” population in a few decades with similar incentives in Oz next door.
From memory.. without bribes… the actual NZ Maori population was around 5-8%.
New Zealand became great at the touch of European hands – they took a a pile of bricks and built great cities. I would posit that there is more than a reasonable chance that were New Zealand returned to the natives, and were they deprived of outside influence, you would very soon have those cities become piles of bricks again.
Excerpts from a recent job ad for an Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeon:
Closing Date: 20/Feb/25
Copy and paste into search engine (Job ad is no longer available) https://tasadhbrac.taleo.net/careersection/.hb_ext/jobdetail.ftl?job=HAW07702&tz=GMT08%3A00&tzname=America%2FLos_Angeles
Oral & Maxillofacial Surgeon
Vacancy No: HAW07702
• Hawke’s Bay Fallen Soldiers’ Memorial Hospital
• 64 – 80 hours per fortnight (0.8 – 1.0 FTE)
• Permanent, Full-time or Part-time available
Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora is firmly grounded in the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and is dedicated to serving all New Zealanders. Through integration and collaboration, we’re building a health system underpinned by partnership, equity, sustainability, whānau-centred care, and excellence.
To review the position profile, click HERE
About you
• Applicants must be registered, or eligible for registration, with the Medical Council of New Zealand and must be a fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, or equivalent.
• Competency with te ao Māori, tikanga, and te reo Māori or a commitment to starting your journey and taking ownership of your learning and growth
• Experience in projects/initiatives which give effect to Te Tiriti principals and frameworks, and the application of Mātauranga Māori and Kaupapa Māori approaches, particularly as they apply in healthcare settings.
Our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion
• We want to see the real you in your application and welcome the real you on board if you come and work with us. Skills are gained across many areas of our life, not just in formal employment.
If you can demonstrate the skills listed in the ad, but the experience was gained through whānau life, community or mahi aroha (volunteering) we encourage you to apply and share your story with us in your cover letter
• We particularly welcome applications from our diverse Māori, Pacific, disabled, and rainbow communities.
So brown, blind homosexuals get first priority !
So long as that is the “real you” and not a ‘fake you’! Not sure if a trans-identity would qualify as a “real you”?
Au contraire, reaching out to “the real you” is pandering to the trans-identified. “I no longer have to live a lie.”
As in the Upton case in the UK, if a patient requests a female maxillofacial surgeon, can a male surgeon claim to be that female? Because of the power imbalance, patients can’t be punished for transphobia (or any kind of bigotry) so if she says, “The Hell you are! Get out of my room,” there is nothing the hospital or the doctor can do about the surgeon’s hurt feelings. Except try to disguise himself better so the patient can’t clock him as male. This is what Dr. Upton claims he can ethically do. Then if the patient eventually figures it out, was there treatment without consent (battery)? Does false signaling amount to deception which everyone agrees invalidates consent? Or is the doctor sincerely and objectively living “the real her”?
Activists, including Dr. Upton, claim that his gender identity is his private business and of no concern to the patient, any more than his sexual orientation or taste in music or sport would be. “I’m a woman,” goes his argument. It is no one’s business whether I’m a cis-woman or a trans-woman or what my hidden body parts look like. This is the real me.”
(Hospitals and clinics in majority-white western countries are generally uncomfortable with accommodating patients in advance who request doctors or nurses of specific races or religious affiliations but women are usually indulged if they request female physicians. It’s a selling point in many practices. That said, “How to deal with the racist patient who refuses care by diversity trainees,” is a hot topic in the medical education literature, as you can perhaps imagine.)
“How to deal with the racist patient who refuses care by diversity trainees”
There was recently a news story about two Australian diversity nurses who bragged they would offer lethal “care” to Jewish patients.
Jerry.
You note that the very first thing in which you must be competent as a pharmacist is understanding the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (“Te Tiriti o Waitangi”) and you note that the Treaty says nothing about pharmacy.
However, the Pharmacy Council directive has antecedents. The “Refreshed Curriculum” of 2023 (now discarded, I believe, and hard to find on the Internet these days) began with the following statement as the first paragraph of the foreword from the Associate Deputy Secretary Curriculum, Pathways & Progress at the NZ Ministry of Education:
“We begin with the karakia for Te Mātaiaho, the refreshed framework for the New Zealand Curriculum, as it signals the intent of the proposed refresh. ‘Mātai’ means to study deliberately, examine, and observe, and ‘aho’ describes the
many strands and threads of learning. Te Mātaiaho is designed to be a curriculum that gives effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and is inclusive, clear, and easy to use”.
Surely the last sentence here should read something like: “Te Mātaiaho is designed to be a curriculum that supports first-class learning and achievement for all students across all schools, and is inclusive, clear, and easy to use.”
Right through that document teachers and students were exhorted to work towards the Treaty and, indeed, to hold themselves accountable in delivering on that commitment.
It was the blatant pushing of ideology ahead of education that worried many people in New Zealand and prompted many, including me, to go into print. Apart from that issue, there was the blatant pushing of one form of Traditional Knowledge as equal to science and the notion that students could balance and choose between that Traditional Knowledge and statistical analysis, for example, in understanding the world around us.
Not acceptable in the twenty-first century!
David Lillis
I am a retired New Zealand pharmacist with over 50 years practice, including 20 years as an Advisory Pharmacist for Medsafe.
My own opinion, shared by many many of my work colleagues is to treat all customers/patients as individuals and assess their level of understanding based upon that person.
We do NOT look out from the dispensary and say “Oh – that patient is part Maori. Therefore I will explain their medication to them differently than if they were European or Chinese or whatever.”
The ridiculous woke list of “cultural” demands that the Council is enforcing are actually quite CONTRARY to the best practice of pharmacy in treating all patients respectfully and equally.
If the Council is allowed to go ahead with this outrageous requirement, there will almost certainly be an exodus of pharmacists From New Zealand to Australia, Canada, U.K. or simply to other careers. I guarantee it. Just watch it happen.
Has anyone figured out why it is the Anglophone countries that have most lost their collective effing minds?
England was the last colonial power. By the time of the British Empire’s ascendance, it was no longer fashionable to exterminate stroppy indigenous people in the colonies who were in the way, so it civilized them instead. Taught them to read and govern themselves and gave them cell phones and the internet and transoceanic cables and satellites so they could share traditional knowledge instantly in a common language in non-traditional ways. Crucially, they (and woke non-indigenous “allies”) could also share knowledge about the vulnerable pressure points of the colonial societies that ruled them. What we are seeing is a survivor effect. The civilizing power of the English language.
Did other nations embrace the democratisation of higher education in the same way as Anglophone nations? Universities in Anglophone nations used to have high standards and strong checks on nonsense, but the democratisation of higher ed meant that those standards were suddenly too high. The gates were opened to less able students who demanded less rigorous studies. Those early students are now senior tenured academic staff, with 2 generations of students.
My last comment, lest I run afoul of the rules.
We all used to believe that the Lysenkovshchina was a specifically Soviet phenomenon, reflecting the workings of the police state ruled by a vanguard Party. We are amazed and appalled to watch something uncannily similar develop so fully in New Zealand, and somewhat in Canada and elsewhere in the Anglosphere. It has grown without a centralized ruling party, without the idolatry of a great leader like Stalin, and within nominally liberal traditions and institutions; it seemed to have developed by spontaneous generation—first in academia— and spread from there.
In retrospect, though, maybe the two phenomena weren’t so different. Lysenkoism began in the 1930s in purely academic controversies about Genetics, and only later took over (for a while) nearly all of Soviet biology and agronomy, including planting decisions.
I used to laugh at the postmodernist affectations found here and there in the groves of academe in the 1970s/80s, and I never dreamed that they could ever escape from the groves and influence life in the real world—say among pharmacists or physicians. How naive I was back then.
My significant other is a pharmacist in a large university hospital intensive care unit. She recently attended training on how to evaluate potential new pharmacists during their interviews.
One slide she sent me from the training set out the following requirements:
1) no candidate can be rejected based only on their GPA
2) GPA can be no more than 10% of the total candidate evaluation score
3) no difference can be given for recommendation letters rating the candidate above the “recommend” level, so “recommend” is scored the same as “with confidence”, “strongly recommend”, and “highly recommend”.
As one might expect, new hires have been less than stellar.
So while not incorporating Māori or other such silliness, hospitals in the states are promoting the poorly trained.
(Here’s hoping for some corrective lawsuits, until then, don’t get sick is all I can say)
Reminds me of some (probably unintentionally) ambiguous statements in letters of recommendation:
“I recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever.”
“You would be lucky if you can get this candidate to work for you.”
Just to make it crystal clear, if I were still a practicing pharmacist (and not retired) I would be looking for pharmacy work in Australia RIGHT NOW.
Pharmacists I have spoken to (who do not want to be named publicly) have all expressed their outrage and objection to these extensive woke and racist requirements. Many mention leaving New Zealand or simply changing career.