The Backstory: Why Stuff’s homepage greets you with 'Kia ora, Aotearoa!' not 'Hello, New Zealand!'

Thursday, 10 June 2021

Feel confident in using these greetings and farewells in te reo Māori (first published in 2019).

The Backstory is an occasional column from Stuff Editor in Chief Patrick Crewdson offering behind-the-scenes insight into stories and newsroom decisions. You can get The Backstory as an email newsletter.

When we launched Stuff’s new homepage last June, it included the phrase “Kia ora, Aotearoa!” as a greeting.

To us, it’s an inclusive phrase, one that welcomes all Kiwis. But for a vocal minority of complainants, it’s deeply offensive.

Here, I’ll address those persistent complaints and explain why we opted for a te reo Māori greeting over something like “Hello, New Zealand!”

* The Backstory: Introducing The Long Read, Stuff's best journalism in podcast form

Here it is: the innocuous phrase that keeps my inbox alive with complaints.

* Complaint about Stuff's use of 'Kia ora, Aotearoa' thrown out by Media Council

We receive more complaints about this than any single other feature. But I don’t want to blow this out of proportion. The volume of complaints is low – infinitesimal even – in the context of the millions of people who visit Stuff each month. All indications are that most people either don’t have a problem with “Kia ora, Aotearoa!” or actively welcome it.

Some complainants are well-meaning but are uncomfortable with the pace of recent social change.

But a disappointing number of complainants use this as an opening to shoehorn in unrelated racist complaints or anti-Māori tropes. If you’re still labouring under the illusion that New Zealand is a paragon of race relations, the naked racism in some of these complaints would shock you (likewise the rejected comments if we ever enable comments on a story about Māori – which is why I’m not opening comments on this column).

At the saner end of the spectrum, some complainants accuse us of trying to change the country’s name by stealth, of pushing some secret government agenda, or of succumbing to political correctness or wokeness.

Others argue that New Zealand is the country’s official name (true but beside the point; it’s not illegal to say Aotearoa) or that while Aotearoa has come to represent the whole country in modern usage, that wasn’t its original meaning (true but language evolves).

Our responses tend to hit similar notes each time.

Te reo Māori is a taonga and as New Zealand’s leading locally-owned media organisation we consider it our duty to help preserve and normalise the language. Using a te reo greeting is a small gesture in that direction.

It’s not like this is genuinely confusing for any Kiwis. “Kia ora” and “Aotearoa” are both well-known and widely understood.

In February, the Media Council – which hears complaints against publishers – handled a complaint from someone who was “deeply offended” by Stuff’s use of “Kia ora, Aotearoa”. The council ruled there were “no grounds to proceed”, the verdict used when there’s no arguable case of a breach of the Media Council’s principles, so the complaint doesn’t need to go to a full hearing.

“The Media Council notes that Te Reo is one of the official languages of New Zealand,” the ruling said.

“‘Aotearoa’ is widely used in New Zealand as the alternative name of this country, and in our assessment is accepted as such by most New Zealanders.

“Furthermore the greeting complained about is widely used and widely understood by most inhabitants of these islands. They need no translation. It is up to each news organisation the extent to which it uses Māori words.”

In recent years, as a website and as a company Stuff has taken deliberate steps to become more inclusive and better reflect our country’s diversity – from adding macrons to vowels in Māori words to introducing our Pou Tiaki section to embedding the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi/Tiriti o Waitangi in our company charter. This means we actively participate in using te reo Māori, we have a role to protect it by using it, and we partner with Māori when we do.

Many Stuff readers have applauded those changes. It warms our hearts when people tell us they now feel recognised in a way they haven’t before.

But there’s an undercurrent of angry complaints from a few who object to what they see as “Māorification”.

Here’s the beautiful thing about inclusive language: it doesn’t exclude you.

Adding “Kia ora, Aotearoa!” to a predominantly English website doesn’t demean English speakers, as some complainants would have it. It doesn’t devalue the contributions of anyone’s ancestors to our nationhood. It needn’t alienate anyone.

I say this from a deeply Pākehā perspective, as a born and bred New Zealander whose family first arrived here on the Aurora in 1840: “Kia, ora Aotearoa!” isn’t a threat to you.

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