Compulsory te reo Māori is nothing to fear - it's the decent and civilised choice

Friday, 11 May 2018

After Māori Development Minister Nanaia Mahuta said compulsory te reo in schools was is a matter of if, not when, she was slapped down by Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters.

OPINION: I know people who are savages.

These people drive their cars, eat icecream, spend their days Facebooking, scrapbooking, watching television and grumbling at their wives or husbands. They go to work, come home, take their dog for a walk. You might even be one of them.

But despite every thread of civilised cloth on their backs, these people have a set of primitive beliefs stretching back centuries.

Māoris, they think, are gonna steal their souls.

* Greens lay out plans for compulsory te reo

* Wellington Girls' College making te reo compulsory**

The data is in, and it's time to be blunt. The number of people in New Zealand able to speak te reo Māori is declining.

I'm learning te reo in full immersion this year, and it has been wonderfully life-changing.

I had the choice to do this, with a large dollop of good fortune, but today I write about compulsion.

As soon as this land was belatedly discovered by Pākehā, the word 'compulsory' was taught to Māori.

Occupation was compulsory. Land was compulsorily acquired. Māori were compulsorily removed and many were compelled to drop dead if they disagreed. Language was compulsorily forgotten.

Māori have had generations of the c-word. And not the gentle, hand-in-the-small-of-the-back compulsion endured by Pākehā under the state. Maori got slapped around the face with both the carrot and the stick of another c-word – colonisation.

This year we have a hint of rebalance, the suggestion of compulsory te reo in our schools by the Greens and a couple of Labour MPs, and for some people the primitive fears resurfaced. These worried people are our savages.

Photograph them as much as you like, but for God's sake don't so much as call them Pākehā, or their Pākehā soul will fly out their mouths like Batman's batarang. Next they'll be deleting The Eagles Unplugged off their Spotify, and playing Stan Walker on repeat.

I can't understand the primitive fears of these people. They hate a language so much that they refuse to be described by even the simplest of its words. To have such beef with words, let alone the entire culture they contain, is exhausting nonsense.

Anyway, is it just me, or are the reo policies in the news some of the biggest changes planned for education in decades? Even the Māori-lite policy outlined by Labour, presumably building a workforce of reo-knowledgeable teachers to allow universal availability by 2025, is an astonishing commitment. I love it. Once this is in place, making te reo compulsory in schools would be within reach.

That a couple of Māori Labour ministers have mentioned the c-word as an inevitability (apparently a political gaffe) isn't surprising.

It is a start to rebalancing those decades when te reo Māori was treated like a dog that had followed his master to school, and was kicked out the gate by teachers.

The very act of making reo Māori available for all that want it in schools is revolutionary. It is a revolution of decency. Compulsory reo would help save a language and remake an entire nation in a single move.

You can join it – do the right thing for yourself, your country, your partners in this thing.

After all, the biggest choices in our lives are subject to compulsion. We are compelled by conscience to choose between right and wrong. Or at least consider doing some shade of the right thing. There is no escaping it. There's death, taxes, and selling out.

We all fail to stick to our beliefs sometimes (I've often failed miserably in my life, and for someone on the Left it weighs heavy. When you fail on the Right, it actually makes you a better man. Go figure). But having to make a choice is compulsory.

Maybe some people in this country don't like all the compulsion talk because it reminds them of this. Choices were inescapable. They threw up their hands and chose to confuse inclusion with separatism.

And I know, people shouldn't have to feel bad about stuff that happened in the distant bloody past. It had nothing to do with them, they say. But shared beliefs run through generations like a residual fever. This current crop still thinks medicine is poison.

The language of my ancestors was the subject of generations of compulsions by the later arrivals in Aotearoa. The language is in danger.

I salute the Greens policy, and I salute the Labour ministers who apparently have to whisper the c-word.

Instead of being ruled by primitive fears we should sign up to the revolution.

We worry about our kids eventually making their own choices in the world. Like us, they'll probably let themselves down. We just hope they can pick themselves up – because that part isn't compulsory.

Supporting te reo in schools is a decent choice we can make now to improve things later.

All you have to do in this revolution is enjoy a moment of silence, have a coffee, and relish the thought of kids walking down your street switching between reo Māori and Pākehā like civilised people.