Mike's Minute: Why do we have race-based flood funds?

Can you tell me how the weather that has affected certain parts of the country has somehow become race-based?

Does the rain fall differently on Māori? Does a flood affect you differently depending on your race?

If your home is yellow-stickered or red-stickered, is that dependant on whether you identify as Māori?

If your apples aren't getting picked, what role has race played in that?

This is the absurdity we deal with, as yet again the Labour Māori caucus strikes with another of their inexplicable hand-outs based purely on race.

There is $15 million for help - but only if you're Māori, for a Māori-led flood recovery.

Do Māori recover differently to flooding than anyone else? Do they do it with different equipment?

Just what is a Māori-led response?

How is it Willie Jackson, yet again, tries to explain this isn't special treatment when it is indisputably special treatment?

In aspects of life that are unique to Māori, it's understandable. For situations like past grievances, that’s why we have the tribunal - for wrongs that need to be put right that only Māori had to deal with.

Everyone in various parts of the country had to deal with the storms. The storms didn’t strike Māori any differently to anyone else.

It was communities that were hit. Some will have had different race make-ups, the same way some would have had different age make-ups and different rural urban profiles.

But the response is the same - if you got hit, you got hit. If you need help, you need help.

Given the Three Waters mess they are trying to unstitch as we speak, given the massive push back they have received in the Māorification of this country under this Government, you might have thought it would have sunk in, in election year.

You don't win votes by being separatist. You don’t get support by pretending money delivered based on race isn't race-based money.

That $15 million is only for one group of people. To get it, you not only have to be flood affected, you have to be Māori and flood affected.

Willie can say it until he runs out of breath but it doesn’t make him right.

Because he isn't.

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