Kate Hawkesby: Kelvin Davis' 'how Māori are you' routine yesterday was a disturbing trip backwards

Kelvin Davis' 'how Māori are you' routine in the House yesterday was a disturbing trip backwards for a country now so bogged down in race politics that it's actually a distraction.

And one I think most of us are rightly sick of. There appears to be more race division and race baiting going on inside the Beehive, on our behalf, than there actually is out here in the real world.

The co-governance spewing forth at a rate of knots, the push for more te Reo inside media, on every signpost, every corporate email, every event, every school.

You can argue it's good for us, or it's long overdue or it's evolution, or whatever argument you want to mount for it, but once we start sinking to 'but how Māori are you really?' we've reached the lowest ebb.

Deputy Labour Party Leader Kelvin Davis, if you haven't kept up with this, and I notice not a lot of news websites are running it, which in and of itself speaks volumes, but he said in the House yesterday to Māori Act MP Karen Chhour, that she needed to 'leave her Pākehā world'.

He said, "What the Member needs to do is cross the bridge that is Te Tiriti o Waitangi from her Pākehā world into the Māori world and understand exactly why, how the Māori world operates."

He said this, to a Māori woman of Ngāpuhi descent; she says she is a 'proud Māori woman'. But that's not how Kelvin sees it.

He also said to her that it was "no good looking at the world from a vanilla lens". A vanilla lens? What's he alleging here? Apart from the fact she is not Māori, which she is, how does this comment come across as anything other than racist?

Chhour was offended by all this, she said, "attacking somebody's mana like that just because they disagree with you is unacceptable".

She was reported as saying that, 'as a child of state care, she feels like Davis should take her lived experience seriously'.. She wants an apology.

"It feels like if you don't agree with us, you're not a real Māori, or you're not Māori enough, or you don't have the mana of a Māori, and I find that quite hurtful," she told Newshub.

Davis for his part still claims she was raised in a Pākehā world, and that's the stuff that creates needless division I reckon, why say something like that? Why look to judge someone you disagree with politically, based on how you might perceive they were brought up? Or based on what colour you think their skin was? Or even how Māori they happen to be? I thought that old 'not Māori enough' thing had gone out in the 80's. Surely.  

It's a dangerous slippery slope we're on I reckon, when our elected representatives and leaders - this guy is the Deputy Leader of the Labour party remember, when they think it's acceptable to speak to people like that, and not only that but refuse to apologise for it.

There's no room for this kind of division and nasty smack talk about how you might perceive someone's race or upbringing. I don't know what he was thinking or why he won't apologise for it, but for a party so hell bent on unity and kindness, I'm seeing none of it.

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