INL DIGITAL EDITION 1st August 2020

14
AUGUST 1, 2020
Businesslink
Matariki could replace Queen’s Birthday as National Holiday
Peter Dunne
The period of Matariki, the
celebration of the Māori
New Year, which began
earlier this week, is being
celebrated increasingly as an
important national event.
While many other countries
have their own form of New Year
celebrations, Matariki is uniquely
New Zealand. As such, it deserves
special recognition.
We already celebrate great annual
events from other cultures, such
as Diwali and Chinese New Year,
which is good, but now is the time
to give Matariki the prominence it
deserves.
Largely local
Yet most of the celebrations
around Matariki are locally organised.
Usually local communities
and councils play their part in
putting together local festivities
such as fireworks displays or other
celebratory events. Unlike Waitangi
Day, or even ANZAC Day, the two
New Fund offers $500,000 to
Auckland charities
Supplied Content
Large numbers of community
groups are struggling to
meet basic operating costs
including; power bills, PPE
and water rates according to new
figures.
New funding application data
show that the average amount of
funding sought by Auckland charities
to cover their current overheads
is almost $8000.
The figures also reveal that operating
expenses were higher among
community and wellbeing groups
as well as environmental and arts
charities.
The new initiative
Over 100 charities who have seen
a significant increase in demand for
their services, and are struggling to
meet their operating costs as a result
of Covid-19, will now receive a share
of more than $500,000, thanks to a
new emergency fund.
The diverse range of community
organisations which operate in
The Trusts CEO Allan Pollard
(Picture Supplied
the Auckland region have applied
for a grant from The Trusts Your
West Support Fund to cover a wide
range of expenses.
Trusts CEO Allan Pollard said
other uniquely New Zealand special
days which we commemorate each
year, there is no national occasion
organised to celebrate Matariki.
The time has come to change
that. Matariki deserves its own
special day of celebration and is
worthy of a public holiday in its
honour. Even though there is a general
wariness in New Zealand about
creating more public holidays, as
the debate a few years ago about
‘Mondayising’ Waitangi and ANZAC
Days showed, we are still on the
light side of the number of public
holidays most countries celebrate.
Adding another holiday to celebrate
a significant national event is
unlikely to bring the economy to its
knees as some critics might argue.
Replace Queen’s Birthday
In any case, the establishment
of a national public holiday to
mark Matariki need not entail the
creation of an additional public
holiday. It could be done by simply
replacing an existing public holiday
that has become obsolete. An obvious
candidate in this regard is the
current Queen’s Birthday holiday at
the start of June.
As New Zealand culturally diversifies,
the celebration of the British
Monarch’s birthday, with full military
honours and all the trappings
besides becomes more and more
incongruous. At a time when New
Zealand is trying to shake off the
final vestiges of its colonial past
and assert its identity as a modern
Pacific nation nothing can continue
to appear more absurd than the
annual official celebration of the
birthday of a hereditary ruler on
the other side of the world.
Queen’s Birthday Holiday is an
occasion whose time has well and
truly past, and it should be replaced
with an event far more relevant
to the lives and world views of
contemporary New Zealanders.
Perfect substitute
Matariki Day would be the perfect
substitute for the anachronistic
Queen’s Birthday.
Occurring at about the same time
of year as Queen’s Birthday, Matariki
would also have the practical
advantage of ensuring that New
Zealanders still get a public holiday
during the long winter months.
The Queen’s Birthday Honours
List could easily become the Matariki
Honours List, which would be a
that the high volume of funding
requests received in the past two
weeks suggests many local charities
are struggling to stay afloat.
Covid impact on income
“We know that the pandemic has
had a significant impact on the normal
income streams of community groups.
These are organisations providing
blankets, food and support services to
the most vulnerable members of our
community,” he said.
Mr Pollard said that what was
particularly concerning to see was
that many of these organisations
have asked for help to cover their
fundamental operating needs such as
power, internet and rent.
“For many of these groups, this
funding will be an essential lifeline to
help them continue to support their
community in a post-Covid environment,”
he said.
Mr Pollard said that the requests
for support exceeded more than $1.1
million and cover a wide range of
organisations including food charities,
whanau-based support, elderly and
youth support services, hospice as well
as environmental and sporting groups.
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nice counterpoint to the New Year’s
Honours List released in January.
And the dwindling pageantry now
associated with Queen’s Birthday
could be incorporated into the
wider celebrations of Matariki, if it
be so wished. In short, Matariki has
a far more New Zealand ring about
it than Queen’s Birthday ever did.
Timid assertion
Bicultural New Zealand has
been engaged in an often too timid
assertion of its national identity for
some generations now.
Yet while our population has
become more diverse, and our
absorption of aspects of other
cultures more extensive, especially
since the 1990s, we have been too
slow to move to ensure that our
national structures reflect both that
emerging diversity and our own
bicultural environment.
Despite successive Prime
Ministers piously acknowledging
the inevitability that New Zealand
will become a republic, none has
done anything to advance that. And
notwithstanding Britain’s abrupt
casting aside of New Zealand when
it wanted to join the European Community
in the 1970s, New Zealand
has rushed to be near the top of the
queue in negotiating a free trade
agreement with Britain now that it
has decided it no longer wants to be
part of Europe after all.
Progressive identity
The time has come for this country
to start matching its lofty and
bold talk about our progressive and
independent identity with some
action that shows we take that talk
seriously.
Continuing the way we are, with
no substantive action to follow,
will, over time, led to more and
more alienation and potential social
division.
Moving now to replace Queen’s
Birthday with the far more relevant
Matariki Day would be a simple,
but important step forward and a
signal that as a country we were
genuine in our desire to establish
and promote our identity and pride
in all facets of what it means to be a
New Zealander today.
Peter Dunne was a Minister of the Crown
under Labour and National-led governments
from November 1999 to September
2017. He lives in Wellington.
Restricting freedom of
speech is harmful to society
Danielle van Dalen
I
do not particularly love
confronting people.
But I know that when it is
done well, disagreement can
be incredibly powerful.
An open letter On Justice and
Open Debate published last week,
suggests the 150 signatories think
similarly. The letter claims that an
increasingly hostile environment
and growing restriction to freedom
of speech and expression is
harmful to society.
Open Letter
It says: “The free exchange
of information and ideas, the
lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily
becoming more constricted. While
we have come to expect this on
the radical right, censoriousness is
also spreading more widely in our
culture: an intolerance of opposing
views, a vogue for public shaming
and ostracism, and the tendency
to dissolve complex policy issues
in a blinding moral certainty. We
uphold the value of robust and
even caustic counter-speech from
all quarters. But it is now all too
common to hear calls for swift and
severe retribution in response to
perceived transgressions of speech
and thought.”
After the letter was published,
however, some of its signatories
denounced it – one even saying “I
am so sorry” – due to some of the
views of other signatories. (Notably
JK Rowling, who has recently
received significant criticism for
her comments on transgenderism,
was a signatory).
Ironic response
This response seems somewhat
ironic.
It is an example of the failure to
listen to opposing ideas that the
letter tried to address.
In fact, some of the signatories
have since said as much.
Author Malcolm Gladwell, for
example, tweeted: “I signed the
Harpers letter because there were
lots of people who also signed
the Harpers letter whose views I
disagreed with. I thought that was
the point of the Harpers letter.”
Or Thomas Chatterton Williams,
who spearheaded the letter, tweeted:
“this letter is not a statement
about everyone agreeing with
every position every signatory has.
The diversity of its signatories is its
strength – not a weakness.”
Agree to disagree
We need to be brave enough
to agree with the ideas of people
we regularly disagree with on
other issues. We could even learn
to have conversations about
the issues we disagree on. The
conversation will likely end with
both people holding their original
position and that is okay. What is
important is that everyone leaves
with a deeper understanding of the
person they disagree with and why
they disagreed in the first place.
While that is easier said than
done, it is incredibly important for
the functioning of society.
In fact, without healthy disagreements,
strong societal divisions are
much more likely to arise.
The Coddling of the American
Mind, by Jonathan Haidt (another
signatory) and Greg Lukianoff,
confronts this very issue.
They suggest that having
conversations with people you
disagree with are essential for
building resilience and learning to
adapt and grow.
Of course, this does not mean
that anything goes. Bullying is
never okay.
But there is a difference between
bullying and thorough intellectual
debate.
So, as someone who does not
particularly enjoy confrontation or
disagreement, it is important that
I learn to do it well – even when it
is difficult.
The stakes are too high to say no.
Danielle van Dalen is a Researcher at
the Auckland-based Maxim Institute.