Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka says that as far as Fiji is concerned, Fijians of Indian descent are Fijian.

While Fiji is part of the Pacific, Indo-Fijians are not classified as Pacific peoples in New Zealand; instead, they are listed under Indian and Asian on the Stats NZ website.

“The ‘Fijian Indian’ ethnic group is currently classified under ‘Asian,’ in the subcategory ‘Indian’, along with other diasporic Indian ethnic groups,” Stats NZ told RNZ Pacific.

“This has been the case since 2005 and is in line with an ethnographic profile that includes people with a common language, customs, and traditions.

“Stats NZ is aware of concerns some have about this classification, and it is an ongoing point of discussion with stakeholders.”

The Fijian Indian community in Aotearoa has long opposed this and raised the issue again at a community event Rabuka attended in Auckland’s Māngere ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa last month.

“As far as Fiji is concerned, [Indo-Fijians] are Fijians,” he said.

‘A matter of sovereignty’
When asked what his message to New Zealand on the issue would be, he said: “I cannot; that is a matter of sovereignty, the sovereign decision by the government of New Zealand. What they call people is their sovereign right.

“As far as we are concerned, we hope that they will be treated as Fijians.”

More than 60,000 people were transferred from all parts of British India to work in Fiji between 1879 and 1916 as indentured labourers.

Today, they make up over 32 percent of the total population, according to Fiji Bureau of Statistics’ 2017 Population Census.

Now many, like Sangam community NZ leader and former Nadi Mayor Salesh Mudaliar, say they are more Fijian than Indian.

“If you do a DNA or do a blood test, we are more of Fijian than anything else. We are not Indian,” Mudaliar said.

The indentured labourers, who came to be known as the Girmitiyas, as they were bound by a girmit — a Hindi pronunciation of the English word “agreement”.

RNZ Pacific had approached the Viti Council e Aotearoa for their views on the issue. However, they refused to comment, saying that its chair “has opted out of this interview.”

“Topic itself is misleading bordering on disinformation [and] misinformation from an Indigenous Fijian perspective and overly sensitive plus short notice.”

‘Struggling for identity’
“We are Pacific Islanders. If you come from Tonga or Samoa, you are a Pacific Islander,” Mudaliar said.

“When [Indo-Fijians] come from Fiji, we are not. We are not a migrant to Fiji. We have been there for [over 140] years.”

“The community is still struggling for its identity here in New Zealand . . . we are still not [looked after].

He said they had tried to lobby the New Zealand government for their status but without success.

“Now it is the National government, and no one seems to be listening to us in understanding the situation.

“If we can have an open discussion on this, coming to the same table, and knowing what our problem is, then it would be really appreciated.”

“Public consultation in 2019 determined a need for an in-depth review of the Ethnicity Standard,” the data agency said.

In 2021, Stats NZ undertook a large scoping exercise with government agencies, researchers, iwi Māori, and community groups to help establish the scope of the review.

Stats NZ subsequently stood up an expert working group to progress the review.

“This review is still underway, and Stats NZ will be conducting further consultation, so we will have more to say in due course,” it said.

“Classifying ethnicity and ethnic identity is extremely complex, and it is important Stats NZ takes the time to consult extensively and ensure we get this right,” the agency added.

This week, Fijians celebrate the Hindu festival of lights, Diwali. The nation observes a public holiday to mark the day, and Fijians of all backgrounds get involved.

Prime Minister Rabuka’s message is for all Fijians to be kind to each other.

“Act in accordance with the spirit of Diwali and show kindness to those who are going through difficulties,” he told local reporters outside Parliament yesterday.

“It is a good time for us to abstain from using bad language against each other on social media.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Supremacism is a cultural belief that an in-group of humanity is inherently superior to other groups, and that those other groups have lesser human rights as a consequence of their presumed inferiority or corruption.

The Jewish religion does have texts which can be understood as supremacist. That doesn’t make Judaism a supremacist faith, though it does mean that it is a religion vulnerable to supremacist interpretations within that faith; including such interpretations within that faith community. This interpretation manifests today as giving Jewish extremists – neozionists – a priority claim over a piece of real estate which may be called the Southern Levant; especially the lands of the Post WW1  British Mandate Palestine, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and between the Sinai Peninsula and the lands of ancient Phoenicia which we now call Lebanon. (Levant is most meaningfully understood as the relatively fertile lands of the eastern Mediterranean, extending from Gaza in the south to a small strip of modern Türkiye in the north.) The present government of Israel is dominated by neozionists; especially those ministers representing the small parties to the political right of Likud. They represent an ultra-extremist tail wagging a willing Likud dog in a divided Israel; a divided nation in which opposition forces only this year waged mass protests against the suppression of judicial independence (refer Listening Post 29 July 2023, second story; quote: “Israelis are describing the fight over judicial reform as a looming civil war”).

Referencing Amalek as a call to Genocide

The following two programmes on Al Jazeera (among others, including other media) – episodes of Listening Post (about the international media) and Inside Story – showed and cited clips from Israeli domestic sources of Prime Minister Netanyahu making biblical references in what amounts to a call to genocide. Over and above the actual content of these clip, clips that are not fake news, my concern is the degree of self-censorship on the part of the media outlets which western audiences have most access to. In some ways New Zealand is even worse than the United States. Clips about Netanyahu’s Amalek comments have circulated in United States media, unlike New Zealand media (although I did see this by Eugene Doyle: The Holocaust Should be a Lesson not a Template, Scoop 7 Nov 2023).

The Wikipedia page for Amalek refers in the second paragraph to “The Biblical commandments to kill all Amaleks”. (And see dictionary.com.) Benjamin Netanyahu speaks: “‘Remember what Amalek has done to you’ says our holy bible. We do remember. And we wage war.” That bible passage goes on to say: “Now go and smite Amalek … kill both man and woman, infant”. Hamas, the present administrators and ‘defenders’ of Gaza, is the new Amalek. The Palestinians – and, for the moment, especially the Gazans – are the Amalekites. Netanyahu goes on to refer to “this chain of Jewish heroes” from Joshua “3,000 years ago” to “the heroes of 1948”. The audience Netanyahu is speaking to knows the texts referred to and the analogies being spun. The reference to the terrorist militias in the years upto and including 1948 is particularly informative. I’ll return to that.

(And we note that, whereas the United States, hidebound by a constitution drawn up in the pre-industrial 1780s, a colonial state which took for granted a deeply racist version of slavery, modern Israel is – or claims to be – a colonising state culturally informed by episodes of violence in the human past which date further back than the iron age. Have we, as a species, not moved on? Is modernity little more than a veneer, a figleaf no longer able to hide our innate savageness? And are our liberal elites, who think of themselves as the most civilised among us, in fact our least noble savages?)

Before coming back to the formation of modern Israel, I’ll elaborate on the biblical references, noting that Netanyahu might also have mentioned the legendary David and Goliath story; indeed both the Philistines and the Amalekites, neighbours in the Southeast Mediterranean, to the Israelites were inferior less-deserving peoples. To be a ‘philistine’ today means to be an uncultured person. Goliath was a Philistine, and Philistia was an ancient version of Gaza; the words ‘Philistine’ and ‘Palestine’ have the same etymology. [Note Philistia, and the adjacent Amalec, in this Wikipedia entry for Kingdom of Israel (united monarchy); and Philistine City States in this Wikipedia entry for Kingdom of Israel (Samaria).]

(Also, before returning to modern Israel, I want to look at the issue of supremacist ideology and theology more generally.)

Ancestry and Race in the Bible

Because the Christian bible incorporates the Jewish bible, the origin stories of the Israelite tribe are very familiar in our Christian-dominated global culture. Further, Muslims have the same origin story. Pedigree is an important feature of the Jewish bible – the Old Testament – with the divergence of correct peoples from corrupt peoples linked to fraternal disputes and ex-nuptial hereditary lines. I will never forget the word ‘begat’.

The place of Amalek (a tribal leader) is comparable in Zionism to the place of Islam (a religion); both follow allegedly ‘inferior’ lines of descent. In Islamic texts Muhammed is descended from Ishmael, the ‘illegitimate’ older son of Abraham/Ibrahim. (Abraham was an immigrant to Canaan from the area we today call Iraq. Abraham’s people were not indigenous to Southern Levant.) The Israelites, on the other hand, trace their genealogy from Ishmael’s younger ‘legitimate’ brother Isaac; or, strictly, through Abraham’s grandson Jacob. Amalek, also descended from Isaac, was descended through Jacob’s bother Esau.

Esau and Jacob were fraternal twins. Esau, the elder, was impulsive and feckless while Jacob was clever, cunning and focussed. Esau was tricked by Jacob into giving up his rights as elder brother. Later, Esau contracted two exogamous marriages; tantamount to, in a community which strongly favoured endogamy, an egregious sin. So, Esau’s descendancy was corrupted; God chose Jacob’s ‘superior’ descendancy as the foundational line for Israel and Judaism.

Amalek was Esau’s illegitimate grandson. At least one classical scholar, Flavius Josephus, considered that Amalek was a ‘bastard’ in the derogatory sense (ref. Wikipedia). We may apply that same ‘inferior line’ or ‘corrupted line’ sentiment to unreconstructed Jewish perceptions of Arabic ancestry, and a certain conflation of the concepts of Arabism with Islam. There is also the sense that, on purely ancestral grounds, the Jewish tradition sees Islam as a ‘bastard’ Abrahamic religion, and that in itself is indicative of inferiority.

This is supremacism based on ancestral disdain, which – in that thought mode – confers the right of the righteous collective to inflict arbitrary mistreatment upon people belonging to the ancestrally ‘corrupted’ collectives. In the Israel case, we might call this example of supremacism ‘Semitism’, because it’s the counterpoint to the misused term ‘anti-semitism’ (used to mean either anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli). This language is inaccurate and problematic; the widespread use of ‘Semite’ in lieu of either ‘Jew’ or ‘Israeli’ should be discontinued by those who should know better. (We might note that the Jewish supremacism seen in present times is better called neozionism, which characterises only a minority of adherents to Judaism and a minority of Israeli citizens.)

Before Abraham

The ancestral demarcations in Genesis did not begin with Abraham’s sons. (And we note that Old Testament genealogy is heavily patriarchal, with daughters mainly absent from the storylines and ‘misbehaving’ mothers often a source of corruption.)

The story of Cain and Abel, the elder sons of Adam and Eve, is widely known. Cain killed his younger brother in a fit of jealousy. So Abel was not able to establish a line of descent. ‘Fortunately’ for humanity, Adam and Eve subsequently had a third son, Seth. So we have two lines of descent, Cain’s line and Seth’s line. Cain’s collective line, however, was corrupted by Cain’s egregious behaviour.

As the story goes, generations later Cain’s line would be subject to divine genocide, the original ‘Act of God’ which remains as legal terminology today. Noah was the uncorrupted man, allowed to live, and he was descended from Seth. (Presumably other descendants of Seth were corrupted in other ways, establishing lines of descent which would in the main also become victims of divine genocide. The exceptions were Noah’s daughters-in-law.)

The Flood – presented as the first genocide, as retribution upon those corrupted – created a new second start for humanity; a second start that contained the raw material for three new bloodlines.  (We learned this story of divine genocide at Sunday School, as if the ‘wicked’ citizens of Gomorrah and other places somehow deserved to die.) The ‘raw material’ for the new races was of course Noah’s daughters-in-law, though the racial bloodlines are named after Noah’s three sons: Shem, Japheth, and Ham.

The known world in Old Testament times comprised West Asia (including Arabia), Northeast Africa, and Southeast Europe (including the Caucasus). The descendants of Shem became Semites, and populated Asia. The descendants of Japheth became Europeans (aka Caucasians, a term used by police as a racial descriptor for Europeans). The descendants of Ham became Hamites – Africans – corrupted on account of the Curse of Ham. The Judeo-Christian biblical tradition thus gained a predisposition to anti-hamitism; a problem which clearly exists today, and which this decade has inspired the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.

Anti-semitism

Anti-semitism is a form of prejudice, which literally should target all persons of West Asian descent, not just people of Israelite descent. (And we should stop calling West Asians ‘Middle Easterners’. The term Middle East is itself a supremacist name, reflecting the perspective of Western Europe in recent centuries.  We don’t call East Asian people ‘Far Easterners’. We have already switched to the widespread use of the term ‘South Asian’, in line with the established ‘East Asian’ in preference to ‘oriental’. Rishi Sunak is a British citizen of South Asian heritage. We should replace the term ‘Middle Eastern’ with ‘West Asian’, forthwith.)

This linguistic problem, the continued partial use of archaic racial constructs, is particularly problematic when we try to apply the European construct of ‘anti-semitic’ to groups of Arabs or Muslims. In the traditions from which the term derived, Arabs were themselves very much Semites. Further, the whole ‘hatred of Jews’ tradition which came to be called anti-semitism is a Christian European thing, and only has meaning in a Christian European context. There is no comparable racial or religious prejudice in the Arab world, although there is an aversion to supremacist behaviours perpetrated by Zionist (and other) colonists.

The present hatred in West Asia is a hatred of the Zionist and Neozionist behaviours that led to the ethnic clearances in the Southern Levant in the twentieth century; clearances which continue in the twentyfirst century. Anti-Neozism is a valid political position, as was Anti-Nazism in the World War 2 era; neither are hate crimes. These sentiments are anti-ideology, not anti-identity.

While the traditional Jewish texts may predispose some followers of Judaism to adopt a supremacist ideology, that hardly makes someone a supremacist if they identify as Jewish or because they descend in a patrilinear manner from Isaac. (In a strict endogamy, where Judaism is understood as a closed ethnicity as well as a religious faith, all Jews today would descend patrilineally from Jacob. However, given the realities of relationship formation and the biological advantages of exogamy, based on the laws of probability and descent, and assuming that Jacob was a genuine historical person, every person today of European or West Asian descent would be descended from him several times over. If we go back 100 generations, we should each have approximately 1,267,650,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ancestors. Clearly there has been some doubling up!)

While anti-Jewish sentiments are unacceptable (an ‘identity offence’ if you will; I don’t like the expression ‘hate-crime’), being anti the politics of the Israeli government is acceptable. And, if we want to accuse people of being anti-Jewish, we should say ‘anti-Jewish’ rather than the archaic racial euphemism ‘antisemitic’. There can be little doubt that Israel at present has a neozionist government, and that it is right and proper to oppose that ideology on ethical grounds; yet without wishing harm on people – without hating people – because they happen to be Jewish by birth or by choice. And we should never hate people; including people who openly espouse a supremacist ideology.

While neozionist supremacism is derived from genealogy rather than ethnicity or theodicy, to some extent these amount to the same thing in this case, thanks to the historical self-segregationist proclivities of the Jewish people. Some genealogical websites treat Jewish as an ethnicity, including the Israel-based site My Heritage.

I will now look at two other fateful versions of supremacy, one based on religion, the other on ethnicity: Calvinism and Collective Darwinism.

The Reformation and Dutch/Calvinist Theo-Supremacism

The medieval Christian churches (Orthodox and Catholic) had their own versions of supremacy, in particular the ideas around hierarchy and priestly absolution. (While I am more familiar with Catholic than Orthodox doctrine, Peter Turchin details Orthodox supremacism in War and Peace and War, 2007.) But the Reformation took this to a substantively different level, especially the Calvinist variation of Protestantism which preached the doctrine of predestination; indeed double-predestination, under which damnation as well as salvation was predetermined. Under predestination, certain groups of people were born into supremacy; and belief in one’s own in-group’s supremacy had to be sustained by faith, even at the risk of being martyred (especially in the religious wars which peaked in West Europe in the third quarter of the 16th century).

The Calvinist doctrines were particularly attractive to Europe’s mercantile communities; with the ‘Low Countries’ – the Netherlands – already having Europe’s most developed mercantile culture. These mercenary sub-cultures (numismaphiles? lovers of money) were attracted to any doctrine for which money-accruing was a virtue, not a sin. In this sense, Calvinism had aspects in common with Judaism; and it is on the matter of moneylending that Judaism differs significantly from both Islam and historical Catholicism.

The Netherlands were riven by the Reformation, which created decades of severe sectarian violence amongst people who were ethnically pretty-much identical. This was the genesis of the split between the peoples of the provinces we now call Netherlands and those we call Belgium. In the culture wars of that time, Calvinist yahoos would terrorise Antwerp and Brussels and other places, inciting violence by calling the Pope the Anti-Christ. Devil-allegers and alleged Devils were everywhere.

The outcome was a 17th century in which Calvinist Netherlands – the successfully rebellious northern United Provinces – changed the world. As the Dutch global presence expanded, the inferior ‘other’ were decreasingly white Catholics, and increasingly black Africans (in South Africa, the South Caribbean, and New York) and brown Austronesians (in what became the Dutch East Indies, and Indonesia). The Dutch dominated world seaborne trade in the 17th century, creating ‘Dutch lakes’ in the North Sea and the Indian Ocean. One such Dutch voyage resulted in the extraordinary tragedy of the East-Indiaman ship ‘Batavia’ (see the actual ship, in Perth); another resulted in the European discoveries of Tasmania and Nieuw Zeeland.

Re the origins of white supremacism in the United States, it is important to note the rise of Calvinism in Scotland and Northern Ireland, under the name of the Presbyterian church. Various neo-Calvinisms followed, such as the Baptist church. It was subsequent settlement in the southeastern states of the United States; settlement – as in Cape Town in South Africa, rich in calvinist values – which created the United States ‘Bible Belt’, and the secessionist and segregationist Confederacy which brought about the United States Civil War. And we note that the sectarian-apartheid which underpinned the twentieth-century troubles in Northern Ireland is very much a manifestation of calvinist doctrine.

The theme of Dutch/Calvinist supremacism in the eastern Indian Ocean is particularly evocative of the Dutch project of global capitalism described by Amitav Ghosh as ‘omnicide’ (refer his The Nutmeg’s Curse, 2021). Well worth reading, also, for New Hollanders (Australians) and New Zealanders is Peter Fitzsimons’ 2011 book Batavia.

Afrikaner Calvinism formed the philosophical basis for the Apartheid state in South Africa, from 1948 to 1991. And not the starting date for that Apartheid regime.

Darwinism, secular European Supremacism, and Neoliberalism

We understand German Naziism as an extreme form of Teutonic supremacism. But this was the eventual tip of a very large iceberg. Further, the supremacism wasn’t particularly targeted at Jews. The Nazis scapegoated Jews as cunning, mercenary, and somewhat conspiratorial. But they were more inclined to see – or wanted to see – Hamitic people than Semitic people as inferior. Hence the deep frustration with the success of African-Americans at the Berlin Olympic games in 1936.

The more important though understated supremacism was the belief throughout northwest Europe in the superiority of the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon race. In the 1920s, for example, this ran deep (see The Great Interwar Crisis by Robert Boyce, 2009). It manifested as a division of Europe into a hierarchy of three principal ‘races’: from superior to inferior, the sequence was the Germanic peoples, the Latin peoples, and the Slavic peoples. Indeed, in both World Wars One and Two, the principal fight was between Germany and Slavic Eastern Europe. The first war was largely about the break-up of the two formerly great empires in the east: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, and the contest for the oil reserves around the Caspian Sea. The second war was principally about Lebensraum, a supremacist grab for the lands and labour of the Slavs. The German Nazis were more interested in sidelining the British than defeating them. Jews became a scapegoat.

The anti-Judaism in Germany was more pretext than text. Less so in the Slavic lands – especially the Russian empire – where anti-Jewish Pogrom-culture developed. (This was not Slavic supremacism; more like anti-supremacist hate; and, in line with Peter Turchin’s arguments, possibly linked to Orthodox Christianity.) It was from these Eastern European lands that most Jewish emigration to the Southern Levant before 1940 took place, and which formed the breeding grounds for subsequent neozionism. Pogrom-culture spread into Central Europe in the interwar years, and ultimately was the genesis of the Holocaust of 1942 to 1945; a super-pogrom which was anti-Jewish but not only anti-Jewish. (There were earlier iterations of pogrom-culture in Europe, the most notorious being in the 13th and 14th century; culminating in the accusations that the Black Death was the result of Jews poisoning the water-wells. Many terrible retributions followed.)

Before 1948, many Jews lived relatively prosperous lives in other territories in which the predominant populations were Arabic and/or Muslim; those mainly African territories were not the seedbed of anti-Jewish hatred.

Charles Darwin should not be blamed for collective or ethno- Darwinism – supremacism linked to race rather than religion – although his social milieu played a substantial role in the propagation of ethno-supremacist ideas. Herbert Spencer‘s Social Darwinism – first published as Social Statics – preceded Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species by 8 years. (And for a literary take on Social Darwinist versions of supremacism, try Jack London’s Martin Eden – written in 1909 when these ideas were especially prominent – or the 2019 Italian movie based on that book.) Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton is regarded as having been the ‘father’ of Eugenics, a philosophy which became influential in New Zealand, especially in association with the founder of the Plunkett Society, Sir Truby King.

We should also contrast these collective identity supremacisms (Neozionism, Calvinism, Social Darwinism) with individualist supremacisms, such as those of Friedrich Nietzsche on the one hand and Ayn Rand on the other. These philosophies, though problematic, are different.

(Rand was particularly influential amongst the generation of men, mainly born in the 1930s and 1940s, who sequestered the 1970s’ inflation crisis to give ‘the west’ neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed neoliberalism, a revival of the monetary supremacism of the 1920s, is so cemented into today’s ‘liberal’ narratives that the pragmatist economic insights of John Maynard Keynes, developed in the 1920s and 1930s, cannot even get onto the agenda of policy discussions around governance, inflation, and the cost of living. Public finance, in New Zealand at least, has become an excruciating zero-sum game; an elite intellectual closed shop.)

Al Nakba (‘The Catastrophe’): 1948 and all that; Ethnic Clearances

The Israel neozionists have told us and shown us what they see as the long-term solution to their ‘Palestinian problem’ – at best ethnic clearance in Gaza and surveillance control in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank; at worst, genocide – and have the will and the means to carry out that solution. (Having the means depends, though, on United States’ cooperation.) Further, their predecessors – as Zionists – have already done what today’s neozionists wish to do. The re-creation of Israel was always going to be a ‘game of two halves’. 1948 was the first half. The 1967 Six-Day War might have been the beginning of the second half, but it wasn’t to be. Circumstances have come together once again, in 2023, to make it possible for the Israeli regime to return to the 1948 playbook, and complete their modern-era refoundation project.

Basically, after World War II, groups of Zionist settlers waged a terrorist campaign against the United Kingdom, which had a continued mandate to administer the Southern Levant; a British mandate which began as an outcome of World War 1. This campaign of terror was known as the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine. The insurgents had different factions. The relatively moderate faction was Haganah; the more extreme factions were Irgun and the Stern Gang (aka Lehi).

All three militias were involved in the 1947 Deir Yassin massacre, though it was lead by Irgun. Before 1948 Irgun was the Jewish equivalent of Hamas pre-2006. (In addition to being a sectarian resistance movement, Hamas today is the elected administration of the semi-state of Gaza.) It was Irgun who in 1946 blew up the King David Hotel, British administrative headquarters, although Irgun sought to implicate Haganah (NY Times, 27 July 1947). Further, Irgun can be understood as the institutional forerunner of Israel’s ruling Likud Party.

Israel’s founding fathers were linked to either Haganah or Irgun. Founding mother ‘Golda Meir’ was linked to the political wing of Haganah; she was heavily involved in fundraising in United States for the Israeli cause.

As soon as the new United Nations was formed, the United Kingdom couldn’t leave quickly enough. The Zionist insurgency was the exemplar for a successful terror campaign. (The father of my first wife served in the British Army during the 1945-1948 mandate. She mentioned to me that, when he was travelling on the back of an army truck, the man next to him was shot in the chest by a sniper, dying instantly. Such is the randomness of life and death, under fire.) The United Nations took over responsibility for Mandatory Palestine (the Southern Levant west of the Jordan River) from Britain, noting that the United Kingdom had various other postcolonial obligations to unravel.

The 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight involved a mass ethnic clearance; it was a land-grab. Gaza became a refugee ‘camp’, with responsibility held by both the United Nations (in the form of UNWRA) and Egypt. Most of the dispossessed fled to Gaza, though still claiming rights to the lands they had previously occupied and farmed. A substantial territory to the east of Mandatory Palestine – the ‘West Bank’ of the Jordan River – was not included in Israel, and was conjoined to Jordan after the 1948 post-independence Arab-Israeli war. This conjoined territory included East Jerusalem.

(This is an authorised American version of the foundation of modern Israel. And this is a summary of the Israeli Declaration of Independence.)

Partition of Mandatory Palestine, in Six Maps

Both the Washington Post and the BBC have sites showing six critical maps of the formation of Israel to date. The first map shows Mandatory Palestine from 1922. This is essentially the combined area which modern Israel possesses and occupies. (Additionally today, Israel possesses and occupies a little more area around the Syrian border; the Golan Heights.)

Each second map shows the United Nations’s November 1947 partition plan. The BBC map shows more clearly that the Palestinian partition is in fact three disjoint territories, although the ‘joins’ are very close. (It’s important to note that Jerusalem/Bethlehem is specified separately as an ‘international city’.)

This was the essence of the ‘two-state’ ethno-sectarian solution which has been revived today, and was a solution very much in the mould of Britain’s partition solution for India earlier that year. The Palestinians rejected the United Nations’ two-state solution, and no wonder given what was happening in the then dividing India. In the South Asia case, the partition created two ethno-sectarian nation states; with Pakistan located in two detached and culturally different parts. This created two major episodes of catastrophic violence, and many minor episodes. (See Why Pakistan and India remain in denial 70 years on from partition, Guardian, 6 August 2017; review of The Great Divide by William Dalrymple, New Yorker 22 June 2015; Violence against women during the Partition of India, Wikipedia; and 1950 East Pakistan riots, Wikipedia; Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, Wikipedia.) That ethno-sectarian India problem has rekindled since around 2010 with the accession to power of Narendra Modi, with the interesting (and worrying) pro-Zionist sympathy of the ruling Hindu nationalists (see the third story of the 11 Nov 2023 episode of The Listening Post). And ethno-sectarian violence against women remains a big problem in India.

The third map shows the outcome of the 1948/49 Arab/Israeli War, with the two parts we today think of as Palestine under occupation by Egypt (Gaza) and recently independent Jordan (West Bank; Jordan had been the British-mandated Trans-Jordan; see BBC first map). This 1949 map has a distinctly modern look.

The fourth map shows Israel’s annexation of Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War. This could have been the completion of the Israeli project, but for the complications relating to Sinai, Egypt, and the closure of the Suez Canal. Eventually Egypt was able to reopen the Suez Canal in 1975, and its repossession of Sinai was formalised in 1982 (fifth map) following the 1978 Camp David Accords.

The Washington Post fifth map also mentions that Southern Lebanon was occupied by Israel from 1982 to 2000. The 1982 events were particularly nasty, though barely mentioned today because there is just so much other context to the present events. (Though we should note that present events include substantial militarisation and violence north and south of the Israel-Lebanon border.) This war largely took place under the cover of the British-Argentinean Falklands War, in June 1982. The nastiest single event, though, was the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982, an aftermath to the Siege of Beirut.

The sixth map shows the situation of occupation in October 2023. (The BBC map shows Gaza only.) Of particular note is the extent to which Palestinians do not supervise the West Bank. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the West Bank’s fate as a slow Israeli land grab; an ethnic clearance accelerating under cover of the present War in Gaza. While the violence in Gaza has been full-on, the West Bank has been subject to huge amounts of petty violence which in its own way is as distressing.

One State, Two States, Three States?

The present Siege of Gaza began from 2005, after Israel closed its settlements there, and after Hamas acceded to government in Gaza. Gaza has been a ‘cage’, the “Gaza ghetto”, (see 20 November 2023 NZ Listener opinion-piece No Place to Call Home by Paul Oestreicher); a refugee enclosure since 1948 managed in large part by the United Nations in the form of UNRWA. Gaza and southern Lebanon were the major destinations for those 700,000 Palestinians dispossessed of their land during the Nakba.

Gaza once had an opportunity to become an independent nation-state; not an oil-state like Kuwait nor an entrepôt-state like Singapore, but a coherent small nation more along the lines of Malta or Cyprus. But the western obsession with a Two-State solution, with Gaza tagged onto the West Bank – like India and Pakistan (with Bangladesh concocted as a distant appendage, as East Pakistan) – put the kibosh on that.

Gaza became a semi-state under blockade, substantially dependent on aid from both foreign and besieging parties. Israel would utilise Gazan labour, to perform low-wage but essential tasks. Gaza – in a first-past-the post election in 2006 – chose Hamas as their administration and their military; Hamas gained a majority of seats but not a majority of votes. Hamas’ rival was Fatah, in control of the Palestine Authority in the West Bank. Gaza was voting for independence from the West Bank as well as from Israel.

People have been able to leave Gaza, but only in accordance with other countries’ immigration eligibility criteria. Thus, the Palestinian diaspora has taken place under a much more difficult ‘rules-based’ legal framework than the 2,000-year Jewish diaspora. (That’s not to understate the many difficulties Jews faced over the millennia in settling other parts of the world.) Persons in Gaza born to Palestinian refugees in 1948 would have led their entire 75-year-long lives in a United Nations supported refugee enclosure. There are few people alive in the Southern Levant today who have clear memories of life before 1948.

Hamas wants a one-state solution: one Palestine, no Israel. And it is mandated by a substantial minority of the Gazan people to remind Israel that it is still there and that it has aspirations to be much more than an enclosure of dispossessed people. Hamas-led Gaza has attacked Israel a number of other times since 2006, though with barely a ripple of international attention. (My recording of the 13 May 2023 Listening Post episode about surveillance of Palestinians in East Jerusalem shows this in the lower-screen news-ribbon: “Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip continue for the fifth consecutive day. Israeli military says at least 1,000 missiles have been launched from Gaza since Tuesday. Israel confirms killing a sixth commander of Islamic Jihad in air strikes on Gaza. At least 33 Palestinians killed and 120 injured in air strikes on Gaza. At least two people killed in Israeli raid on Balata Camp in Nablus in occupied West Bank”. Clearly Hamas had to do much more next time in order for the international community to take notice of the ongoing plight of the Palestinian people under siege and surveillance.) The world – and the news-cycle – follows an ‘out-of-sight out-of-mind’ reality. On 7 October 2023, Hamas did enough – probably more than enough – to be noticed. Egregious behaviour is rewarded with attention.

We should also understand that the willingness of many Palestinians to die in their struggle for freedom is not unique to them. Israel maintains a substantial monument to the Siege of Masada (by the Romans) in the year 0073. Apparently “The Jewish rebels had set all the buildings but the food storerooms ablaze and had killed each other, declaring ‘a glorious death … preferable to a life of infamy’.”

My sense is that an India-Pakistan-style two-state solution was never viable in the Southern Levant; just as it was never viable as a post-colonial solution to British India. The ‘two-state solution’ remains a fantasy of the self-proclaimed ‘liberal rules-based’ West. And, I suspect, it’s now too late for a three-state solution. Both Gaza and the West Bank have already been too substantially compromised. (A West Bank state has been compromised by the present degree of Israeli settlement there. There had been a possibility of a small landlocked independent state such as Eswatini, which – as Swaziland – ‘enjoyed’ an independent coexistence with Apartheid South Africa.) We should note the parallels between the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 with that of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and this story from Al Jazeera in 2015: Rabin’s assassination marked the end of the two-state solution.

The only viable long-term outcome that I can see is a one-state solution, possibly with that state being Israel. For a first-best outcome, we can draw some inspiration from post-Apartheid South Africa. In the Levantine context, an ideal state would neither be called Israel nor Palestine. An important feature of such a state would be a truth and reconciliation process. In the words of Paul Oestreicher: “There is still a fast-shrinking possibility that apartheid Israel could become a nation with equal rights for all of its inhabitants … a dream worth pursuing.” Such a state might be called ‘South Levant’.

My sense though is that Israel’s campaign of supremacist violence has already become a fait-accompli. The rest of the world probably needs to focus on achieving – this decade – the second-best one-state solution. The best that the West can offer the Southern Levant is a state of permanent limbo; a permanent cycle of escalating and de-escalating violence; this is a third-best or fourth-best outcome. Contemporary Gaza is like a turkey-enclosure before Thanksgiving; enduring its own Squid Gamepurgatory. And the West Bank has already become a Kafkaesque nightmare of Israeli-imposed bureaucracy and petty collective cruelties to those Palestinians – especially Muslims – who resist being chased off their lands.

Military realism today may be a more likely precursor to a long-term realisation of the living-together one-state dream than another permanent set of temporary impasses; than another 75 years of limbo and a continuance of the passions that the last 100 years have brought, not only to that region but to the whole world.

Military and geopolitical realism may see all the Southern Levant west of the Jordan River become Israel; eventually (hopefully by 2050) a depoliticised and de-zionised Israel. To avoid genocide this northern hemisphere summer, the 1940s’ architects and sponsors of Israel – especially the United States and the United Kingdom – will need to facilitate a substantial 2020s’ expansion of the already-large Palestinian diaspora. Israeli writers are already saying this: refer The West Should Welcome Gaza Refugees, by Danny Danon and Ram Ben-Barak, Wall Street Journal 13 Nov 2023. The sooner the purgatory is over, even if the short-term outcome is not first-best, then the sooner people who identify as Palestinians will once again be welcome in the lands of their ancestors; welcome as equals in a 2040s’ Israel or South Levant that is very different from the present Israel.

We note that the Netherlands of today – renowned for its pluralist tolerance – is quite different from the Calvinist Netherlands of 1600; although Netherlands still retains much from its Calvinist origins, including its own rural Bible Belt. Some forms of supremacism wither, when circumstances no longer sustain them. In addition to the Dutch, consider the more recent histories of the Germans, and the South Afrikaners. The United States remains a work in progress; white supremacism remains a problem there. And there are other supremacisms still alive, still rampant; in Myanmar, and in Darfur, which have not so far been mentioned here, and are not mentioned much anywhere else either. The West’s attention span remains too short.

Afterword

The Zionists and the Calvinists – the Jews and the Dutch – have, for better and/or worse, punched above their weight in world history, in the creation of the modern capitalist world. Likewise, we must give much credit to Darwinism as a positive force; the science of evolution and the evolution of science that is (not supremacist Darwinian pseudo-sciences!).

Supremacism will not go away. It will not be smashed by anti-supremacism. Israel cannot and should not be smashed, just as the Calvinist tradition in modern Christianity cannot be eradicated. Rather, supremacist cultures can be ‘domesticated’, their energies channelled in ways that construct rather than destroy, that sustain rather than deplete. Jewish people should be – and are – proud of what they have achieved and have endured, in collectives and as individuals; they don’t need Zionism or Neo-Zionism through which to express that pride.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins and National leader Christopher Luxon have faced off in a fast-paced but unspectacular debate in the Aotearoa New Zealand general election campaign with co-governance and gangs among the issues producing the liveliest exchanges.

It was the first time the two leaders had squared off against each other outside Parliament and at times the mood was tense during last night’s debate.

Luxon, in particular, appeared frustrated when Hipkins interjected, while the Labour leader appeared to be enjoying himself a bit more.

However, with Labour behind in the polls, Hipkins was unable to deliver anything telling enough to put Luxon off his stride.

He did manage some amusing lines, however, such as “We have a proven track record of reducing our emissions . . . it’s not just a bunch of slogans”, “building EV stations is like building petrol stations”, and when asked what was his worst quality he responded with a smile: “I need to delegate more”.

Afterwards both leaders professed themselves happy with how they performed, however, commentators on TV1 were less enthusiastic, with former MP Tau Henare saying there was no excitement and Hipkins had been “too mild”.

Former Labour leader David Cunliffe believed Hipkins had allowed Luxon too much of a free run and the National party leader made the most of it. Both declared the debate a tie.

Wide-ranging debate
The debate was wide-ranging, covering health, housing, crime and gangs, climate change and the economy. 1News political editor Jessica Mutch-McKay kept it moving at a fast clip and co-governance, especially in health, led to some intense debate.

The leaders were both asked if Māori and Pacific people should get priority when it came to the health waitlist. Luxon said need should come first ahead of ethnicity, while Hipkins said Māori and Pacific people having priority was a positive due to their poor health outcomes when compared to the rest of the population.

Hipkins said other parties were using the issue to “race-bait”, to which Luxon interjected “rubbish”.

Luxon said he felt the definition of co-governance had been expanded since the last time National was in government and the public had not been given adequate explanations of what it entailed.

Hipkins said co-governance meant shared decision-making over natural resources which had been successful. He believed Māori and government working together benefited New Zealand.

Luxon said he supported it for Treaty of Waitangi settlements but not for national public services and repeated his party’s intention of axing the Māori Health Authority.

“The Māori Health Authority isn’t having two separate systems,” Hipkins said.

Luxon challenged in Māori health
He challenged Luxon on why he would keep Māori health providers if he did not want two systems of health. Luxon said he wanted to “turbo-charge” community organisations but it would be as part of one health system.

Hipkins said the health system was dealing with systemic issues and it would take time to build capacity to fix them.

But Luxon said every single health indicator had worsened under Labour — although Hipkins countered that by saying falling smoking rates were one example of effective action.

He said he did not feel safe in downtown Auckland and believed many New Zealanders felt the same.

Under Labour the prison population had been reduced by 30 percent — which might have been acceptable if the crime rate had gone down by the same amount — but in fact it had risen sharply, Luxon said.

On gangs he claimed: “We have nine gang members for every 10 police officers in this country.

“We’re going to make sure we ban gang patches in public places, we give police dispersal and powers to break them up from planning criminal activity, we get tough on the illegal guns that they have and we make being a gang member an aggravating factor in sentencing.”

Consequences for young offenders
He also promised there would be consequences for serious young offenders.

Hipkins said the escalation in gang activity was unacceptable and acknowledged that more New Zealanders were feeling unsafe. However, he advocated working with young offenders to turn their lives around which would reduce crime.

On boot camps, told that an expert had said 83 percent of young people who went through them re-offend, Luxon said National would make them “more effective”.

“We need targeted interventions in these young people’s lives. I’m not prepared to write them off.”

When Hipkins tried to intervene and say how boot camps did not get results, Luxon hit back saying Labour had had six years to get it right.

Hipkins said Labour had changed the law so police could be tougher on gang convoys, such as the recent one that closed down parts of Ōpōtiki over a tangi.

Insults fly on housing
Luxon slammed Labour’s record on housing while Hipkins said National’s plan was to offer incentives to landlords whereas Labour was focused on getting people into homes.

Hipkins said there were more “mega landlords” these days and that was not right.

“Will you guarantee your tax breaks for landlords will get passed on to tenants?” Hipkins asked Luxon.

Luxon avoided a direct answer so the Labour leader answered on his behalf, saying “We’ll take that as a no.”

Both leaders stated they supported building more state houses — although Hipkins was critical of how state houses had been sold off the last time National was in government.

Hipkins admitted KiwiBuild had been an “unrealistic promise” but since then Labour had created momentum in house supply which needed to be continued.

Afterwards both leaders were relaxed. Hipkins was reluctant to score himself, saying the voters would decide, but when pressed again opted for an eight.

Luxon said he had enjoyed it and hoped viewers did also while also choosing an eight.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Iwi leaders in Aotearoa New Zealand have accused opposition parties National and ACT of “fanning the flames of racism”, urging the prime minister to be brave and not walk away from partnership on Three Waters.

With Waitangi events and festivities gearing up for the holiday weekend, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins attended the Iwi Chairs Forum yesterday.

He emerged from the closed-doors meeting saying they had asked the government to continue to work with Māori “to advance the issues that we’ve been working on previously”.

Iwi leaders had also, it seemed, laid down a wero [challenge].

“I have also heard their concern that they don’t want to see ethnicity, race, being used as a way of dividing New Zealanders and I was able to absolutely reiterate my government’s commitment to ensuring that we continue to work together to avoid that happening,” Hipkins said.

“Where there is uncertainty, where there is a lack of clarity, that can lead to fear. Politicians who use that fear or exploit that fear in order to try and gain political advantage need to really reflect on their own actions. That’s something my government will never do.”

He was not afraid to get into specifics, either.

“They don’t want the concept of co-governance to be used to stoke fear, and nor do we,” he said.

“I think it’s been misunderstood and those who seek to use misunderstanding around it for political advantage need to reflect on their own behaviour.

“People can form their own judgments about that but I certainly think the opposition — National and ACT have, as they’ve done in the past — they’ve used uncertainty to try and stoke fear.”

The devastating flooding in Auckland this week may have changed some minds about the need for change in management of drinking, waste and stormwater — something Hipkins will be looking to capitalise on.

“I think that we have to accept that as a result of climate change we’re going to see more extreme weather events, and stormwater — which is an integral part of the Three Waters system — is going to continue to come under more pressure,” he said.

The iwi leaders were not shy about it either, with Tukoroirangi Morgan telling reporters they wanted co-governance or a similar partnership retained in the Three Waters legislation.

“The challenge we’ve put to the prime minister today is will he succumb to the attack dogs of the National party and ACT as they fan the flames of racism and anti-Māori sentiments, and throw us under the bus for the sake of keeping alive Three Waters?”

Morgan, it must be noted, has been appointed chair of the entity set to oversee Auckland and Northland’s water.

“There is nothing mysterious about Three Waters — it’s all about pipes under the ground. Our view is as it has always been: we stand here at Waitangi, the cradle of the Treaty of Waitangi, and here is the embodiment of partnership,” he said.

“What we seek from this government is an ongoing commitment that partnership will amplified and affirmed through Three Waters, [it is an] opportunity for the Crown and Māori to work together in a meaningful and significant way.”

Jamie Tuuta, an iwi leader from Taranaki, also warned against allowing Māori to become a political football this election.

“One of the key messages we want to give to the prime minister and other ministers is that they need to stand up, they need to step up,” he said.

“It’s unacceptable — because again, the racist and biased attacks on Māori in 2023 are unacceptable.”

A Pou Tikanga of the forum, constitutional law expert Professor Margaret Mutu, said it was essential race rhetoric was removed from electoral debate.

“There’s a need to understand and address racism in this country and over recent times it’s got a lot more urgent,” Professor Mutu said.

“We need to make sure that work doesn’t slow down, particularly as the extreme attacks coming in are very, very hurtful. We want to try and stop that hurt.”

Te Arawa’s Monty Morrison said the meeting went “very well, it was very open.”

Ngāti Kuri’s Harry Burkhardt said they “were clear about our message, and I think Chris received that well”.

Luxon, Seymour respond
Co-governance was a topic National’s leader Christopher Luxon chose to address when he visited Rātana last week. His speech accused the government of failing to make its position on the matter clear, and allowing it to become a “divisive and immature” conversation.

National had been invited to meet with the Iwi Chairs Forum but declined. In a written statement after the kōrero at Waitangi today, Luxon said the party had been clear about its position.

“We support co-management between government and Māori for natural resources in the context of Treaty settlements. We do not support co-governance of public services or separate bureaucratic systems for Māori and non-Māori,” he said.

“Labour has progressed a divisive agenda and continually failed to set out its views clearly. It is disappointing to see the new Prime Minister try to shut down the discussion rather than clearly setting out Labour’s plans for the public to judge.”

Luxon has previously raised as examples National does not support:

• The Māori Health Authority, which sets strategy for overcoming racial health gaps and commissions kaupapa Māori health services
• The Three Waters legislation allowing equal representation between council and iwi appointees on a strategic oversight group which appoints the management board of the four entities set to take over management of water services

ACT leader David Seymour — who has Ngāpuhi roots — has been even more stridently critical of these, arguing they are race-based approaches which only further divide.

“If the prime minister thinks that ACT is making co-goverment divisive, wait till he hears what Labour’s been up to,” he said.

“Their modus operandi is to divide public affairs between two groups of people based on race — that is divisive and it’s unsurprising that opposition parties are raising concerns.”

He bristled at being labelled an “attack dog” by Morgan.

“Again, it’s a shame. The Iwi Chairs Forum were an organisation we’ve enjoyed good relationships with.

“That kind of language, calling people dogs, well it doesn’t exactly sound like they’re coming to the table to make the situation any better, now, does it.”

Three Waters changes yet to be decided
Since taking over as Prime Minister from Jacinda Ardern, Hipkins has promised his government will focus more on the “bread-and-butter” issues, targeting cost-of-living pressures and cutting back some of the government’s work programme.

Media speculation has highlighted the unpopularity of the government’s RNZ-TVNZ merger and the Three Waters projects, and therefore likely on the chopping block.

Hipkins signalled announcements within weeks about the slimmed-down work programme, but when pressed about Three Waters early this week spoke about the need to change the status quo — statements he repeated today.

“We’ve been doing so many different things, actually we probably haven’t created the space to make sure people understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and that is absolutely, I think, a lesson for us over the last five years and it’s something we have all reflected on and you’ll see some change in that regard.

“I haven’t said a lot in terms of ruling things in and out, but one thing I will rule out is no reform . . .  we can’t continue with the status quo — it is not delivering New Zealanders the water services they need and that they deserve.

“If we leave it just with the status quo, one thing it will deliver is significantly higher rates for households, and I’m not willing to just stand back and say ‘that’s a council problem to deal with’.”

He has, to date, refused to outline what any of the changes to the project might be — saying those decisions are yet to be made by the full Cabinet — but speculation has centred on the co-governance aspect.

“I think everybody acknowledges that what we’re doing now or around the way we manage our water infrastructure in New Zealand is not sustainable, and it has left us with a pretty disgraceful legacy, frankly, of that core infrastructure being run down.”

Taranaki iwi leader Jamie Tuuta said whatever changes came, they expected the same level of engagement and partnership.

“By and large what we ask is that we are respected and that [Hipkins] and his ministers engage openly with us in the event that there are any changes.”

With an election in October, Morgan and the other leaders present at today’s forum are clear: they want bold leadership and partnership, and however this year’s election plays out — they will still be there.

“This is a ongoing journey for us,” Morgan said. “Absolutely, we would want a very clear and unfettered response and commitment from this government that they’re not going to walk away, nor are they going to throw us under the bus for their own political means.

“Iwi will be at this side of the table come the election, we’ll deal with whoever the government is. What is clear in this situation is we are enduring, iwi will remain as the Treaty partner.

“Whether we deal with Hipkins after the election or the National Party, we will see, but all we say is that we want an equitable share in the major decisions that affect our people – that’s our bottom-line expectation.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Iwi leaders warn Hipkins not to bow on Three Waters co-governance https://t.co/upsPqJEbMm

— RNZ News (@rnz_news) February 3, 2023

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The “politics of fear” pervading Fiji must go away, says National Federation Party (NFP) candidate Agni Deo Singh.

The former general secretary of the Fiji Teachers Union (FTU) attacked the “politics of fear” aimed at the hearts of voters, especially Fijians of Indian descent.

“Every time we hear about politics of fear from the FijiFirst government,” he claimed.

“They are doing it currently. Trying to instil that fear in the Indo-Fijian community.

“The worst part is that this is bringing about an ethnic divide.

“We are here to bring the two major ethnic groups together.

“We don’t talk ethnicity, we don’t talk race or religion.”

Singh said people should not worry and leave security to the authorities such as the police.

Shayal Devi is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Why is Russia encircling Ukraine with what looks very much like an invasion force? The first principle in answering such a question is that one should never take the simple media-reported statements of any of the major protagonists at face value.

Yesterday I argued that an important part of the context for conflicts of this type is rival views of nationality. Here I look at the reality of the world’s many ambiguous ‘nations’ (we may call each of these a ‘polity’, a more inclusive term than ‘nation-state’ and a more specific term than ‘country’). Also, in the context of their present relationship to a dominant partner, we may all these places ‘annexes’, though not necessarily ‘annexed’.

My interest in political ambiguity was heightened when I watched the five-part BBC documentary series  Places that Don’t Exist, presented by the intrepid and familiar Simon Reeves. Four of the six places featured are located in the former Soviet Union; none of these far from Ukraine. Of the other two, one was Taiwan. (The sixth was Somaliland, a breakaway from Somalia.)

China and Taiwan.

My sense is that the status of Taiwan continues to remain the greatest threat to ‘world peace’ (where ‘world peace’ is here defined as anything that is not ‘world war’). China ‘has’ three ambiguous annexes: Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Each has its own quite different set of historical circumstances. Hong Kong, as a polity, was almost entirely independent of China for 157 years to 1997. Its principal relationship was with United Kingdom, and it became one of the world’s biggest financial centres. In the last 25 years it has been subject to a now-near-complete reclamation process, the last few years being ones of intense internal conflict.

The polity of Macau was linked to another nation (Portugal, in this case) for much longer than Hong Kong was. So far it seems to have avoided the conflict that has plagued Hong Kong, and may indeed be poised to become a new focal point for China’s one country, two systems presentation of diversity.

Taiwan was a full part of China in the immediate post- World War Two period, between the surrender of the Japanese occupiers (1945) and the completion of the Maoist [Communist] Chinese Revolution (1949). It became the final bastion of the pre-Mao regime. The new Communist regime had priorities in 1949 other than waging a final battle, in the island of Formosa, with the surviving forces led by Chiang Kai-Shek. To the Chinese Communist Party, the polity of Taiwan remains the most significant unreclaimed territory.

Very early on, from 1949, Taiwan became a significant icon of the Pacific ‘Cold War’. It became an important part of the United States’ informal Pacific empire. Taiwan is an ambiguous annex. As such, we have come to expect that any attempt by China to repossess Taiwan by military means would mean an immediate state of war between United States and China.

However, what is little known, is that the polity of Taiwan covers more than the big island of Formosa. Lieyu Township, on Taiwan’s island group of Kinmen, is just three kilometres of shallow water away from China’s Xiamen city. The Mashan Observation Post is similarly close to China. Another Taiwanese archipelago – the Matsu Islands, aka Lienchiang County – are just off the Fujian coast, near the Chinese city of Fuzhou. (For a few months in the 1990s, I hosted a boarder from Fuzhou; he was always intensely interested in news about the then military build-up across the Taiwan Strait.)

What would the United States or the United Kingdom do if China militarily occupied Kinmen or Lienchiang, and stopped there? Quite possibly even less than they did with respect to Hong Kong. Military responses, pragmatically, have to be proportionate. Few would want to risk a world war over a few islands that almost nobody ever knew existed.

China also incorporates other contested territories, and is particularly eager to keep them under tight control, given the importance of central power to the Chinese territorial state. One obvious one is Tibet. The other is ‘East Turkistan’, essentially Xinjiang, home of the Turkic (and Muslim) Uighur people. (See East Turkestan independence movement, and the Turkistan Islamic Party.) Another important point of contest is the borderlands between China and India; both countries are significant nuclear powers.

United States

The United States ‘has’ five external territories, plus two mainland enclaves. While none of these are politically ambiguous at present – in the sense that they are not currently contested – the five territories fall well short of being states (as Hawaii is). The territories are Puerto Rico, American Virgin Islands (whose people drive on the left), American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands (from where the 1945 atomic bombs ‘took off’) and Guam. The enclaves are Alaska, a full state, and Point Roberts, part of Washington State. Alaska remains the best place in the English-speaking world to see authentic Russian architecture; a clue to its ambiguous political history.

There are other places in the Pacific with significant American presence, including Okinawa (Japan). And, we shouldn’t forget the United States military enclave in Cuba, Guantanamo Bay.

New Zealand and its neighbours

New Zealand is a surprisingly interesting case. It has a realm with time zones covering a 24 hour span. (Niue is 24 hours behind New Zealand in summer; Tokelau, hundreds of kilometres to the north is a full day ahead of Niue).

New Zealand’s closest international neighbours – both on the Zealandia continental mass – are ambiguous foreign polities, with contested histories.

Norfolk Island would probably today be part of New Zealand’s realm, were it not for the convict history that tied it to Australia. (It is the only foreign territory that my parents ever took a holiday to, together. Today it is serviced by the regional airline, Air Chathams.)

Norfolk Island is an external – realm – territory of Australia, which has been recently subject to a (contested) loss of autonomy. According to Wikipedia, the results of a recent survey indicated that 25 percent of the local population want full independence; the remainder were equally split over whether their association should be with Australia or with New Zealand.

New Caledonia’s formal status today is as a French Overseas Territory (like French Polynesia and Wallis/Futuna; unlike Reunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique and French Guiana which are full ‘Departments’); ie New Caledonia is a French realm country.

New Caledonia’s sovereignty has been highly contested, though with the weight of the French identifying population prevailing. In 1988, an independence insurrection – Ouvéa cave hostage taking – was violently suppressed by the French Government, with at least 21 fatalities on both sides. Since then there have been a number of independence referendums, the results of which were determined – as noted – by the weight of population identities; the demographics favouring those with French identity. (In another group of islands, the Comoros Islands off Africa’s east coast, a similar demographic balance led to most of the islands becoming independent, but one island – Mayotte – becoming a French Department.)

United Kingdom

England probably ‘has’ the more ambiguous territories than any other nation. First there is Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, each with different circumstances, and with different degrees of and processes of contestation as hegemons of England. Then there are the nearby tax haven polities: Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. The last two – together known as the Channel Islands – are just off the French coast, a long way from England, and were occupied by Nazi Germany during World War 2.

Even the status of the Republic of Ireland is ambiguous. While a full member of the European Union, it continues to have a relationship with the English-centred United Kingdom that is different from the United Kingdom’s relationships with the rest of the European Union. It even shares an ‘All Ireland’ rugby team with the Northern Ireland ‘province’ of the United Kingdom. After all, Ireland is a part of the British Isles, and the flag of the United Kingdom continues to include the Irish cross of St Patrick.

The United Kingdom still maintains an extensive realm, which includes part of the European mainland (Gibraltar), enclaves of Cyprus (Britain’s equivalent of Guantanamo Bay), the Chagos Islands (recently in the news; and see this and this on youtube) including the American military base at Diego Garcia, and Pitcairn Island.

The most numerous group of British extensions is in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. They include Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands tax haven. Of particular interest here is the contested Falkland Islands (aka Las Malvinas) in the South Atlantic Ocean. Forty years ago, Argentina claimed or reclaimed Las Malvinas by military force. However, most of the Falklands’ residents identified as British, and were resistant to the claims from the South American mainland, especially as 1982 represented a particularly problematic period in Argentine history.

The result was a substantial military (and ultimately successful) operation undertaken by United Kingdom, though not supported by United States. It was never going to become a World War. But what if the nearby mainland had been Russia or China?

Other Europe and Asia

Before looking at Russia, we might note that both Denmark and Netherlands have significant ‘overseas territories’. In the Netherland’s case, the territories of Aruba and Curacao used to attend the Olympic Games as ‘Netherlands Antilles’; now their residents must form part of the Netherlands’ team. As in the Norfolk Island case, the possessor has this century taken the territory into a closer embrace.

Two other places that should be noted here are the Spanish possession in Africa of Ceuta, and Republika Srpska within what is generally recognised as Bosnian territory.

At either ends of Asia there: is Houthi Yemen, a product of Shia/Sunni Islamic rivalry; and the purported Republic of West Papua (and other contested territories in eastern Indonesia).

And there is of course Palestine, now two highly contested territories bisected by the post-1948 ethno-political state of Israel.

India has the seemingly permanent flashpoint of Jammu and Kashmir, contested with Pakistan. Similarly, Myanmar has Rakhine State. Philippines has its Bangsamoro region in Western Mindanao and the neighbouring Sulu Archipelago. All these contested places, like previously mentioned East Turkistan, are associated with Islamic as well as ethnic-identity nationalism.

Former Soviet Union

It is with the context of the above ambiguous political states that the Ukraine crisis – the problems and the solutions – can be understood. Before going directly to the Ukraine region, it is pertinent to note that, in 1945, the Soviet Union annexed a group of Kuril Islands from Japan. Now considered fully a part of Russia, these islands lie just a few kilometres to the east (not west!) of Hokkaido, one of Japan’s main islands.

So, if World War 3 was to break-out from the Ukrainian impasse, there is more fuel than just Taiwan for there to be a Pacific War in parallel with a European war.

The breakup of the Soviet Union into its constituent republics was inevitably going to create a number of border issues, as former provincial boundaries become national territorial boundaries, with the possibility of becoming geopolitical boundaries. (Indeed, we see this problem in the boundary within Ireland. While there are two distinct national polities within Ireland, the preference of all, nevertheless, is to downplay the role of the border.)

Ukrainian nationalism was always going to be a significant force, despite both a shared ethnicity with Russia and shared variant of Christianity (Orthodox). In the last 100 years this particularly relates to the economic exploitation of Ukraine by Russia, especially in Stalinist times. This parallels the economic exploitation of Ireland by England at the time (1840s and 1850s) of the potato famine.

It has taken time for some of the various nationalisms to unfold, however, thanks to the original terms of the Soviet Union breakup, that left compliant autocrats in charge of flawed fledgling democracies.

The first of the significant splits was Transnistria, on the Ukrainian edge of Moldova. The Moldovian Soviet Republic was an unstable Romanian-Russian identity mix. Transnistria, formed in the early 1990s, remains a strongly pro-Russian separatist polity that is internationally recognised today as part of Moldova. Russia does have military hardware in Transnistria, poised as part of Russia’s near encirclement of Ukraine.

Next was Abkhazia, a Russian-leaning province of Georgia located on the Black Sea close to Sochi. Abkhazia fought for (and won) its freedom from Georgia in 1992 and 1993. Still recognised in the west as a part of Georgia, Abkhazia is in reality still part of the ‘Russian Riviera’.

Next, in 1994, was Nagorno-Karabakh, which saw the creation of an unrecognised Armenian enclave within recognised Azerbaijan territory. In late 2020, Azerbaijan successfully reclaimed – by military means – Nagorno-Karabakh.

Jump to 2008. While the Beijing Olympic Games were being held, Russia invaded Georgia, a post-Soviet nation making strong advances to both Europe and NATO. Russia annexed the Georgian territory of South Ossetia, not far from the problematic Chechnya, again like Abkhazia a place nominally in Georgia but whose people identified, for the most part, with Russia. Russia also gained a set of assurances that Georgia would not become a full member of NATO. It is this event, however, that the American National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was almost certainly alluding to when he commented that he expected Russia to invade Ukraine before the end of the present Beijing Winter Olympics Games.

By the end of the Beijing Summer Olympic Games, this intervention had become a historical fait accompli. Today, most people, including most of the mainstream media, have forgotten. Looking back, it was certainly not regarded today as a lost opportunity by the west to engage in an expanded war with Russia.

Fast forward to late 2013. This is when the occupation of central Kyiv began, an event reminiscent of the Arab Spring occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo. The issue was the political leadership reneging on a promise to align Ukraine with the European Union. After three months and quite a lot of bloodshed, the President fled, and paved the way for a more western-aligned political leadership.

These events triggered the Russian intervention into Crimea, a strategic and ethnically diverse region not historically aligned with Ukraine. Thus, Crimea become another (strictly, two other) new nation that doesn’t officially exist. The parallel is with South Ossetia. At the same time, the eastern region of Donbas extended its attempts to breakaway from Ukraine, much as Abkhazia had fought against the state of Georgia. The result has been the creation of two unofficial Russian-aligned states that are usually referred to as Donbas. While there exists a definite boundary between Donbas and the rest of Ukraine, many people who lived in Donbas have moved to Russia which is more economically and militarily secure.

So, in the region there are effectively five ambiguous though Russian-aligned polities, three of which border on Ukraine and two of which are internationally recognised as part of Ukraine. We may also note that Belarus itself, with its strongly Russian-aligned regime, is also somewhat ambiguous, and helps to maintain the balance of power in the region. Belarus may be described, for the present at least, as a Russian-aligned ‘autonomy’.

Current Events

My present interpretation of the current impasse is that Russia has received intelligence to the effect that Ukraine plans to push to reclaim one or both of its ‘lost territories’. If I am correct, then Russia has no actual plans to invade Ukraine; certainly not as per the American ‘Olympic’ narrative. However, Russia I believe will take military action against Ukraine if the Kyiv-based government acts in any military way to reclaim either Donbas or Crimea. Crimea seems to more likely; especially it seems the more likely that the western powers would wish to prompt Ukraine to reclaim.

For a Ukrainian nation to go ahead and forge substantial ties with the European Union, it does not have to be distracted by its hitherto peripheral territories which have always been less keen to embark on that nationalist journey. For Russia, it would seem, the critical issue is that the five ambiguous territories maintain their present ambiguity. The Russian leadership might be ‘bad’, but I don’t think that they are ‘mad’.

What looks like an aggressive posture may really be about defending – and eventually recognising – the ‘places that do not exist’ as Russian-aligned ‘autonomies’. (Just as the United States will defend Taiwan – or at least the main island of Taiwan – from any attempt to reincorporate it into China.)

Some Wider Thoughts

NATO should be understood as a Cold-War institution that is no longer fit for purpose. Indeed a number of European Union Eurozone countries are not members of NATO: Ireland, Austria, and Finland. Finland is most significant here; it has a long history of rivalry with Russia, but is no longer seen as either beholden to Russia or a threat to Russia. Ukraine can forge for itself a future much as Finland has done. And it needs neither Crimea nor Donbas to do this.

It is also useful to note that the Russian desire to build a Greater Russia based upon Slavic identity may be not quite that. In the Interwar period – 1920s and 1930s – there was an underlying European racial hierarchy (as noted by Robert Boyce in his introduction in his 2009 book The Great Interwar Crisis) with Teutonic peoples (including ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and Scandinavians) at the top, Latin peoples next, and Slavic peoples below them. These beliefs, common in the past, are of course racist nonsense. Nevertheless, they linger, and East European people have suffered much because of them. Is Vladimir Putin the champion of the historically unappreciated Slavs? I think maybe not. The Rus’ people were in fact Swedish Vikings. And the supreme Rus’ were the Kyivan Rus’; thus the Russian national identity broadly defined may reflect the once-accepted racial hierarchy rather than bely it.

So, it could be interpreted that President Putin would like to acquire the citadel of Kyiv as the pinnacle of a Russian hegemony that controls the world in the terms that some early political geographers understood such control. (See Halford Mackinder in Wikipedia, and this Battle for the Heartland commentary by Chris Trotter in 2017.)

Having noted that, my preferred view about the present crisis is that the Russian leadership principally wants to defend the former Soviet places which, officially, do not exist. And therein lies our problem; we find it hard to cast a narrative around places that few of us have heard of. And we default to the presumption of officially recognised territorial sanctity; except when it comes to Taiwan.

Conclusion

Intractable boundary issues can be practically resolved by allowing for ambiguity. So far, the process of ambiguity – and a willingness by interested parties to live with that – has held the post-war peace with respect to Taiwan. It can do the same with respect to the much more complex boundary issues associated with the post- Soviet Union unravelling. We can take the middle road, avoiding both territorial dogmatism and identity dogmatism. And, we should always be sensitive to the preferences of the people who live in these ambiguous territories; so long as those people are willing to live peaceably with their neighbours.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

When policymakers try to fix things, they often mess up because of the way the problem is formulated and the ways that subsequent policies are targeted. A classic example was the Closing the Gaps initiative in the early 2000s.

The problem – albeit simplified – is that some people are ‘advantaged’ and others are ‘disadvantaged’. In New Zealand, one of the groups that were (and presumably still are) disproportionately disadvantaged are Māori. (Another such group was, and is, Pasifika.)

One useful way of approaching the problem is that we can say as stylised facts:

• Seventy percent of non-Māori are advantaged, and thirty percent are disadvantaged.
• Thirty percent of Māori are advantaged, and seventy percent are disadvantaged.
• The socio-economic circumstances of advantaged Māori are comparable with the circumstances of advantaged non-Māori. And the socio-economic circumstances of disadvantaged Māori are comparable with the circumstances of disadvantaged non-Māori.

Closing the Gaps was meant to be about making the disadvantaged less-disadvantaged; or – better still – not disadvantaged at all. But the policymaking didn’t target the disadvantaged as such; rather it targeted Māori as the most prominent disadvantaged group. And it is true that if the median circumstance of Māori could be raised, given that the median Māori is disadvantaged, then the gap between a median disadvantaged person and a median advantaged person would close. Though many disadvantaged people – indeed the majority of disadvantaged people, who in New Zealand are not Māori – would not benefit

Today’s more modest equivalent of Closing the Gaps is the proposed creation of a Māori Health Authority. And, as in 2004, the National Party passionately opposes this as racially targeted policymaking. (I might note that Māori versus Pakeha constitutional issues have no more to do with ‘race’ than do issues in Northern Ireland between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’. In New Zealand’s case, the point of difference is that Māori are tangata whenua, not that Māori are ‘brown’; of course that doesn’t preclude the possibility that some people may be prejudiced against dark-skinned ethnicities, and thereby – knowingly or unknowingly – hold racist views towards Māori.)

Unintended Consequences

The problem with racially targeted policymaking of this sort is that it doesn’t address the actual problem (‘disadvantage’); instead such policies use ‘Māori’ as a proxy for ‘disadvantage’. (Other groups use other demographic proxies for disadvantage, such as ‘female’ or ‘working-class’ or ‘Muslim’.)

We are not yet clear as to the purpose of the Māori Health Authority.

Some believe that its purpose will be positive discrimination in favour of people with proven indigenous ancestry, especially in their ability to access health services. (Much as a Community Services Card discriminates in favour of cardholders.) If this is intended, it would be clearly problematic. Should a Māori family in Flaxmere or Kaikohe have more favourable access to services than their circumstantially identical Pakeha neighbours? Or should the community of Kaikohe be more favourably resourced than the community of Bluff?

The alternative interpretation is that the Māori Health Authority is an addition to the Health bureaucracy, that could only be justified – like other government bureaucracies – as a means to an overall improvement of health outcomes for all disadvantaged New Zealanders.

This is particularly problematic in today’s zero-sum fiscal environment. In a zero-sum fiscal environment, funding is from a fixed ‘pot of money’. This means that funding for one purpose comes at the expense of funding for other purposes (such as cancer treatment, or research on infectious diseases); and the policy issue becomes the ‘marginal health benefit’ that arises from this use of the money, as opposed to that use.

One of the most important refrains today is that Health is already over-bureaucratised, with far too great a proportion of funding going into ‘prioritisation services’; this being a euphemism for gate-keeping. Is an addition to the bureaucracy a more beneficial use of scarce resources than direct funding to train nurses, or to subsidise a greater range of life-enhancing drugs?

The concern that follows from this is the possibility that the principal benefit of the Māori Health Authority will be to provide enhanced career opportunities for the thirty percent of Māori who are not disadvantaged. And that the main people who will bear the opportunity cost of this benefit will be the presently disadvantaged, the majority of whom are the thirty percent of non-Māori who are disadvantaged.

The irony of this would be an opening of the gaps between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Indeed, a dispassionate look at socio-economic outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand since 2017 would be that it has been a period that could be described as an ‘opening of the gaps’.

————-

Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

contact: keith at rankin.nz

Over the last month, I enjoyed watching Origins on TV1. Very ambitiously, it looked at the origins of Tangata Whenua, going all the way back to the origins of humanity in Africa.

Nevertheless, the final episode in particular bothered me. It presented a somewhat uncritical view of the ‘Express Train from Taiwan to Polynesia’ view which points to China as the pre-Taiwan homeland of Māori, and that the diaspora from China was comparatively recent (ie within the last 10,000 years).

To me, this ‘Taiwan model’ seems to have the same problems as the long-discredited Thor Heyerdahl ‘Kon Tiki’ model which postulated that the primitive but noble savages of Polynesia came from a civilised continental population source; in the one case South America, in the other case China. Both hypotheses were formulated by people with Eurocentric views of the diaspora of civilisations, and both emphasise the historical rapidity of the process from source (eg China) to final destinations (eg Aotearoa).

The other problem with the final episode of Origins was the suggestion that, because there is evidence of all forms of humanity and pre-humanity having existed in Ethiopia, then all of these forms of humanity must have evolved in or near modern-day Ethiopia.

Human Origins

From the history of primates, there is little doubt that the first pre-humans evolved in Africa. However, it is not now believed that apes first evolved in Africa. Rather – as Tim Flannery shows in Europe, a Natural History – apes, indeed bipedal apes, originated in Europe over ten million tears ago. They subsequently migrated to Africa and died out in Europe.

Where modern humans first evolved is not clear, because they most likely at some stage become extinct in their evolutionary home. The evidence seems to show, however, that the present world’s population of homo sapiens was largely or entirely populated from modern South Africa. This fits the idea that most humans were wiped out by a catastrophic event; the supervolcanic eruption of Lake Toba in modern Sumatra 75,000 years ago is an obvious candidate. Such an event could have left a population of humans in Southern Africa as the only (or principal) viable population of our species on Earth.

We might note that modern dystopian and science fiction stories frequently postulate the near-extinction of humanity. In my lifetime the idea of a ‘nuclear winter’ (caused by an asteroid collision if not by a nuclear holocaust) has been the main such catastrophe. This century, the ideas of climate or pandemic catastrophes are gaining traction for obvious reasons. In all of these cataclysmic scenarios, Aotearoa New Zealand has appeared to the wider world as a possible ark or bolthole for humanity, and subsequent human restoration. Indeed Aotearoans have milked that idea to the rest of the world: clean, green, temperate, and far away.

If, in a few centuries time, Aotearoa was to be the repopulation reservoir for the rest of the world, and was thousands of years later investigated by archaeologists and paleo-anthropologists, some would conclude that humanity had evolved in Aotearoa. Others would find archaeological connections to Europe; though their ideas would be rejected by many on the grounds that Europe is much too far away to have been a possible source population for Aotearoa. The academic consensus would probably settle on modern humans as being a South Pacific species.

In today’s world, probably over 60 percent of people live at altitudes of less than 100 metres above sea level. And a similarly large (or larger) percentage of people live in places that are especially vulnerable to earthquakes, volcanoes or alluvial flooding. There are good economic reasons why people live in these places which are subject to high natural risk. Past demographic catastrophes will have followed these natural forms – earthquakes, eruptions, floods – although warfare and pandemics have also taken large human tolls.

Principles of Evolution

Evolution happens, cultural and biological. Indeed most people who believe in a specific cultural creation story do accept that, subsequent to creation, people have evolved; ie changed and diversified.

The principle drivers of evolutionary change are death and isolation. It is most likely that new forms of human – or other lesser but substantial changes such as the development of new language clusters – arise from populations being separated for a long time, and for some populations to die, creating new spaces for non-extinct populations to occupy. The places therefore in which most evolutionary change is most likely to have taken place were those places most subject to natural disasters, including disasters such as the beginnings and ends of ice ages. In particular, it was at the ends of ice ages that sea levels increased (and increased substantially), quite rapidly in historical time. Rising sea levels created both death and isolation.

Africa is probably the most naturally stable part of the world. While Africa therefore becomes a good candidate for slow evolution – the small changes that accumulate over long time spans – it is a poor candidate for fast evolution. Aftrica is the part of the world least subject to the catastrophic vagaries of nature mentioned above. So, in the bigger story of humanity, Africa makes a great ark – a reservioir from which global repopulation may take place – but a poor site for the origins of the faster more dramatic forms of evolutionary change which are essential to the human story.

Māori Origins

For Pākehā, origins as Pākehā are simple. We are European. Most are of Anglo-Celtic European origin.

Māori on the other hand are Austronesian, Polynesian Austronesian. So where or what is Austronesia?

The core Austronesian territories today are Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia. Their languages are the present languages of those territories, just as Italian, Spanish and French are the principal modern variants of Latin.

Ancient Austronesia includes the lands of those three countries, plus Taiwan, and most probably Japan. (Possibly the placenames Fuji, Fujian and Fiji all have the same meaning, as places defining the sometime periphery of Austronesia. We may think of Japan much as we think of Britain; the ‘British’ people now live on the western fringe of that island, as Welsh. Similarly, the Ainu people now live in Japan’s northern fringe.) Just as Aotearoa, Australia, and the United States (and others) are regarded today as peripheral neo-Europe, so Polynesia, Micronesia, Island Melanesia and Madagascar are today peripheral neo-Austronesia.

Austronesia means ‘southern islands’, with the reference point being Asia. But this is misleading. 15,000 years ago during the Ice Age, Austronesia was an Asian subcontinent, Sundaland; comparable to India or Europe. The seas of modern Indonesia are shallow, for the most part less than 100 metres deep.

Austronesia was a prehistorical place, comparable with Europe, India, and China as prehistorical places. Further, if we consider an ice-age world, Austronesia was probably the most densely populated part of that world. A large proportion of its land had an altitude of less than 100 metres, making it much like northern Europe today. Further, ancient Austronesia was on the Pacific ring of fire, making it vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic explosions. It had all of the elements required to propel rapid evolutionary change.

After the year 15,000 BP (before present), the last Ice Age ended, not as a slow process of climate change but in three rapid leaps: about 14,000 then 11,000 then 8,000 year ago. Austronesia became, in stages, a drowned subcontinent made up mainly of islands. This context represents the perfect environment for the evolution of sophisticated marine technology and culture. Austronesia is a much more obvious place than China as an incubator for maritime technology. Taiwan should be understood, prehistorically, as connected to Austronesia rather than to China, with the likelihood that, during the ice age, Austronesian people settled from Taiwan along what is now the Chinese coast.

Māori are Austronesian, and Austronesians (like Europeans in later millennia) visited distant parts of the world (eg South America) and colonised some of these (eg Madagascar). In the case of the Polynesian and Micronesian islands, Austronesians were their first peoples.

Both the Polynesian and Madagascan ventures were comparatively recent examples of Austronesian voyaging, and therefore well known. But earlier lesser known adventures made these possible; just as European oceanic venturing from the 15th century was made possible by the Portuguese firstly learning to sail to and from the Azores, Canary Islands, and Madeira. (Other important early oceanic maritime zones were the western Indian Ocean and the Baltic and North Seas. While some have called the Polynesians the Vikings of the South, as James Belich noted, it would have been more accurate to have called the Scandinavian Vikings the Polynesians of the North.)

We can understand the early development of Austronesian maritime culture as having been due to the post ice-age flooding of their lowlands, leaving archipelagos of nearby islands in their place. The development of oceanic skills will have arisen as sea levels raised further, and will have enabled those with the best skills – probably in modern Philippines – to sail to and from islands such as Guam and the Northern Marianas. Thus, the Marianas Islands are almost certainly critical to the evolution of South Pacific oceanic voyaging and settlement. The analogies here are between the Philippines and Portugal, and between Guam and the Azore Islands.

Conclusion

Aotearoa New Zealand has its human origins in Austronesia, of which Taiwan was a part. It is most likely that the critical maritime culture that enabled Austronesians to become the world’s first global maritime explorers was developed in Austronesia through the millennia of stop-go global warming (ie between 15,000 and 7,000 years ago), and probably not in Taiwan specifically.

Further, at least in the late years of the most recent Ice Age, the Austronesian subcontinent was surely the most sophisticated human culture that the world had, till then, ever hosted. Most likely there was a cultural spread from Austronesia to India and later to Europe. After all, the Austronesian languages are closer in form to the languages of Indo-Europe than to Chinese.

Diversity was in the spotlight last week. Te Wiki o te Reo Māori and Te Wā Tuku Reo Māori were embraced throughout organisations and homes. We also had the annual Diversity Awards NZ celebrating the organisations championing diversity and inclusion in workplaces.

Tellingly, most award recipients talked about ensuring our workplaces are representative of our society.

Having diversity at the table is an excellent and important start, but just as with Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, if our engagement ends there, we lose the full potential diversity and inclusion offer.

Research shows that diverse teams are more creative, innovative, resilient and empathetic. They are more productive and profitable. Shareholders and customers are starting to vote with their wallets too – requiring organisations to embrace diversity and inclusion.

Across New Zealand, our organisations are becoming more diverse due to changing demographics. The latest census data shows almost 40 percent of Kiwis identify as Māori, Pacific or Asian; and more than 55 percent in Auckland.

More than half of us identify as female, a quarter of us weren’t born here, and a quarter have disabilities. We also have an aging population.

But diversity without inclusion is meaningless.

Typical approach
The typical approach to diversity is to record the number of people in each diversity box, including: gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical ability, age, beliefs, socio-economic background, and education.

And we are seeing more and more organisations reporting in this way.

In many of my roles throughout my career, I have been the youngest, the only ethnic Indian, and migrant from the Pacific, a religious minority, and one of few women. That’s a few boxes I tick.

And yet I have been told that had I identified with the rainbow community and had a disability, I would be a better poster child for diversity.

We are in such a hurry to put people in boxes, we miss the intersectionality that arises as a result of the multiple forms of diversity they represent. We also fail to see that people have the potential to bring a lot more to the table than ticks in boxes.

A few years ago, a high-achieving Māori woman recalled to me her early experiences on boards. One of her board chairs would seek input from the males at the table and ignore her.

The reporting metrics would have shown a Māori woman on that board, but her knowledge, skills and experience were underutilised.

Tick box exercises
Sadly, such tick box exercises are still prevalent today. If anything, perhaps even more so as appointment panels are under more pressure now to ensure teams are diverse.

A tick box approach to diversity and inclusion also perpetuates stereotypes. By having a token Māori, or Pacific or Asian person at the table, we expect them to represent the views of entire communities. This ignores the huge diversity within Pacific and Asian communities.

We also forget that while we may identify with an ethnicity and its cultural values, our education, socio-economic background, life and work experiences all mean that our views are not going to be representative of everyone in our community. The same applies for people who identify with disabilities or gender minorities.

Just as we need all of us for diversity to exist, the responsibility for harnessing the value of diversity and inclusion lies with all of us too – not only those who are considered diverse, which is often minorities. While it is important leaders set the tone, the onus is on each of us to learn about those different from ourselves – whatever dimension that difference may take.

Step in someone else’s shoes for a day. Covid-19 and the lockdowns magnified some of these differences. Consider that 90 percent of the newly unemployed as a result of covid-19 have been women.

Consider that Māori and Pacific people are more likely to end up in unemployment statistics than other communities.

Consider older colleagues unable to work because they were vulnerable or immunocompromised. Contrast those worried about how to put food on the table with those who complained about missing their regular coffee fix.

Business claims
Many businesses claim they seek to maximise diversity, but their systems promote similarity. Recruiting practices emphasise hiring from historically reliable sources.

Job ads give cues which help attract or turn off certain candidates. Selection practices often tend to choose candidates based on what’s worked in the past.

Within an organisation, dominant cultures tend to subsume all others. This is also reflected in approaches to performance and pay reviews, and promotions, which mean minorities and women continue to stagnate and plateau.

Diversity and inclusion cannot be a one-off exercise. Organisations need strong, sustained and inclusive leadership and culture. A culture where all people feel respected and valued, and not viewed as ticks in a box.

Ziena Jalil is an independent director, strategic consultant, and diversity and inclusion advocate. This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre with the author’s permission and was originally published by Stuff.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

How racially prejudiced is Aotearoa New Zealand? Well, we saw just how racially prejudiced it is a weekend ago when a Stuff reporter showed us pictures of the breaches of alert level 3 at the skate park and basketball court in Victoria Park.

In one photo, there was a group of young Pakeha males, in the other, there was a group of young Asian males playing basketball.

The reporter also mentioned an Auckland councilor who was “gutted” at the numbers of skate boarders in a park on the North Shore and lamented that the skaters and basketballers had removed the yellow caution tapes that ran around the areas.

During my walk in my West Auckland neigbourhood and around our playgrounds during the same time, and again the next day, there was no one on the playground and not anyone I could see in the skate parks.

My friend who lives in South Auckland said the playgrounds in her area were also empty.

When New Zealand was hit by that first wave of covid-19, there were few Māori and Pasifika peoples who had contracted the disease. Yet almost everyone went into lockdown.

Almost everyone. Māori and Pasifika were nowhere near as affected as Pakeha, yet they understood what community and community transmission meant and went into lockdown, for the sake of Aoteaora.

Disproportionate impact
Now this second wave has disproportionately affected some Pasifika communities in South Auckland. Yet to those on the North Shore and in Ponsonby, they could not give a damn.

To them, people (in South Auckland) are not their people. That community is not their community.

Gutted to see this again. People keep taking the caution tape and signs off our CLOSED playgrounds and skateparks. 400 people have died in Melbourne from their second outbreak. 2000 healthcare workers have Covid in Melbourne. pic.twitter.com/ZPKZPjxtWZ

— Richard Hills (@richardhills777) August 23, 2020

They will flout the lockdown rules because this time it is not their people or community impacted on. South and West Auckland have significant numbers of Pasifika, Māori and ethnic communities.

We understand the concept of community. When one falls, we gather to lift them up.

David Farrier wrote about how easy it is for a rumour to travel. He spoke to the young professional who was the cause of the vile rumour against a Pasifika family in South Auckland and who had erroneously and cruelly linked the family to the cause of the second outbreak.

But Farrier was gentle with this person, almost apologising to him for having to interview him about his “misdemeanour”. Would he have been so sympathetic had the transgressor been a person of colour?

It is time that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the government start implementing alert levels to put the country in lockdown due to the ongoing racism and racial prejudice pandemic.

If Ardern can take bold steps to eliminate the virus, even putting the economy into hibernation for the sake of the country’s wellbeing, surely she can do the same for the sake of the country’s humanity.

As for those unempathetic, racially prejudiced dullards in Ponsonby and the North Shore, go to South Auckland and learn what community means.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A New Zealand youth MP Shaneel Lal is speaking out against education policies that exclude some Pacific Island people from Pasifika programmes and scholarships as unfair.

Lal, who is eighth generation Indo-Fijian, applied for a Pasifika scholarship at the University of Otago only to be told he had to prove he had “indigenous” Pacific Island ancestry because Indo-Fijians did not qualify.

He is not the only one to be rejected on the basis of race – even though he was born in Fiji – but he aims to take the matter up with the Education Minister Chris Hipkins.

Lal told Stuff: “I know I’m Fijian. I’m eighth generation Fijian. I have indigenous [ancestry] along the lines I just cannot draw a family tree and say, ‘this person is an indigenous person’.”

Lal said the policies were unfair as Indo-Fijian people experienced many of the same challenges as other Pacific Island groups.

He said that some universities that did not recognise Indo-Fijians as Pacific people “kind of highlights the subtle racism that’s going on in our Pacific community”.

The Auckland-based student said he struck the same problem when applying for Pasifika leadership opportunities while at secondary school and his cousin had a similar experience when she tried to apply for a place in the Māori and Pacific Admission Scheme (MAPAS) at the University of Auckland.

‘Not enough evidence’
He was told his passport and birth certificate were not enough evidence of him being of Pacific descent and he would need to get a Pacific community leader to vouch for him.

He said that would be difficult having come from Fiji to New Zealand in 2014.

The irony in his circumstance was that he was chosen as youth MP for Minister for Building and Construction, Minister for Customs and Minister for Ethnic Communities Jenny Salesa, who was not responding on the issue.

When asked for a response, a spokesperson from her office said: “Yes, but probably not from the minister. It will be around definitions and criteria.”

Meanwhile, Professor Vijay Naidu from the University of the South Pacific based in Suva – where all Fiji citizens are recognised as Fijian and the indigenous people are recognised as I-Taukei – had a historical perspective on the issue.

“Some years ago, Loraine Pillai who migrated to New Zealand many years ago and retired as a senior high school teacher over there wrote to then Prime Minister Helen Clark about Pasifika identity and Indo-Fijians,” he said.

“Her response was that Indo-Fijians were Pasifika. Apparently, Aotearoa had arrived at this decision when [founding Fiji prime minister] Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara had expressed his disaffection with the absence of Fijians of Indian descent at an official reception hosted for him.

“Back to Loraine’s letter. She wrote her letter because, at a workshop for school administrators in Wellington, she had been told by a woman by the surname of Wendt that Indo-Fijians were not regarded as Pasifika people.”

Education Minister Chris Hipkins has said universities set the criteria for Pasifika scholarships, not the government.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

A call has been made to members of the Pacific community in New Zealand to check on loved ones during the current Auckland lockdown and to remember there is no stigma or shame in getting tested for covid-19.

Dr Jemaima Tiatia-Seath, co-head of the School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland, said it was important in these extraordinary times to check in on family, friends, colleagues and students.

“Through my work around suicide prevention, it has always been a key message to check in on each other, and that was born from siblings checking in on each other once they have lost a loved one to suicide,” Dr Tiatia-Seath said.

READ MORE: Vaccine diplomacy heats up in the Pacific

Dr Tiatia-Seath, a specialist in mental health and well-being among Pacific people, said it made complete sense to continue such connection in the Covid-19 era.

“Sometimes we get so caught up in our own bubbles that we seem to not realise that other people may not be doing so well, and it is so hard to detect that when you’re not physically near or seeing people on the daily,” she said.

The Auckland family at the centre of the current covid-19 cluster received a lot of negative comments on social media, and Dr Tiatia-Seath said the stigmatisation of that response had not helped with stress levels in the Pacific community.

“Covid-19 knows no ethnicity, so it was extremely unhelpful to point out the ethnicity of the family. The virus is the problem here,” she said.

Negative social media
The Auckland family at the centre of the current covid-19 cluster received a lot of negative comments on social media, and Dr Tiatia-Seath said the stigmatisation of that response had not helped with stress levels in the Pacific community.

“Covid-19 knows no ethnicity, so it was extremely unhelpful to point out the ethnicity of the family. The virus is the problem here,” she said.

Dr Tiatia-Seath pointed out that when people are disconnected from others, it could be hard to pick up signs of distress without being physically present.

“I think when you notice people close down their social media accounts, people that were usually active or engaging online have suddenly gone quiet, I would check up on that person.

“Ensuring families in need have food, checking that our elderly are okay and connected and that our young people are staying engaged after being disconnected from their schools. These are the kind of people we need to look out for,” she said.

The University of Auckland academic said parents needed a lot of support especially if they were having to also be educators for their children.

“We need to be vigilant about our own wellbeing as well as other people’s. Part of that is watching for digital fatigue.

Long Zoom calls
“Zoom video calls should not be so long, and be mindful and respectful of the spaces people are in. It can sometimes be intrusive for some, as you are inviting people into your home.”

She said not spending a lot of time on social media could also be beneficial for wellbeing.

“There’s no stigma or shame in being tested for covid-19”

Pacific union members also encouraged people in the communities to get tested for covid-19 if they were showing symptoms.

Komiti Pasefika, the Council of Trade Unions Pacific Island worker representative group, have learnt through their engagement with Pacific workers that there was fear in regards to taking a test.

“A negative test provides the assurance that you and your family are safe. Where there is a positive result then it is about following the correct procedures to make sure our families are safe and well,” co-convenor Brian Palalagi said.

“We encourage our Pacific families that if they are not well, go and get tested.

Time for GP
“Take the time to go to your GP or Community Based Assessment Centres (CBAC) to get tested.

Palalagi said if people are were concerned about what this means for their work, talk to their union organiser or union delegate in the workplace.

“Our view is that you should be accommodated with full pay to be able to make your contribution to the team of 5 million who are wanting to stamp this virus out of our communities.

He agreed with Tiatia-Seath that people were the solution to the coronavirus.

“We know that covid-19 is a tricky virus, which doesn’t discriminate who it infects. The virus doesn’t discriminate, and neither should we,” Palalagi said.

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

• All RNZ coverage of covid-19
• If you have symptoms of the coronavirus, call the NZ Covid-19 Healthline on 0800 358 5453 (+64 9 358 5453 for international SIMs) or call your GP – don’t show up at a medical centre.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It is clear and proper that New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is closely monitoring a concerning situation of deteriorating violence in West Papua.

It is also apparent that groups who have long monitored the security situation in West Papua have contacted the New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, urging her to speak up against the violence and human rights abuses in the Indonesian-controlled state. I believe the Prime Minister should. Here’s why.

When considering the history of West Papua – the increasing violence; the enduring wish of its peoples for self-determination; the arrests on treason charges of those who seek a pathway toward independence; the intensifying concerns of its immediate neighbours Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the states that make up the Melanesian Spearhead Group – it would be a brave but significant step should New Zealand also add its considerable weight behind a call for a multilateral-led resolution to the West Papua conflict.

New Zealand’s reputation as an honest-broker on global human rights issues, and the Prime Minister’s significant reputation for being able to identify common-ground, and, map out a way forward for parties with disparate interests, would provide significant leverage and resolution to a conflict that is at risk of becoming a human catastrophe.

Also, New Zealand is right, smack, in the middle of the Asia Pacific region. Despite Australia’s historical interests in Melanesia, this is New Zealand’s patch as well. Human rights abuses, conflicts, disorder within our region will impact on New Zealand in the future as they have in the past.

Take the Solomon Islands conflict in the early 2000s. The Melanesian state was descending into civil war. In 2003, I was in Townsville, at an Australian airforce base when the leaders of Melanesian and Polynesian states (including New Zealand’s Helen Clark and Australia’s John Howard) signed a non-aggression pact and sent armed forces to the Solomon Islands to help reestablish peace and progress.

The operation became known as RAMSI (Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands).

Under RAMSI, once order was restored in the Solomon Islands, the countries of this region helped the once chaotic state to establish good governance and government operations, and helped to establish a thriving civil society.

The merits of RAMSI can be seen today in how the Solomon Islands now functions as a progressing state and valuable member of the Pacific Islands Forum.

Regarding West Papua, New Zealand, and indeed the other nations of the region, ought not to permit a repeat of the violence that took hold of East Timor in 1999.

For years those advocating self-determination in East Timor were persecuted and killed by forces and militia loyal to Indonesia’s interests. In 1999 the crisis descended into massacre. In the end, it was estimated over 100,000 people were butchered in an unnecessary and preventable street-conflict.

At the time in 1999, New Zealand was hosting APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Co-Operation) leader’s summit. It was the end of the National Party’s run of government and Jenny Shipley was the prime minister. The government was determined to keep East Timor and its troubles off the APEC agenda. It refused to allow the massacre to be discussed at formal APEC meetings, that is, until the United States’ then president Bill Clinton and Japan’s then prime minister Keizō Obuchi demanded that a special meeting to discuss a multilateral response to the East Timor crisis be held.

While thousands of people were being massacred on the streets of East Timor’s capital, Dili, the leaders of APEC’s nations forged a consensus that became a pathway to peace.

Obuchi’s message to his Indonesian counterpart Habibie was as follows: “East Timor remains in a very difficult situation. But Japan has a good relationship with Indonesia. And Japan will continue to encourage Indonesia to take measures to bring East Timor back to a state of peace.”

He went further with diplo-speak akin to: ‘We are your friend Habibie, you know we are your friend. Afterall we provide you with $2 billion US in humanitarian aid [60 percent of the annual total]. We do not want to take that away from you, to do so will cause hardship throughout Asia, and only bring retaliatory consequences to all. So allow the international peacekeepers in to help you bring about peace. To do so is not an embarrassment. It is recognising the gesture of a friend. And to do so will prevent Japan from having to withdraw its aid to the people of Indonesia.” (ref. Scoop, Selwyn Manning, 1999)

The gesture was significant and began a process that led to East Timor becoming the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste – a self-determining independent state.

I argue here, that there is no need for Asia Pacific’s leaders to sit back and dispassionately observe a disturbing escalation of violence in West Papua.

Timor-Leste’s experience, as does RAMSI – the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands – provide examples of how leaders of a region, who have the willpower, can and do bring warring parties back from the brink of atrocity.

Jacinda Ardern has, for good reasons, obvious diplomatic credentials. She is seen as an honest broker on the world stage. A new generation leader. She is reacquainting New Zealand to a foreign policy that we were once proud of, that is as an independent Pacific Island state. The realignment is something to celebrate. With regard to West Papua, there is an opportunity to use it, and to do good for the people there, who are experiencing persecution and death for their ethnicity and for their political views.

It need not be so.

by Dr Bryce Edwards

This week might come to be seen as a turning point in New Zealand’s complex trading and political relations with China. Suddenly there is a very strong awareness of the deteriorating relations between the capitals of Wellington and Beijing. And although there is plenty of confusion and contention about the details, it’s clear that the Chinese Government has initiated a type of political blowback against New Zealand. This is based on what the Beijing government see as a betrayal by its formerly-close trading partner.

Three factors have been discussed this week as signalling that China has initiated a campaign of retaliation against New Zealand: 1) the sudden announcement that China is postponing the long-planned launch of tourism initiative in Wellington next week, 2) the mysterious turning back of an Air New Zealand flight to Shanghai in the weekend, and 3) the long-running inability of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to arrange a diplomatic visit to China.

The story about the postponement of the tourism launch was broken by Barry Soper on the frontpage of the Herald on Tuesday, explaining that: “The 2019 China-New Zealand Year of Tourism was meant to be launched with great fanfare at Wellington’s Te Papa museum next week, but that has been postponed by China” – see: China, New Zealand links sink to new low: PM Jacinda Ardern’s visit on hold, tourism project postponed.

In a second piece on Tuesday, Soper points out that the diplomatic explanations for the postponement aren’t credible: “the lame excuse from Wellington officials that there was a change of schedule. Given the Year was announced two years ago by the Key Government when the Chinese Premier visited here, Beijing’s had plenty of time to schedule it in” – see: NZ feeling the heat of the Chinese dragon.

This article also delves into the long-running difficulties that Ardern is having in getting an official visit agreed to by Beijing. Soper says: “The invitation for Jacinda Ardern to visit Beijing early this year’s been put on ice and all her talk at the end of last year about neither side being able to coordinate their diaries was baloney.”

In addition, Soper points to the third issue – the “turning back of the new Air New Zealand plane over the weekend, which was half way to Shanghai, because it wasn’t registered”. These three incidents illustrate, according to Soper that “New Zealand is feeling the heat of the Chinese dragon’s breath and if we’re not careful it could incinerate us.” He reports that “word from the Chinese capital is that retaliation is being worked on.”

And Soper points out that it’s easy to understand why the Chinese have become upset with New Zealand, after the Government here essentially decided late last year to ban the Chinese company Huawei from being involved in the new 5G telecommunications network.

I covered this at the time in my column, Huawei decision is the price of being in Five Eyes, pointing out that the decision was widely seen as fulfilling a US Government request to help it its geopolitical battle against China and Huawei. I predicted, “There is certainly going to be a cost for the ban… this country’s economic and diplomatic ties with the superpower of China will now be strained as a result.”

Of course, it wasn’t just the Huawei decision that soured relations with China – Wellington has been edging away from a close friendship with Beijing for a few years. This is all explained in a must-read column today by Victoria University of Wellington’s strategic studies specialist, Robert Ayson, who goes through the deterioration of the Wellington-Beijing relationship, saying that even under John Key “New Zealand was raising concerns about China’s behaviour in the South China Sea” and in return received some messages “suggesting that Wellington should stay quiet if it wanted an FTA upgrade” – see: New Zealand and China: time for clarity in a hall of mirrors.

According to Ayson, New Zealand’s criticisms of China have been increasing, especially with Ron Mark as Minister of Defence, and with the Government “calling out” China “for nefarious cyber activities”.

The Labour-led Government is still denying, or at least downplaying, the serious pushback that is now coming from Beijing. For the most recent examples of this, see Jo Moir’s news report, Winston Peters dismisses claims govt visits to China stalling.

The best quote in this story is from Shane Jones who declares: “I don’t think I’m one of these losery politicians that’s apparently not allowed to go to China, in fact I’m very popular with the Chinese – I think they see a kindred industrial spirit.” And David Parker is also reported as having visited China and seen no signs of trouble in the relationship.

But there’s clearly now a consensus amongst political commentators and journalists that the political blowback from China is real, many of who are complaining that the Prime Minister and Government are either failing to be upfront or else simply being delusional about the relationship.

Veteran political journalist Richard Harman reports that “the foreign affairs community” is certainly asking questions about China’s retaliation against New Zealand, and says diplomats and officials even see the incident with the Air New Zealand flight as evidence that the relationship has soured – see his column, Why was the AirNZ plane turned back?.

The suggestion is made that China is now cracking down “on technical infringements of its laws” when it comes to New Zealand exporters or the national carrier. In this regard he reports that Victoria University’s David Capie “suggested that what the incident showed was that New Zealand no longer had a special relationship with China. In other words, all things being equal previously, China would have found a way to let the plane land.”

China is prone to using this type of ambiguous retaliation, according to Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva: “China has a history of operating with plausible deniability when it comes to meting out punishments” – see: NZ-China ‘scheduling issues‘ cause for concern.

Sachdeva reports, “One observer noted that blowback often begins with tourism numbers, moving onto international education before spreading to the wider trade and economic relationship – a script into which the postponement of the Year of Tourism launch sits uneasily.”

The problem, according to the New Zealand Herald, is that New Zealand appears to have chosen sides in the growing US-China rivalry – see the editorial: Has our govt antagonised China?. It points out that “it is not hard to see why China would have the impression this country is not the friend it used to be. The new Government’s ‘reset’ of policy towards the Pacific Islands is strongly tinged with support for the US and suspicion of China’s interests in the region.”

New Zealand observers in Beijing are also commenting on what’s going on. The most interesting is businessman David Mahon, who is interviewed by Liam Dann, saying that the decision to ban Huawei was “seen as a Five Eyes stitch up” and “a breach of trust” – see: NZ/China relationship: ‘We have a big problem’.

Mahon suggests that New Zealand had been building a much closer relationship with China for the last four decades, with the Chinese having huge respect for this country, but “In the last 12 months or so that has almost reversed. So there is now a very different view, almost an opposite view of New Zealand.”

There are real dangers of the China-NZ relationship getting much worse. Geopolitical and security analyst Paul Buchanan says that he’s now warning his clients against going to China due to risks to their safety as a result of what’s going on at the governmental level. On Newstalk ZB, Buchanan said “if you are a New Zealand resident in China, you need to be cognisant of the fact that there could be a knock on your door and you could be taken away on corruption charges or turpitude charges” – see: Kiwis warned over ‘hostage diplomacy’ from China.

Slowly but surely, the current government has engineered a major reorientation of foreign policy according to Audrey Young, who labels the Relationship with China a diplomatic mess. She complains that this “was never foreshadowed before the last election”.

The shift appears to lie with New Zealand First and Winston Peters: “Peters has been an irritant. A year ago Peters framed his Pacific Reset in terms of a response to counter China’s growing influence in the region, and he challenged China’s most important foreign policy strategy, the Belt and Road initiative. He ended the year with a speech in Washington, almost a love-letter to America, practically begging them to get more involved in the Pacific to counter China’s influence. A National Party Foreign Minister could not have made such a speech without being accused of wanting to rejoin Anzus.”

According to Young, the onus is now on the Government, and the Prime Minister, to fix the deterioration. They need to “to take a lot more care in preserving the relationship New Zealand had and to be less cavalier.”

Similarly, the Prime Minister needs to sort out her long-promised trip to Beijing, according to economics journalist Hamish Rutherford – see: Until Jacinda Ardern visits China, questions about the relationship will only deepen.

Rutherford discusses the on-again-off-again trip: “Ardern is left trotting out the line that this is a scheduling issue, and the only thing keeping her from an official visit is scheduling clashes. This has been the case for some time; journalists were asked to prepare for a trip in December, however this was abruptly cancelled. The longer the situation goes on, the more it appears that the excuse that the problems are caused by scheduling issues are simply a subtle diplomatic slap. For weeks there have been rumours that officials at the Chinese Embassy have warned the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade that the trip is not happening until other issues are resolved, something Mfat denies.”

Herald business editor Fran O’Sullivan is also calling for the Government to quickly fix the problems – see: Chinese relations must get back on track. Her suggestion, however, is that the “postponed” tourism event needs to be sorted out by the Minister of Tourism Kelvin Davis getting “on the first plane up to China to sort out the debacle”.

But perhaps it’s the Minister of Foreign Affairs that needs to be sorted out. Richard Harman suggests that this might already be happening: “The Prime Minister appeared yesterday to deliver a subtle message to Foreign Minister Winston Peters telling him, she, not him, ran foreign policy. This contrasts with her admission last year that she had not read a speech he gave in Washington directly criticising China and calling for more American involvement in the Pacific” – see: Ardern takes the lead on China.

Could Peters even be shifted on from his portfolio, in order to satisfy the Chinese? It seems unlikely, but that’s the hint that security specialist Robert Ayson is making when he says that fixing the NZ-China relations “may also mean a change in the pecking order within the politburo in Wellington.”

Ayson’s column, cited above, also has plenty of other suggestions for how the mess might be fixed – and these include providing the Chinese government with greater clarity about the Huawei decision, showing that New Zealand is not simply “a willing member of a new Cold War”, stop cosying up to the US, and pull back from Winston Peters’ anti-China Pacific Reset strategy.

Finally, last month Matthew Hooton wrote an important and prescient column about New Zealand’s changing relationship with China and US, and this is well worth reading as background for what is happening now – see: Is Jacinda Ardern on board with the Winston Peters Reset?.