NZ Aotearoa snippets (pn699)

NOTE the new bird, a korimako/bellbird in the heading.

Michael Bassett

The NZ Herald and Northland Age  had to withdraw an article written by ex LP MP Michael Bassett who thinks we are being Māori-fried.  He wrote:

• The use of Aotearoa only recent, despite evidence it was used in the 1840s and before, and use of New Zealand is much more recent. 
• He selects 1860 the Māori population of Auckland Tāmaki Makarau as only 800 and  fails to mention why. mainly government's claim that Ngāti Whātua were in rebellion and they to the Waikato. The population in 1840 and 1880 was much higher.
• He wants schools to celebrate the “more developed culture” that Britain supposedly brought to the South Pacific, and fails to mention most fled from poverty and oppression..

As The Spinoff's Scott Hamilton writes in "Racism on a grand scale": The past is composed of an infinite number of events. Historians have to select a few. The events they select, and the stories they tell with those events, to some extent reflect their personal beliefs and experiences. That’s why history is always partly subjective as well as partly objective, and why there is no final, single historical narrative. But Bassett’s cherry-picking of events goes far beyond what would be acceptable to serious scholars of the past, and his evidence-free claims about Māori population and the history of our toponyms would also be rejected. It is hard to believe that the author of the text printed by the Northland Age was once a history professor. Bassett’s intellectual decline proves once again that bigotry is injurious to scholarship.

Jamie Lee-Ross

Ex Nat Party and Advance NZ Party co-leader Jamie Lee-Ross gets weirder and weirder.

• He's selling pills to protect you against 5G and   
• A Nutrient supplement Praesidium to protect you against just about everything

Read The Stuff article here. See also pn684 for One NZ party.