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| Richard Shaw |
Opinion: We don’t all start out in life from the same place, writes Richard Shaw, and that is why treating people equally can mean unequal outcomes.
Following the formation of the National-ACT-New Zealand First government, there has been a good deal of noise about the importance of treating everyone the same.
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| Taranaki, confiscated land |
This sort of thing happens periodically in a country which is generally pretty poor at recognising just how often people are not treated equally.
In fact, depending on whether or not they meet certain eligibility criteria, we treat people differently all the time. It’s a banal fact of life.
People over the age of 65 receive publicly funded superannuation; those yet to reach that age do not. Tertiary students are able to access interest free loans (to fund their study) that aren’t available to other people. People holding mortgages on investment properties will shortly be able to get tax relief that other types of mortgage holders aren’t eligible for.
A less banal example: Professor Lisa Marriott’s research shows than someone convicted of tax evasion is much less likely to receive a custodial sentence than a person who commits welfare fraud, even though the monetary value of their misdemeanours is often vastly greater.
For some reason, however, it is different treatment on the basis of ethnicity that fires some people up - especially when it comes to Māori.
So it’s important to remind ourselves that, historically, Māori have often been treated differently – and almost always to their detriment.
The examples are legion (for starters, Google “Māori veterans World War I treated differently” and see what turns up), but I’d like to offer just one or two from my own past.
A reinvention on stolen land
In 1865, the colonial state confiscated 1,275,000 acres of land in Taranaki, disregarding both the property rights of mana whenua (which were subsequently transferred to colonial settlers like my great-grandparents, who by 1921 ran three family farms on confiscated land) and the government’s own legislation (which stipulated that only those in rebellion against the Crown would suffer confiscations, even though in practice both ‘rebels’ and ‘non-rebels’ had their land taken).
To complete the process of land alienation, other policies that treated Māori differently were subsequently implemented.
Many Māori landowners were charged occupation licences to live on their own land; those licences did not apply to non-Māori landowners. Non-Māori farmers were able to access loans that were denied Māori farmers. And a system of perpetual leases locked Māori out of their own land; that system, which remains in place today, has never applied to non-Māori landowners.
Some people, myself included, have benefited from these policies and other ways that Māori have been treated differently. The economic and other returns on investment enjoyed by the early settler-colonisers have been handed down to generations of their descendants.
Others, including Māori who lost land (and language and other things), continue to pay a price.
The land remains taken; the economic violence visited upon hapū and iwi has not been repaired; possible futures remain foregone. This stuff is not in the past – for good or ill, the consequences of being treated differently continue to shape the material circumstances many Māori find themselves in today.
After all, the effects of destroying a people’s economic base are long-lasting. You need only look at Irish history to learn that.
My Irish ancestors had their land confiscated by English imperialists in the mid-17th century.
Two hundred years later, they were still so impoverished – their land still taken; the economic violence still not repaired; their futures still foregone – that they left Ireland for Aotearoa and reinvented themselves as settlers on land stolen by the state from Māori.
Therein lies the nub of the problem.
You simply cannot explain the distressing statistics in Māori health, inequality, or suicide and incarceration as a consequence of poor choices made by individuals.
Those disparities – as the Irish will tell you – are what happen when a people’s social and economic structures are destroyed.
Equal treatment, unequal outcomes
Some people may simply be born into resources that others are denied.
In short, we do not all start out in life from the same place.
Some people have tangible and intangible resources that are denied to others – and we don’t necessarily earn these things, we may simply be born into them (or not, as the case may be).
Therefore, treating people equally can be bad for them: treat everyone the same and, for some, the inequality will simply be entrenched.
And if equal treatment leads to unequal outcomes, why would you not treat people differently to try and achieve equal (or at least improved) outcomes for them?
After all, it’s not as if anyone on the right side of the ledger will miss out on anything – who wants more heart surgery or treatment for diabetes that they don’t need?
This stuff is not all that hard to figure out. To cleave to the "equal treatment" line in the face of overwhelming evidence that this tactic actively harms some people is, at best, credulous.
At worst, it betrays a wilful refusal to accept the fact and ongoing consequences of colonisation – and a failure to acknowledge that while some were, and are, beneficiaries of those historical injustices, others were and are, victims of it.
Richard Shaw is a Professor of Politics at Massey University.
See NZ Politics Daily for other Treaty-related news https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGwJJTcfdkTLGxXWbqJXMmWkPld
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