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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.
