Just Thinking

It began when Australian PM Howard passed a special racist law to deal with problems of drunkenness and sexual offenses in Aborigine settlements. New Zealand Maori MP Hone Harawira called him a racist bastard.

"John Howard is a racist bastard imposing racist policies on a people who are not in a position to fight back," Mr Harawira said on Maori TV's Native Affairs programme last night.

He compared Mr Howard's move in the Northern Territory, with its mineral wealth, to United States President George Bush's invasion of Iraq, allegedly to control oil. A similar move in New Zealand would be met with violence from the Maori community.

"If they tried this up north, we'd be out with guns. It wouldn't happen."

He told Australian press agency AAP he stood by his comments: "If I was an Aboriginal man in the Northern Territory I would feel like absolute shit right now.

Mr Howard declined to comment.

There is no doubt that NZ's MMP electoral system has made Parliament more colourful. Harawira has shown staunch support for the Australian Aborigines who really are treated poorly in their own country. His next step was when he was on a trip with other MPs to Australia and he went walkabout much to the discust of MPs of other parties. He turned up at some Aborigine communities because he wanted to see for himself how bad the situation was without media distortion. Parliament's speaker's decision as reported in the New Zealand Herald:

Maori Party MP Hone Harawira has been ordered to pay back half of the cost of his taxpayer-funded airfare to Australia after he went walkabout while on an official parliamentary visit.

Speaker Margaret Wilson told MPs that Mr Harawira's "private visit" to the Northern Territory to see aboriginal communities had come halfway into a select committee visit to Melbourne.

MPs had an obligation to complete their work for which they received public funding, she said.

"As Mr Harawira participated in less than half of the committee's business I consider it appropriate that he refund half of the airfare that has been paid out of public funds," Ms Wilson said.

Ms Wilson's ruling today sparked a number of exchanges between MPs with Mr Harawira's co-leader Pita Sharples having a go at his MP's critics over incidents in the past.

This included National MP Richard Worth going for a camel ride, when he was on an official trip and also the travels of MPs in the parliamentary rugby team.

"Has the same due diligence applied (to them)?" Mr Sharples asked.

Pita Sharples once again shows how astute he is in finding previous situations where the shoe is on the other foot. He has also spoken out about the problem of violence being perpetuated by Maori families, and gave a severe telling off to a Maori family who did not help the police with their inquiries when young twins will beaten and later died.

In the past I have visited Hone Harawira's web site and always found it interesting and thought provoking. He is a man of action and he sometimes hitch hikes from Auckland to his home in the North. He says that this is good for developing humility because he sometimes gets an ear-bashing on the way. I don't see any statement yet by him on this issue, but look forward to what he has to say.

While it is fair to ask him to attend a conference that the taxpayers have sent him to, and he does not deny that and seems quite willing to pay half the air fare, he is quite right that the issues involved for Australian Aborigines are very serious. All the problems that NZ Maori have, and they are considerable with many recent terrible cases of young children been brutally beaten to death, are many times greater in Australia.

Hone, may your efforts be successful in keeping these issues in the public eye so that they are addressed in a meaningful way, both in New Zealand and Australia.