Maori must take responsibility

The following is, for the most part, a comment I posted on Lindsay Mitchell's blog Tip of the iceberg about the over-representation of Maori in crime, child abuse and welfare dependency.  Her posting was prompted by the conviction of a young Maori man, Raurangi Mark Marino, for the rape of a 5 year girl in a camping ground in Turangi, New Zealand.  Marino's father and mother are members of the criminal, violent (and predominantly Maori) gangs Black Power and the Mongrel Mob that are known to use rape as an rite of passage for young inductees.

In her post, Lindsay quoted Peter Buck, one of the most prominent Maori leaders of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, who said:

“The [Maori]  communism  of  the  past  meant  industry,  training  in  arms,  good physique, the keeping of the law, the sharing of the tribal burden, and the preservation of life. The communism of today means indolence, sloth, decay of   racial   vigour,   the   crushing   of   individual   effort,   the   spreading   of introduced  infections,  diseases,  and  the  many  evils  that  are  petrifying  his advance.”

The following (with minor edits) is what I said in response to Lindsay's posting.

The sorry state of Maori today, filling the courts and prisons for violent crime, overwhelmingly dependent on welfare and failing to perform by almost any accepted aspirational and moral measure, is a huge indictment on the resurgent Maori tribalism and the billions of dollars thrown at them by successive governments.

The problem is, I think, partly that Peter Buck and many contemporary apologists for Maori performance have got it wrong. Maori 'communism' (and I think that is a good term) in the past may have been about "the keeping of the law, the sharing of the tribal burden, and the preservation of life," but it was also about preserving a brutal, paternalistic, cannibalistic, genocidal Stone Age society with little going for it except for some fine primitive art. Black Power and the Mongrel Mob are the precise modern expression of this culture.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that a young Maori man brought up in such a culture feels it is acceptable to rape a 5 year girl because, as gut-wrenching as this crime is to you and I, it pales into insignificance compared to the wholesale female infanticide that was practiced by Maori society prior to the establishment of British rule.

The answer is not more Maori tribalism, tradition and culture, nor more handouts. Such policies are just producing more disaffected Maori youth who believe it is their right to take anything they want by force, even the innocence of a 5 year old girl. The answer is that Maori must be forced to take individual responsibility for being productive, moral members of society. The sooner Maori themselves and New Zealanders generally realise this, the better.