Bob Jones is doing us all a favour

Sir Robert Jones, the Wellington property investor, political pundit, boxing commentator and writer, has never been one to shy away from a fight. This time he is taking up his cudgel against a women who called him 'racist'. It all started with an opinion piece Jones wrote in his regular column in the weekly National Business Review newspaper about the annual Waitangi Day fiasco.

Waitangi Day is meant to be New Zealand's national day, celebrating the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between Maori chiefs and the British Crown in 1840, but it has become a day of such insult and even violence from Maori activists that in recent years New Zealand prime ministers have refused to attend the ceremonies at Waitangi (where the Treaty was signed) and many New Zealanders refuse to acknowledge the day with anything more than contempt.

Bob Jones was making a satirical point in his column when he said that the day should be repurposed as 'Maori Gratitude Day', an occasion on which Maori give thanks to the British settlers for saving them from self-inflicted extinction. The woman Jones is suing raised a petition calling on the government to strip of his knighthood for his comments and managed to get 40,000 signatures, but it isn't the petition that is the subject of Jones's counterpunch but rather her libellous use of the 'racist' epithet.

I have recently written about the antonymic use of the term. It is used predominantly not to describe someone who wants to discriminate on the basis of race but rather those who object to such discrimination. Thus, if you believe we all should be equal under the law, you are called a racist. It is long overdue that such insulting and dishonest use of language was called out and those responsible be made to pay. If Bob Jones succeeds with his legal action, perhaps those who use the term with such profligacy for their own purposes will think twice.