Mythical harmony in NZ race relations

Opinion

New Zealand is a physical paradise, says Rajen Prasad, pointing to the country’s environment, scenery and infrastructure. Many outsiders would give their left arm to live here. But to truly enjoy living in a paradise, people must be in harmony with each other and in that context New Zealanders are not doing so well. For a long time they liked to claim they led the world in harmonious relations between the races. It was a myth, Prasad says.

“We talked ourselves into it. While we were saying that, we were creating disparities between the races. We were sending more indigenous people to prison, we were watching people mainly non-European - live in poverty. We swept the reality under the carpet.” This month, Prasad, a self-confessed incorrigible optimist, hopes to start a process that will turn things around, that will see New Zealand achieve its potential as a nation where different races and cultures can live together in harmony and, as he says, appreciate the fun of living in a diverse society.

As the nation’s Race Relations Conciliator, Prasad will present the government with a report on a project called Agenda New Zealand. He hopes it will give birth to a long-term education strategy for positive race relations over the next 10 to 15 years.

His last annual report to Parliament (which I wrote about in PIM, December 1999) illustrated the sense of urgency he feels.

“There are disturbing signs that all is not well,” he wrote. “Racial discrimination and harassment are on the increase. It is time New Zealand took its race relations issues more seriously.”

It is time indeed. Prasad is the country’s seventh conciliator.

He and his predecessors have been pushing their cause for 28 years. “We have been working at this for some time and we have only got this far,” he says.

“We are beginning to say we are a Pacific nation – an Asia-Pacific nation, sometimes. Now we had better start working on what all of that means.”

Agenda New Zealand is designed to outline the directions the country should take to develop an environment of harmonious race relations. It has been drawn up with considerable public input following a series of 30 consultative meetings from one end of the country to the other and receipt of 200 written submissions.

But as Prasad noted in his last report there is a pressing need for sustained investment in public education about race relations and the success of Agenda New Zealand may depend on the government’s reaction and particularly its response to his plea for more money for his office.

Currently, the country spends a pitiful 31 cents per head of population each year to try to secure peaceful race relations.

Prasad has said an additional half a million dollars to his $1.3 million funding would make all the difference, but will have to wait till next month’s Budget to leam whether his pleas have been heard.

He has some hopes that Prime Minister Helen Clark’s Labour- Alliance coalition may be more amenable than its predecessor.

The new government has announced a number of key goals, including strengthening national identity, celebrating cultural diversity, promoting community development and closing the disparity gaps between Maori and Pacific Island people and the rest of the population that have encouraged him.

“If you take those signals, you’d say they want us to get serious about creating a society where its citizens are at peace with themselves,” he says. “So I guess this government is saying it is not going to leave it to the market to decide our race relations.”

All six previous holders of Prasad’s job have faced the challenges of their time. He says his is the enormous change in society, change that is continuing almost daily.

“When I first came here (in 1964, from Fiji, where he was bom) everyone ate a diet of meat and three vegetables,” he says.

“Now, they eat food hotter than I eat!” Noting the changing pattern of population, with the European majority set to decline as the Pacific Island and Asian communities increase, he says the question is; “In the midst of this diversity where are we going?”

While the changing ethnic mix presents its problems, he pins his optimism on several things. But the main factor, he says, is a growing awareness of inter-ethnic conflicts overseas.

“Not one continent, except perhaps Antarctica, is left untouched. They have major racial conflicts, some of them very violent, and 1 think many of our people are convinced that we must not let that happen here.”

Sadly, he says, no culture is exempt from the effects of racism - or from practising it. Europeans (the majority culture) traditionally get most of the blame, but many sectors of the community express attitudes that are hostile and judge a whole class of people different from themselves negatively, he says.

And what is worrying is that the number of complaints to the Race Relations Office, which jumped 47 per cent to a record 658 in 1998-99, is tracking to top 800 in the 12 months ending June 30 showing that racism is alive and well in the new millennium.

Prasad says Pacific Island people are not the complaining type.

They tend to shrug their shoulders and get on with life when they experience racism. But there is a worrying trend that should concern all PIM readers. He notes a tendency for Pacific Island people to take it on themselves to address the effects of racism - in those cases it does not appear a race issue, but one of violence, he says. And it’s worth pondering that New Zealand, and the Pacific community, need violence in the new millennium as much as they need racism. ■

David Barber

Wellington