The Greens specialty: 'Ahistory'

The recent testy exchanges in Parliament between Winston Peters and Chloe Swarbrick, showed how 'catchphrase history' can crowd out the actual stuff. Swarbrick's electorate is home to Auckland University whose legendary former Head of Department, Prof Keith Sinclair, led the charge towards source-based analysis of NZ history. Two standout comments from Swarbrick to Peters were: 'Maori was beaten into people' and 'Maori was fought for'. Leaving aside the fact that corporal punishment was commonplace in schools until about 4 years before Ms Swarbrick was born, the actual 'fight' was by Maori for MORE English - not less.

A readily accessible record in the National Library archives, is a letter from Mr Wii Takaro and around 100 supporters written to Parliament urging that there be greater emphasis on English in the Native Schools which at that time had been running for over a decade. Two of Takaro's recommendations were firstly that English be the only language spoken in pre-school classes and that teachers recruited for Native Schools have no Te Reo ability whatsoever. Perhaps Swarbrick could take a short stroll across the sun-dappled uplands of Auckland Central and get the facts from this country's preeminent historians.

This was sent as a letter to The Listener, in the belief that something being played out in the electronic media (Parliament TV), would be of interest. Not so and yet another bit of nonsense of the: 'A taxidriver told me and he heard it from his brother-in-law' is allowed to go unchallenged.