May 11, 2024 - Personal blog of Rick Giles

Te Pae Oranga

March 15, 2021

By NZB3

Turns out that identifying as a Maori allows you to substitute prison time for talk time.
“The Government’s restorative justice programme Te Pae Oranga is taking preventing imprisonment to a new level with more serious offences sent to the Iwi Community Panel, National’s Police spokesperson Simeon Brown says…“Now, if you stab a police officer or sell military-style automatic weapons or sell meth to kids, your punishment will be a hui.”- Scoop (2021)
My main concern is that it’s an apartheid move. There should not be a race-based justice system. The program may be very good, it may be excellent, but every race/gender/sex/ethnicity should have equal access to it. Or, if you want to exclude people for not being Maori enough then an equivalent opportunity needs to be there for those groups too.
Police commissioner Andrew Coster said the programme is “a fantastic example of Police and Māori working in partnership”. – Stuff (2021)
The list of offences this get-out-of-jail-free-Maori card now works on includes “Assaulting Police Officers, Supplying synthetic drugs, Abducting a child out of New Zealand, Assaulting a Taxi Driver, Possessing child exploitation images.”
If the program gets results that’s great, that’s what we want, we want that elusive unicorn called reform. Let’s not kill Te Pae Oranga if it’s functional. If so, shouldn’t everyone in need of reform get access to that? And if someone finds reform while others are deprived of it because they are given extra resources and made a special race-based case doesn’t that automatically undermine the progress? Those who make it out of crime by the grace of their skin colour will have a hard job believing they earned it. Those who don’t make it out of crime despite being given extra-racial opportunities will be the mockery of the un-privileged as well as their own conscience.
“Two [Maori] women who stole $103,000 from a small rural Hawke’s Bay school they managed have been sentenced to home detention and ordered to repay about half the money — the amount they deposited into their bank accounts.”- Newstalk ZB (Aug 2020)

“What influence did Cuthbert’s background have on his behaviour? And should he serve less time in jail because of that background? A judge decided that yes, he should.”- Ref. Judges reduce jail time by up to two years for cultural factors; Stuff

“You will know that this court isn’t like tauiwi courts, this court belongs to a Māori woman” she said. (Tauiwi- Refers to anyone not from your own tribe)- Ref. New judge’s goal: Fewer Māori through courts and in prison; Radio NZ [

“The Māori are back where the Maoris belong, Affirmative actions propel them along. Lever that ethnicity, make that DNA pay, Just put up a macron on top of your ‘a’.” – “When the justice system takes into account where maori have come from”, NZB3 (2020)

“My argument is that Justice is supposed to be dispensed according to the facts of the case not the facts of the race. ” – Considering Historical Justice, NZB3 (2020)

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Ref. Social Justice; NZB3

 

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