Andy Oakley - Why Are Maori Filling New Zealand Prisons?

Andy Oakley
Opinion

Below is a transcript of a video, Why Are Maori Filling New Zealand Prisons, by Andy Oakley. Published here with permission from the author.

New Zealand has one of the highest incarceration rates in the Western world and we are constantly reminded that more than half of them are Maori, despite Maori making up only about 16% of the population. 

The statistics are presented as follows; in 2016 Māori, mostly under 30, made up 56 percent (4,462) of the total prison population. European prisoners made up 29 percent (2,471), and Pacific peoples accounted for 8 percent (667) of the total. 

However, all of the Maori people who make up these statistics have European ancestry to some extent and many of the Pacific people also have European ancestry. Even if the majority of ancestry of the inmate is European, as many are, the European ethnicity is dropped. This could be voluntary or they may have been influenced by the Treaty of Waitangi Act, which states in legislation that a Maori person is a person of the Maori Race of New Zealand or anyone descended from such a person. 

This Act effectively creates Maori from thin air and may explain why in our last census we gained about 35,601 new Maori people. So the more New Zealanders mix the more Maori people there are.

Obviously that law would make the offspring of a woman who is 100 % European and a white New Zealand man with a 1/32nd Maori father, a Maori. This leads to the rather bazaar situation where Hanna O’Regan, who is 1/32nd Maori or rather 31/32 European defining herself as a Maori and whakapapa to Kāti Rakiāmoa, Kāti Ruahikihiki, Kāi Tūāhuriri, Kāti Waewae. No European ancestry in sight.

My point is that up to 85% of all prisoners in New Zealand have European or mostly European ancestry.

When you also consider that nearly all of the Europeans in prison will have no Maori ancestry and nearly all Maori will have European ancestry it is very clear that while crime may be described as a Maori problem, in fact the vast majority of prisoners are European or mostly European in most cases. Which means the worn out line that crime is a Maori problem is merely a statistical illusion created by the government department Statistics New Zealand. Maori leaders who are experts in creating Treaty claims and politicians looking for votes continuously use these bastardised statistics so that Maori appear as being the oppressed indigenous people of New Zealand or tangata whenua.

Which leads us to the question; why would the government and Maori leaders want Maori to appear as oppressed?

The answer is because the Government have created the Waitangi Tribunal who have been specifically empowered to make recommendations on Treaty claims, which are really claims by Maori of oppression. 

These claims are upheld and we are reminded of that every week when we hear about many millions of dollars and extra rights being transferred directly to the tribal elite who are acting on behalf of the oppressed Maori. They also use the false statistics endlessly to excuse the behaviour and the failure of these Maori people that they have conjured up from thin air, who end up in prison. 

Never mind that they are mostly European, have grown up as westerners, did not grow up influenced by Maori culture, don’t know the language, the history or anything else about what it is to be Maori.

Clearly then the people who are filling New Zealand prisons are not there because they are Maori, they are nothing more than mixed ancestry criminals being used as a racist statistical trick on the people of New Zealand. We must simply reject these lies from now on. 
So if it is not the race or perceived race or ethnicity that is the influencing factor of why someone ends up in prison or why we have high incarceration rates, what is it?

Well, because I grew up in Cannons Creek, New Zealand’s poorest suburb and one of the largest Polynesians cities in the world in the 1960s and 70s I know, because it happen to me. 
It is an awful mix of inequality, which is a result of us being a reasonably successful country, but when you sprinkle greed and racism into the mix we have a recipe for the Marxist doctrine of oppressor and the oppressed.

Let me explain. 

While my family were poor and there were many social problems, largely brought about by bad parenting, we were not suffering poverty like a Sub-Saharan tribesman in Africa. However, whenever I went to another suburb to play rugby and increasingly as TV became more popular we saw people who were rich or very successful, in other words I saw great inequality.

The result of great inequality causes young men in poor suburbs great frustration as there does not seem any way or a pathway to success. Worse, in New Zealand if the young men have the tiniest smidgen of Maori ancestry they are continually told by their leaders, government, schools and the media that the Pakeha system does not work for them.

Many young men in these suburbs a programmed to show dominance and have a need to rise to the top in the hierarchy. This is an in built male trait. The apparent unfairness of it all and the desperate need to impress woman and to show dominance over other males will often result in them using aggression and crime to rise to the top. 

And so we see that it is inequality and nothing to do with race or ethnicity that results in us having the highest incarceration rates in the western world. 

This realisation of this is a godsend because we can do something about inequality and consequently we can stop arming people with brown skin, with a false dogma that there is increasing racism against them and that the prison statistics are the proof of it.

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