OPINION
It is disgraceful for New Zealand First leader Winston Peters to describe spaces our dear friend Fa’anānā Efeso Collins and the great Dr Ranginui Walker helped build at Auckland University as comparable to the Ku Klux Klan.
Māori space, Pasifika space, rainbow space and women’s space have been spaces inside the university where Māori, Pasifika, rainbow community and women can connect, support and exist in.
They have lots of information available in these spaces for our young people at university. Pamphlets providing support structures, free condoms, sanitary products, course information, counselling services, harassment and anti-bullying networks. These are all good things to help our uni students.
These spaces have been on campus for over three decades.
To attack them, as the coalition government has, is disgraceful and ugly.
Deputy prime minister-in-waiting David Seymour and current Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters should be deeply ashamed for denigrating Collins’ legacy, Walker’s legacy, and the generations of students who have benefited from these spaces.
To conflate study spaces at Auckland University for our minorities needing support, to the KKK and ‘separatism’ is weak and gutter politics.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is simply competing with his coalition partners’ redneck race-baiting by describing the spaces as “totally inappropriate”.
Luxon went on to say: “There is no place for discrimination or segregation in New Zealand. Universities should be places of inclusion, not exclusion.”
Yet, in our very own Parliament, we have special rooms for Māori, Pasifika, rainbow, ethnic minorities and women and his own minister Erica Stanford voiced support for these special spaces this morning on TV3.
It is simply not good enough for the leader of the country, Luxon, to allow his two deputies to play to cultural war race-baiting rather than providing true leadership for our communities who need it.
In Seymour, Peters, and Luxon, we have three politicians who are constantly in competition with each other over who can say the most derogatory thing about people who can’t fight back or who don’t have a voice.
To denigrate those university spaces and threaten them is weak, sad, politics and every passing week shows a Prime Minister too frightened to rein in the most extreme voices in his Government.
Willie Jackson is a Labour list MP and head of Labour’s Māori caucus.
-NZ Herald