The New Zealand Human Rights Commission recently spent $1.3 million on Voices of Racism, the second wave of the 2017 campaign calling on New Zealanders to Give Nothing To Racism which originally cost $360,000. These bills were picked up by New Zealand taxpayers.

A slew of creative assets for both parts of the campaign were developed by advertising agency Clemenger BBDO featuring Hollywood director Taika Waititi as the main talent. Waititi once claimed New Zealand is ‘racist as f**k’. The original campaign also featured rugby stars Sonny Bill Williams and Kieran Read, musician Tiki Taane, and actor Sam Neill.

Both campaigns were launched with great fanfare and championed by various media outlets.

With such investment into, and emphasis on, combatting racism, it has been astonishing to watch New Zealand’s establishment and media stick its head in the sand over the past few weeks when a case of blatant racism with violent themes was not only platformed at the Auckland Arts Festival, but funded to the tune of $107,280 by the government. In fact, the media celebrated the stage performance of Tusiata Avia’s poetry, laughing along as the poet described her glee at making white people ‘uncomfortable’.

In 2017, then Race Relations Commissioner Susan Devoy stated:

‘Racial prejudice and intolerance starts small, in quiet places, in our everyday lives. When it becomes normalised it turns into overt racism and extremism.’

New Zealand’s current Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon has certainly taken his predecessor’s words to heart as he has barked at every passing racial slight in the media. ‘Absolutely disgusting’ was what he called the (unpleasant and inappropriate) remark by DGL CEO Simon Henry calling celebrity chef and businesswoman Nadia Lim a ‘little bit of Eurasian fluff’ and fronted media on it.

He has been primed to fight racism and unafraid to condemn it in the strongest of terms … except when it is directed at white people.

In the following excerpt from Avia’s poetry book, The Savage Coloniser, explicit ideation to enact violence against white people is expressed and although it is about James Cook, she makes it clear that she wants to go after his ‘descendants’.

These days

we’re driving round

in SUVs

looking for ya

or white men like you

who might be thieves

or rapists

or kidnappers

or murderers

yeah, or any of your descendants

or any of your incarnations

cos, you know

ay, b*tch?

We’re gonna F… YOU UP.

Tonight, James,

it’s me

Lani, Danielle

and a car full of brown girls

we find you

on the corner

of the Justice Precinct.

You’ve got another woman

in a headlock

and I’ve got my father’s

pig-hunting knife

in my fist

and we’re coming to get you

Tusiata Avia’s poem skates very close to the threshold for ‘incitement to violence’ and if it had been about any other race there would likely be calls for the poet to be prosecuted.

This is not her first foray into this thematic territory. She has previously written a poem linking all white people to the Christchurch terrorist who killed 51 Muslim New Zealanders. How often have we heard that it is wrong to judge Muslims by the actions of a few Islamist terrorists? Why does this not apply when the perpetrator is white?

Despite Commissioner Foon’s hair-trigger responses to other examples of racism, his response to this overt and violent racism has been uncharacteristically quiet. A mealy-mouthed statement, not attributed to the commissioner, appeared on the Human Rights Commission’s website stating they were looking into the matter after receiving many complaints. However, the statement also included the justification that James Cook’s ‘legacy is also a source of immense hurt and intergenerational trauma for many indigenous peoples in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond’.

Where is the outspoken crusader against racism who said, ‘I encourage our team of five million to make this country racism free, to dismantle it.’ Did Meng Foon mean ‘racism free’ except when it is directed at white people?

Every New Zealander should be equal before the law and that includes the Bill of Rights and the Human Rights Act which provide protection from discrimination based on ethnicity or race. We are a multi-cultural nation and many New Zealanders have parents from differing ethnic backgrounds. Our government should be fostering unity and not feeding ugly, divisive rhetoric that splits our nation inaccurately into brown and white.

As a nation, New Zealand has spent decades forging a path of reconciliation with a hope of delivering better outcomes and unity. Despite these efforts there remains a ready audience for the allocation of blame predicated on narratives of victim versus villain and coloniser versus colonised. This narrative relies on the demonisation of those whose who are perceived to have ancestors who were colonisers and that is what this poetry leverages. To have this funded by government and endorsed by media makes a mockery of the concept of reconciliation and a unified future.

Where is the investigation into Creative New Zealander and the process by which they allocated funding to such a violent and hateful art piece? Where is the media outcry? Where is the concern about how this ideation could result in increased racially-motivated violence against white New Zealanders?

Even if we accept Avia’s right to make art that is provocative, that doesn’t mean our taxes should fund it. Giving $107,280 for a tirade of violent rhetoric is not ‘giving nothing to racism’, it is funding it.

Casey Costello, Trustee Hobson’s Pledge

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