2022: Whiria te Tangata

May 27, 2023

By Anarchist History of New Zealand

The National Library of New Zealand has recently funneled $5.8 million of your money toward “sustainability of the library sector” and in particular produced 12 “sustainability champions.” Now fully trained in “dismantling White privilege” and “colonising the library” the Champions take their freshly galvanised indoctrinations back to our local communities. For example, you are going to get the sharp end of the new Wokeforce if your home library is in Whanganui, Kaikohe, Auckland, Matamata, Kapiti Coast, and Hamilton.

Most of this cash injection, $4 million, was laundered under the guise of COVID-19 emergency money-printing. Labour 6.0’s Finance Minister Grant Robertson created the Covid Response and Recovery Fund under the pretense of a health crisis but then went ahead and spent it on Labour Party policy instead. The “…Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund, contrary to his undertakings that the enormous pot of emergency money be limited to direct, pandemic-related spending and over the Treasury’s objections. The Government took $1.05b from the fund and “reprioritised” the money…” Ref. Kate MacNamara quote in 2012: Kiwiblog Foresees Labour 6.0, AHNZ

Some of the billions fell into the hands of Paul James of Internal Affairs, then trickled down to the New Zealand Libraries Partnership Programme (NZLPP.) According to the Beehive announcement on the original funding package the NZLPP now had over $60 million of which half was marked out to “fund and upskill librarians in public libraries.” Ref. Beehive (May 2020)

Equipped with some $30,000,000 career bureaucrat Ratangihia Steer (image, right) was ‘seconded’ to recruit Woke librarians and give them basic training to be even more “sustainable” and “diverse” after an 8 month course. Plenty of the budget was evidently transferred to Allen + Clarke Policy and Regulatory Specialists which have their logo plastered on all of the resource materials. This firm probably resembles the fictional one lampooned by actor Rob Sitch in his brilliant Australian TV show Utopia (2014-present.) Since all the resources are being given away for free by the National Library I don’t suppose Allen+Clarke offered their best work but probably old materials they didn’t mind surrendering their Intellectual Property to.

On the other hand, it also seems amiss that Labour 6.0 would need to pump millions into international consultants to tell librarians how to spread White Guilt and Colonisation. Would have thought there was more than enough talent for that sort of thing on-shore and within the National Library already without having to import it!  However, from an Anarchist’s cynical view of how government works the sense of this is not to be found in economic efficiency. The point is that Grant Robertson’s printed money found its way into the pockets of people like Ra Steer and Specialist Matthew Allen who can now be expected to feel much obliged to the politician with the moneybags in the near future.

So much for the set-up. What do Ra Steer’s inaugural Whiria te Tangata apostles have to teach ‘Aotearoa’ now they have emerged from their 8 month development program?

“We provided over $4 million in COVID-19 response funding through the Mātauranga Māori Marae Ora Fund, and we supported the sustainability of the library sector through $5.8 million in partnership grants. ” – Paul James, Secretary for Internal Afairs, Internal Affairs Annual Report (2021/22)

“Twelve kākaho (sustainability champions) will soon be putting library and information skills underpinned by mātauranga Māori into practice following an eight-month programme developed by the New Zealand Libraries Partnership Programme (NZLPP)…Whiria kicked-off in September 2022 and since then kākaho have learned collaboratively via online modules, fortnightly ‘check-ins’ and attended face-to-face noho Marae.”

“Rā is of Kai Tahu and Ngāti Porou descent and her professional experience is in local and central government..” – TTM Consultancy

“Rātangihia Steer (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Porou) has been seconded to the Manager Strategic Partnerships role with the New Zealand Libraries Partnership Programme (NZLPP)…three key initiatives. These revolve around.. increasing the diversity of our workforce,…My vision is that libraries are a place that reflect the diversity of the communities that they serve.” – Career Profile: Ratangihia Steer, Libraries Aotearoa

“The Government is entrusted the National Library to lead and support COVID-19 recovery work across New Zealand’s library system, especially in public libraries, with a funding package of $58.8 million, over two to four years, announced on 29 May 2020. The New Zealand Libraries Partnership Programme (NZLPP) supported librarians and library services to be retained in NZ libraries and assisted them to support community recovery. Read the Beehive announcement on the original funding package” – About New Zealand Libraries Partnership Programme, National Library

“Rātangihia Steer, Manager Strategic Partnerships introduces Whiria te Tāngata and the kākaho – sustainability champions who have taken up the wero. The project aims to improve the sustainability of the library sector in Aotearoa.” – Future sustainability of libraries, National Library (2022)

“The strategies and frameworks the kākaho learnt are free and available on the National Library website,” said Rā. I urge the wider information and library sector to utilise them as well. They are the Data, research and evidence strategy and Workforce Capability Framework,” she added.” – ibid

Rather than review the Allen + Clarke Policy and Regulatory Specialists  course materials we can do no better than read what the graduates of Whiria te Tangata have to say about their training. It will come as no surprise at all that saving the world from COVID-19 has nothing to do with any of this beyond an excuse to trick Kiwis into parting with their money!

Colonising the library, Jasmine Ratana

One of the first learning modules challenged the student librarians to ask “How well do you know Te Tiriti o Waitangi? Do you even think about it on a daily basis?” It’s a lesson in shame for anyone who doesn’t make this ‘living document’ (est. 1986) party of their daily thoughts!

She’s open about quietly colonising you. Are you even trying to hold your space?

This ethic that Ratana attributes to the National Library’s Whiria te Tangata program were once a work of fiction. The stuff of Shortland Street: ‘We are the future, not them. Oh they’ll struggle as they fall but they will fall, and I’m here to make sure the right people take their place, kei te pai?’ Ref. 2018: “Get Woke, Or Shuffle Off”, AHNZ

Possibly emboldened by her favorite soap opera, when La-Verne King was called to the bench in 2910 she got a bit carried away about being a Maori woman. She said, “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. Social Justice, NZB3 (2020)

When Party Maori co-leader Rawiri Waititi (or one of his flunkies) said these things in 2021 it was quickly hidden: “Caucasian’s…Pay them no attention, their archaic species is becoming more extinct as new Aotearoa is on the rise.” Ref. ibid

The fact that Ratana’s comments about what she says the government program has instilled in her but have actually been published with approval suggests she’s telling the truth. If so, it’s one of the most open and honest statements of government taking sides and financing race-based discrimination. It is also illegal: “The Employment Relations Act provides that where a person directly or indirectly expresses hostility against, or brings into contempt or ridicule, another employee on the ground of the race, colour, or ethnic or national origins of that employee, within a workplace, this will constitute racial harassment.” Ref. Stuff (2020)

Reflecting on Whiria te Tāngata, Simon Whitlock

Whitlock talked a lot without saying anything. Much waffle about being part of the inaugural group and the plan to take the lessons back to the different library organisations we work for. No hints as to what the content on that will be. But by reading this fawning but non-specific praise for Whiria te Tangata it seems clear why each apostle has to write a blog exit-post. If you want to ‘pass’ it’s probably required and helps insulate the program from criticism down the track. Hard to say anything bad after you’ve voluntarily heaped praise on someone or something. I bet Allen + Clarke thought that one up!

Libraries are the beating hearts of communities, Dan Beck

“Nothing about us, without us” is a phrase that has really resonated with me from this learning, Beck says. He’s talking about the bizarre idea that Maoris have sovereignty over what other people say and even think about them. Evidently Whiria te Tangata has indoctrinated its 12 apostles with the anti-free expression notion that a race should, and can, dictate to others what they are allowed to believe about them. It reflects low cultural self-esteem that resorts to a desperate, dictatorial, attempt to force other people to award reputation through compelled speech. If poor old Dan or any of his cohort dared challenge this fascism you can be fairly sure they’d be pushed out a window! More likely, never selected for the Wokeforce in the first place.

“My project aims to gather data on the borrowing behaviour of Māori borrowers..This will then be analysed and used to inform our selection of material for our collections….ethnicity data in our systems,..don’t need to act as roadblocks to prevent research being undertaken. “

Indoctrinated, Dan goes on to say he has a new agenda to focus on library clients but only Maoris. He seems to think this ethnicity and race-based preferential treatment will be inhibited because of the reliance on self-identification on the part of borrowers. I think he wishes Auckland Libraries would make non-Maoris wear some kind of arm band so he would know who not to focus on. Despite this dead-end roadblock he sees no reason why he shouldn’t consume his library’s resources on go-nowhere research into going ahead with race/ethnicity profiling just the same!

I’m troubled to find that Auckland Libraries is already racially profiling its clients and curating the collection to advantage Maoris over other groups. Dan Beck wants to take this to a whole new level and has been emboldened.

Engaging my organisation through action learning,  Heather Furniss

Heather’s post reveals that there is shame and urgency attached to the idea that her library have a specific ‘Maori Strategy’ and ‘Treaty Policy’. Clearly Whiria te Tangata (while pretending to the world to be saving us from COVID-19, remember) has the agenda of compelling our libraries to be extensions of a race-based agenda. Like Beck, Heather has now been conditioned to think ‘Maori knowledge’ is something she cannot touch because she is ‘limited’ and ‘inexpert’.

The weaving continues, Amanda Bond

Amanda’s reflections on the course come over as if written by ChatGTP. I don’t think the course stretched her at all because she already had a rubber brain ready to go along with anything while secretly thinking she may as well be in charge because she knows it all. If Communist Chinese took over New Zealand she’s the sort of person who would adapt to the new overlords and get a job overseeing chopsticks instructors over our dead bodies.

Uncomfortable, Siren Deluxe

This vulnerable and exhausted women was taught to hate herself. Also, it was impressed upon her that Maoris must be given a special epistemological role in New Zealand over what may and may not be thought about Maoris. “Māori data sovereignty is the future..I see my pākeha-self and my pākeha-centric workplace more clearly. I see privilege. I see the dismantling of that privilege as a duty of contemporary library practice.”

They had her calling herself a “pakeha” (ie an outsider in her own land. Ref. 1835: The Pakeha Slur, AHNZ) and asking if such a person had the moral status to think and to write! Is it OK to write about change, about libraries? Did that make her ignorant and self-indulgent? Evidently the White Guilt was flowing freely on this state-sponsored course! Siren, of course, isn’t accusing the program of persecuting her. She’s self-harming, self-flagellating, because she has been encouraged or at least has not been dissuaded from doing so. This toxic baggage she will take with her to smear around the Kapiti Coast. Lucky them?

Whiria te Tāngata, Kay Huia

When people are traumatised they go into Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn. The idea of a program like Whiria te Tangata is to select people who are going to Fawn. In other words, to suck-up and become a ‘yes man’ to power. As in Stockholm Syndrome, bonding with one’s captors represents a psychological escape from the reality of being under someone else’s power and in danger. Maybe by cooperating you will be less in danger? I think of this when I read from Huia things like “privilege to be nurtured by our support team” or trite boss-pleasing phrases like “overnight stays further develops my understanding of tikanga.”

There must be 5 more blog posts like the above still to come. I’ll be keeping a look-out.

None of them will have the pride to confront the program as once did Chief Librarian of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Jim Traue. One of the first things the cohort will have done is to have made a public statement of their pedigree according to the neo-Maori framework. Who were my ancestors? What’s my favorite river? My mountain? Traue, in 1989, refused to be colonised into a little box. He burst out that his intellectual inheritance was far more than a little tribe or a sketched family tree. He was the inheritor of thousands of years of civilisation and made no apology for it! Ref. 1989: Ancestors of the Mind, AHNZ

Obviously this State-sponsored academic-Maori agenda has zip to do with “sustainability” or COVID-19 or “diversity.” This is just cover to get the program paid for and to keep it under-cover until it is established enough to work in plain sight. It was Winston Peters who once warned that  “If we do not confront it now, in ten years there will be violence in our streets and the race riots of Watts, Toxteth and Soweto will have their New Zealand equivalent.” Ref. Independent (newspaper, UK); Hanbury-Tenison (1989.)

People like Ratangihia Steer are most responsible for inciting race-based conflict. It’s one thing to be one of the many vulnerable and fawning government workers picked out for these very qualities and pushed even further toward zealotry. But it’s another thing entirely to deliberately mislead and coax damaged people into crusading their mental health problems into the community with the authority of the Department of Internal Affairs.

We will try to colonise each other as a matter of course because that’s what humans always do. More, we think it’s an act of benevolence because aren’t our values and morals the best? When Jasmine Ratana, like Rawiri Waititi, smiles at euthenising ‘Caucasian dinosaurs’ that’s also a version of kindness albeit situated in a resentful and damaged mindset. What is to be done about the desire deep in the bones of every human culture that made it this far up the phylogenetic tree to spread and reproduce its colony? The only thing to be done is to let 1000 flowers bloom and may the best ideas win. State Power must play no role in this contest because wherever there is a State there will be violence between competing groups to control it and use it to do violence to every other group. Grant Robertson’s millions, made out of money-printing and theft by currency inflation, have fallen into the hands of such a group. Of course, the mainstream media will have nothing to say about this.

Internal Affairs and the National Library have been perverted into taking part in alienating New Zealanders from one another. Bad enough that judges, soap operas, politicians, historians, teachers, army and the police themselves are doing this. Librarians!?

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Image ref. New Zealand depicted as ‘Aotearoa’ and serving hapus and iwis

Image ref.  Manager of Whiria te Tāngata. Ra Steer. Libraries Aotearoa

Post syndicated from https://ahnz.anarkiwi.co.nz/2022-whiria-te-tangata/.