In a podcast with ex-Member of Parliament Paula Bennett, covered in a puff piece by The Herald on 21 April 2024, Dame Susan Devoy issued the following lament about her time as New Zealand’s Race Relations Commissioner:
“I still to this day don’t know why it was so bad. I mean, I wasn’t naive, and I knew that it wouldn’t be universally [liked], and it may be an interesting appointment, but I didn’t expect the vitriol that followed.
“Was that because I was a Pākehā? Was that because I was a woman? I think a lot of it’s to do [with the fact] people just assumed that I was just a sports jock and had done nothing else in my life that would make me suitably . . . qualified for this position.”
Devoy seems to believe she’s viewed as having been a woeful Race Relations Commissioner because she was a white-skinned New Zealand sportswoman. But the real reason Devoy was not up to being Race Relations Commissioner is that her conception of “Race” was tenuous at best.
And that’s not to say “Race” is easily defined. Traditionally, a “race” is a group of humans with shared, inherited physical and behavioural characteristics. But “Race” is a nebulous concept, and nowadays some argue that “Race” is a cultural construct, rather than a genetic thing. With the advent of Woke, race has of course been woven into Western colonisation, with the online Britannica stating “scholars now argue that “races” are cultural interventions reflecting specific attitudes and beliefs that were imposed on different populations in the wake of western European conquests beginning in the 15th century”. So the Maori race is simply a Western colonial invention?!
Aotearoa New Zealand is schizophrenic on race. If one has Maori ancestry, race is AMAZING. Otherwise, defining people by race is abominable.
But whatever else it is, “Race” is not a shared belief system. And that’s where Devoy falls down. Devoy thinks that the approximately 2 billion people who share the Islamic religious belief system are a “race”. In 2015, in her capacity as Race Relations Commission, Devoy criticised Prime Minister John Key for failing to meet with President of the Islamic Associations, Anwar Ghani, about Islamist extremism: “It’s not good enough”/“He owes the Muslim community an explanation”. Criticisms of Islam can be entirely legitimate, and are never in themselves racist.
Some love to imagine an eternal race-based Maorified New Zealand, as some sort of Aotearoan Utopia. But Race is a sickly dying breed and dead end concept…which is a good thing.
In the words of the wonderful When The Cats Away/Sharon O’ Neill song Melting Pot:
Take a pinch of white man
Wrap him up in black skin
Add a touch of blue blood
And a little bitty bit of red Indian boy
Oh like a Curly Latin kinkies
Oh Lordy, Lordy, mixed with yellow Chinkees, yeah
You know you lump it all together
And you got a recipe for a get along scene
Oh what a beautiful dream
If it could only come true, you know, you know
What we need is a great big melting pot
Big enough enough enough to take
The world and all its got
And keep it stirring for a hundred years or more
And turn out coffee coloured people by the score
How hasn’t this song been cancelled?
Apparently you can’t be called out for racism if it’s offensive to, or against white people? Same for any religion outside of Muslim.
Dame Devoy has succumbed to the woke parallel universe that exists only in Wellington, where reality doesn’t exist?
Who on earth takes her seriously anyway? Oh I know, people in Wellington.
Goodness only knows why she was appointed to this position? She was a great squash player, maybe not so pleasant to be around off the court according to some?
Anyway another useless woke anointed figurehead for another useless ministry in Wellington.
So the Employment Law case was heard in November, the Judge reserved her decision and of course had judicial holidays for the majority of January… 90% of Employment Court cases take at least three months from the last day of trial … Easter was early. I suspect we won’t hear until May at the earliest.