Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 13. June 11 1979
The Haka Party
The Haka Party
The first motion was That VUWSA condemns all conscious and unconscious acts of racism. The first problem that came up, was what was an unconscious racist act? Stephen explanined that this was where the doer did not realise he or she was being racist. This appeared to be unacceptable to the meeting, and Steve Watson proposed an amendment (duly passed) that the word unconscious be removed and unintentional be put in its place.
But still there was opposition. Ann Riddle said we should oppose this motion because racism is a state of mind. If a person doesn't mean to be racist, then his or her actions are not racist. A person called Lindy Cassidy, who said she was just an uninformed arts student, then spoke, saying that meaning well doesn't negate the horrific nature of a person: act, an emotion followed up by Geoff Adams who said we should be attempting to raise people's awareness of just what they are doing when they commit a rascist act. The final nail in the coffin of the opposition was Stephen A'Court saying that it was entirely proper to condemn any rascist act. The motion was, finally, passed, and we moved on to motion the second.
That VUWSA recognised that the violence associated with the haka party at Auckland University was a direct result of domestic racism amd the inability of society's normal channels to adequately bring about social change, Debate progressed along several distinct lines. Did this motion suggest that under some conditions violence could be condoned? Stephen pointed out that the haka party had been going for 25 years, and each year Maori groups had protested about it and been ignored. It had, he said, reached the stage where peaceful protests acheived nothing. Another area of discussion emerged from this, namely had He Taua adequately explored all peaceful methods of solving the problem The general feeling seemed to be that maybe they had not. The two other areas debated were whether we should be condemning a group of people for their actions, but it was pointed out that nowhere did this motion condemn anyone, and the point that maybe we should be a bit more careful in future about what capping stunts we have.
This motion was lost, but it showed us the problems we face when trying to discuss an incident such as this where there were no witnesses from Vic. We were presented with two contradictatory accounts (both second hand) of what happened, and really found it very hard to decide just what had happened at the incident.
The third motion will hopefully clear the issue up somewhat, as it was That VUWSA fully supports the NZUSA tour of a Maori activist to speak on general issues of racism. This motion was passed, this tour should give us an opportunity to see and hear about the realities of racism in New Zealand, and perhaps prompt us to take some positive action to fight it.