Whilst I am not a member of NZ First I thought it was appropriate to put this article which I wrote in May 2024 back in front of the people of NZ in support of the move by NZ First leader Winston Peters to try to legislate that NZ is the official name of our country.
The most important thing about a name is the value of recognition that a name gives.
Given that the mere mention of a name gives us an instant understanding of what/who is being referred to by that name.
There has been a move to rename our country as Aotearoa which seemed to have been driven/supported by the just defeated Labour Government.
The Labour government of New Zealand was in my opinion never honest with their population in relation to their aims around the use of the Maori language.
At the 2020 election there was no mention of many of the issues that were implemented by the Labour government after that election (such as renaming our country as Aotearoa) and it is my belief that many of these issues were deliberately not mentioned as they may have had an effect on the result of the election.
The mainstream media now routinely replace the name New Zealand with the name Aotearoa and New Zealand seems to never be mentioned at all, yet Aotearoa is a recently made up name for New Zealand.
My country of birth is New Zealand not Aotearoa, I am a Citizen of New Zealand not Aotearoa, I hold a New Zealand passport not one from Aotearoa and I have no intention of ever voting to change the name of my country to Aotearoa (IF I AM EVER TO BE GIVEN THE CHANCE TO DO SO).
Yet the Labour government decided that government departments should have Maori language names and most people have no idea what these names refer to. It is now common practice for government agencies to use the Maori language name for their departments without an English translation.
The taxpayers of New Zealand should not have to look on google or similar websites to know what a department does.
The name of our country is New Zealand not Aotearoa and many companies have spent millions of dollars advertising that fact so that it is instantly recognisable that products offered for sale on the international markets are made in New Zealand.
And yet without the slightest attempt to ascertain whether the public wanted to change our country’s name, the Labour Government increasingly referred to our country as “Aotearoa”.
The reality is that for the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders the Maori language has no practical value and that, despite heroic efforts to revive the language, it is spoken by a diminishing proportion of Maori.
International evidence suggests that even making a dying language compulsory does not ensure its survival. After the formation of the Irish Free State in 1921, Irish language was made compulsory. Not only did this fail to achieve the hoped-for revitalisation of Irish, the language is currently in near-terminal decline. And the same is true of other languages where compulsion has been tried – Tamil among the Tamil-speaking population of Singapore, Luxembourgish in Luxembourg and so on.
Personally, I have no problem with teaching the Maori language to those who wish to learn it. But we in New Zealand are extremely fortunate to have English as our predominant language, the language of science, the language of aviation, the language of finance, and the language which will get you understood in almost every country in the world.
The vast majority of New Zealand citizens have no or very little knowledge of the Maori language and very few understand what the Maori names of the various government agencies refer to, yet we see a huge outcry in the mainstream media regards the coalition government’s policy of returning the government agencies names to the English version.
I find this very hard to understand particularly given that even most Maori do not speak their own language.
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By Andy Loader, Poke the Bear