E tipu e rea mo ngā rā o tō ao

1/8/2017

People often ask why I study public administration and public policy.

More often than not, it’s Pākehā officials who struggle to see public administration as anything other than fair and neutral and their ability to secure a job as nothing but a scientific and correct version of merit.

When it is not them it is global north academics, who hold tight to the idea that the state is objective, detached, and somehow above politics, and the state is somehow not an unreformed colonial construct.

When they ask, I tend to give them this:

Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.

And sometimes, if they still look confused, I remind them of Dr Kehinde Andrews:

We urgently need to destroy the myth that the West was founded on the three great revolutions of science, industry and politics. Instead, we need to trace how genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones upon which the West was built. The legacies of each of these remain present today, shaping both wealth and inequality in the hierarchy of White supremacy.

Colonialism hasn’t ended. It’s just evolved. You can see it all through the apparatus: in policy, in delivery, in data and in accountability and performance settings that pretend neutrality but deliver inequity.

So yes, it needs watching. It needs describing. It needs challenging. And, someone has to do it.

When whānau ask me the same question, if not slightly differently: aunt, why do you spend so much time on kāwanatanga and poneketanga? my answer is slightly different.

E tipu e rea mō ngā rā o tō ao
Ko tō ringa ki ngā rākau a te Pākehā hei ara mō tō tinana
Ko tō ngākau ki ngā taonga a ō tīpuna Māori hei tikitiki mō tō māhuna
Ko tō wairua ki tō Atua, nānā nei ngā mea katoa.

Simply put: if we’re going to make this system work for all of us, and for the people yet to come, we need to know its tools inside and out. Then, we can bend them to fit the gifts our tīpuna left us, so the nation we are building works for everyone – not just the few.