Talkin' bout te reo-lution

The coalition is behaving as if Kiwis are gagging on too much te reo Māori, but new research shows the opposite as irritated reo champions push back.

- BY ATAKOHU MIDDLETON

Attitudes are the biggest impediment to language revitalisation," says Larry Parr, kaihautū (chief executive) at Te Māngai Paho, the state agency charged with promoting Māori language and culture through broadcasting. "The environment needs to be receptive to the notion first. You can't have infertile ground to plant your seeds."

So Parr is thrilled that for the first time in several years, research tracking New Zealanders' attitudes towards te reo Māori has seen a small but significant positive shift. That translates to a greater proportion of the population showing active support for this country’s first language.

The research, released last month and covering 2024, is based on a theoretical model (see “Where do you sit?”, page 20) that segments the population into seven groups ranging from zero interest in te reo to full support. Parr says a 3% positive movement of the midpoint is “really exciting”.

However, there’s a poisonous patch in the garden. Parr describes as “disappointing” various moves by the right-leaning coalition government of National, New Zealand First and Act to discourage state use of te reo Māori even though it has been an official language since 1987.

NZ First went into the 2023 election campaigning to strip state agencies of their Māori names, with leader Winston Peters saying it was “not an attack on the Māori language - it’s an attack on the elite virtue-signallers who have hijacked language for their own socialist means”.

The position was written into the National-NZF coalition agreement with an addendum: state entities were to communicate primarily in English except those specifically related to Māori.

Numerous decisions since have been seen by many as reo-bashing within a wider agenda of anti-Māori, anti-Tiriti o Waitangi prejudice. A year ago, Education Minister Erica Stanford culled Te Ahu o te Reo, a popular reo learning programme for teachers.