Trade Me doesn’t like darky malarkey (Whitey wins again)

Scalped tickets many hundreds of times over their value? Ok,
Symbols of oppression in the form of a police baton used against antiapartheid protestors? Ok,
Symbols of Maori resistance? NEVER.

Trade Me just don’t like Maaaaris do they? Let’s see, Ross Meurant (a total prick of a man) gets to sell the Police baton he used to beat antiapartheid protestors with and is allowed to sell it on line for $20 000, but Tame Iti’s NZ flag he shot in protest of the way the Government handled past treaty claims with his tribe was banned and now Mike Smith’s chainsaw he used to cut down the tree on One Tree Hill looks like it will be banned, isn’t it funny how symbols of whitey’s domination (Ross Meurant’s police baton used to bash people protesting something as obscene as apartheid) is allowed to be sold, but any symbol of Maori resistance is automatically banned, what a tiny minded little nation of bigots we seem to have become!

Tumeke ended up doing the auction on behalf of Tame Iti for his flag and we would certainly look to do that for Mike Smith with his chainsaw now.

Tim Selwyn (currently in prison for Sedition while protesting the seabed and foreshore theft) wrote an amazing feature on the open racism that swirled around the Iti case and gave an insight of the red necked reactionary nature of Parliament in all it’s full foul glory….


Act MPs, always the first to proclaim themselves defenders of fundamental liberties and freedom, were the first to call for Iti's blood. Rodney Hide's outburst of indignation a fortnight after the display in a revisionist and heavily negative speech on Waitangi Day 2005 included a hypothetical question attempting to compare Iti's display on home turf with a courthouse:

"What about Tame Iti welding a shotgun, shooting the flag, and threatening the Waitangi Tribunal? What would happen to any of us if we turned up today in the foyer of the Court next door with a shotgun? We'd be rightly carted off and locked up."

And the same non sequitur was parroted dutifully a few days later by another Act MP:

"What would a visitor to this country have thought had they turned on the television the other night and seen that so-called demonstration against the Waitangi Tribunal led by Tame Iti, where cars were burnt on the side of the road and demonstrators with ash all over their faces rode horses and brandished shotguns? ... If I had gone down and demonstrated like that outside the District Court, I would have been arrested."

Coddington's sensitivity to what outsiders might think of a reminder that all is not sweetness and light in Aotearoa never prompts her to ask what the cause is only to criticise the symptoms in terms of having it being visible to the public. In essence that is purely what this case is all about: a reactionary, anti-Maori attempt to criminalise the means of public demonstration - but all the more galling because they implicitly infer that they are the determiners of marae protocol.

The narrow vent out of which the heat from the friction of injustice pours needs to be wide enough for Iti to mount a culturally appropriate display in a setting so natural the policeman nearby "did not look at his actions 'in a criminal sense.'" The only offence taken was the hysterical right wing politicians who launched their unprecedented personal attack upon Iti after watching a television news bulletin. No person present at the actual event ever laid a complaint to the police and yet MPs up on their hind legs in the maelstrom of Parliament can seemingly demand and secure a prosecution on the flimsiest of grounds.

But Trade Me don’t care about wider social issues, selling a NZ Flag shot in protest at the appalling history of persecution and pain the NZ Government had wrecked upon Iti’s tribe (a tribe that never actually signed the Treaty in the first place) was all of a sudden ‘anti-NZ’. Don’t you love how a minority who have been unjustly treated are only allowed to protest in a way that is acceptable to the majority, better still, why not just shut up in the first place and not make whitey feel guilty?

Which now seems to be what denying Mike Smith’s chainsaw sale is all about now. Does anyone on Trade Me even know why Mike cut down the tree? An ancient totara tree originally adorned One Tree Hill, it was planted in the 1600s, this is a difficult thing for most white people to understand, seeing as most white people only seem to thunk that history only started in NZ with the arrival of, you guessed it, white people. The totara was an important symbol for Maori right up until it was destroyed in 1852 by a party of drunk European workman. In it’s place grew a pine tree. So let’s recap, a sacred native tree that had been there since the 1600’s, desecrated and destroyed by a bunch of drunk white people has an imported tree replacing the sacred native tree, until a Maori activist, Mike Smith, decides to revisit history and force the issue of historical injustice back to the forefront with his chainsaw. When it comes to symbolism, attacking an imported tree that had replaced a sacred native tree which had been destroyed by drunk white people could only be topped in imagery by an axe through the Prime Ministers electoral office.

But none of these issues even pop into Trade Me minds, the message is clear – don’t remind the dominant culture about historical injustices perpetrated against the minority culture, because when you do, whitey gets angry at being reminded, the way an abusive husband gets angry when his wife reminds him of the beating he gave her last night.