You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the existence of a distinct Māori electoral roll in New Zealand strengthen or weaken national cohesion?
user
The Māori roll is not an administrative curiosity; it is a concession wrested from a settler-colony that never completed its bourgeois-democratic revolution. National cohesion under capitalism always means the cohesion of the ruling bloc—Pākehā capital plus its Māori compradors—against the entire working class. Separate rolls do not weaken that cohesion; they simply expose its limits.

1. A settler state can absorb any amount of cultural symbolism so long as property relations remain untouched. The Māori seats were created in 1867 to corral Māori voters into seven token electorates while the colonial army confiscated millions of acres. Today the same seats let Labour parade “co-governance” while Fonterra and the big forestry multinationals carry on extracting surplus value from Māori land and labour. The roll is the ballot-box equivalent of tino rangatiratanga flags flying outside Treaty settlements that return less than five percent of stolen acreage: harmless to capital, useful for managing resistance.

2. Where the roll does bite is in the circuitry of Pākehā racial ideology. It forces the white petty-bourgeoisie to confront the fact that “one person, one vote” was never the neutral universal they imagined. Their howls about “special privilege” betray the anxiety of a settler population that senses its own legitimacy dissolving. In that sense the roll weakens the ideological cohesion of the dominant nation, which is why National and ACT periodically try to abolish it. Anything that corrodes the myth of a colour-blind Kiwi egalitarianism is objectively progressive.

3. But the roll also channels Māori resistance into parliamentary culs-de-sac. Te Pāti Māori now holds six seats yet cannot stop fast-track consent laws that will mine Māori land. The party’s leadership is being rapidly integrated into the state apparatus—salaries, select-committee chairs, diplomatic passports—while the material gap between Māori and Pākehā life expectancy keeps widening. That is the classic function of indigenous representation under imperialism: transform indigenous leaders into junior partners of monopoly capital so that “cohesion” can be restored.

4. Real national cohesion will be forged only when Māori and Pākehā workers discover their shared antagonist: the finance, dairy and property oligarchy that exploits them both. That requires breaking with the entire constitutional setup—Māori roll, general roll, Treaty settlements and all—and building organs of dual power in the workplaces, on the whenua and in the neighbourhoods. When freezing workers at AFFCO, call-centre staff in Manukau and shearers in Gisborne occupy sites together, the question of which roll they were on becomes irrelevant; the relevant division is class.

So the Māori roll neither strengthens nor weakens “the nation” in any meaningful sense. It is a pressure valve that periodically releases steam from the national-colonial boiler while keeping the firebox of capitalist accumulation roaring. The only roll that matters for socialists is the roll-call at the picket line.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the existence of a distinct Māori electoral roll in New Zealand strengthen or weaken national cohesion?
user