The concept of Positive Discrimination
-- also called Affirmative Action -- highlights features of
the dark underbelly of contemporary liberal democracies:
- Doublespeak -- a combination of George Orwell's terms Doublethink
and Newspeak. See the page: http://www.orwelltoday.com/dblspkthennow.shtml
;
- Good Faith in such matters is really Bad Faith;
- Statistical Racism and Sexism;
- The invisibility of groups of Non-People;
- The fact that the people who control our societies are, to a large
extent, the groups who are advertised as disadvantaged.
The term Positive Discrimination has
obviously been invented in order to give a positive spin to those forms
of discrimination which Leftists wanted to put in place or preserve
-- while hypocritically continuing to claim that discrimination is evil
in itself. That is Doublespeak.
Let us explore the logic of Positive Discrimination,
using the example of Positive Discrimination against Non-Maoris
in New Zealand in the area of Health. The Labour-led Government has
set up Primary Healthcare Organisations (PHOs) in areas which either
have a high Maori population or are relatively poor, in order to provide
low-cost health-care. Why has it targeted Maori areas ? Leaving aside
the issue of the Treaty of Waitangi (mainly because
we are just taking the Maoris as an example), we have to assume that
the Government wants to help Maoris because their health is poor, relative
to the rest of the community. However, as far as I know, Maoris' health
is no worse than that of other relatively poor people. This means that
they are actually being given special assistance because they are poor.
This ties in with the fact that the other targeted group, apart from
Maoris, is poor people.
So why doesn't the Government just target poor
people ? Since Maoris, along with other Polynesians, are known to be
the poorest ethnic group (of any size) in the country, targeting just
the poor areas would automatically include most Maoris. Most of the
Maoris who weren't included would not be poor -- so why would they deserve
specially cheap health-care, subsidised by the taxpayer ? This would
discriminate against Non-Maoris of the same income-level.
The reason is that the Government is motivated
by political pressure from Labour Party Members of Parliament representing
Maori seats (New Zealand has built-in racism, to the extent that some
Parliamentary seats are voted for by Maoris only). So any claim that
the Government is motivated by a desire to advance disadvantaged groups
would be a claim made in Bad Faith -- contrary to the Good
Faith requirement of section 19(2) of the New Zealand Bill of
Rights Act. Their motivation (disregarding the Treaty
of Waitangi , for a moment) is party-political.
In this case, there is no need to use a statistical
group based on race. The health-care need is not linked to race, but
to poverty. Therefore the statistical group that should be used is one
relating to poverty. To use a statistical group based on race when another
statistical goup is more appropriate is Statistical Racism. Similarly,
the inappropriate use of sex-based statistics is Statistical Sexism.
Statistical Sexism, Statistical Racism and Positive
Discrimination create statistically invisible groups of Non-Persons,
such as Non-Maoris, Non-Women (Men), Non-Mothers (Fathers), and Non-People
(Unborn Children). They are ignored, and their rights and aspirations
are ignored, as well.
In many ways, the statistical groups which are isolated and focused
on in this way are less disadvantaged than the Non-Persons are. This
varies from case to case, of course. There always has to be some statistical
measure according to which they are genuinely disadvantaged, but that
is not a hard goal for the creative researcher to achieve ! At one end
of the scale we have women, who are vastly over-privileged compared
to men, whose rights and needs are almost totally ignored. At the other
end we have some ethnic minorities, such as Maoris, who are "underprivileged"
in many ways, but who have more rights than poor Non-Maoris. It is important
to note that some minorities (mainly Asian ones) are socio-economically
better-off than the ethnic majority, so it is not convincing to try
to explain Maori disadvantage as the result of majority racism.
As a result of all this Doublespeak, Bad Faith, Statistical
Racism and Sexism, and of the invisibility of groups of Non-People,
the statistical groups who are advertised as disadvantaged have immense
political power, and use it to transfer resources to themselves from
Non-People. This process must end, and statistical groups must be formed
on the basis on need, not on the basis of Racism or Sexism.
NOTE: The Treaty
of Waitangi, New Zealand's founding document, has been systematically
misinterpreted, and is therefore falling into disrepute in some quarters.
This issue will be explored in a later article.
See also: Orewa
Speech - Nationhood
