You know, I can’t help but wonder why it seems that the only Maori words on the NZ Police website that I can see are the Maori name of the NZ Police- Nga Pirihimana o Aotearoa. On the left sidebar is a list of language options- several of which I don’t recognise. Those, apart from English, that I do recognise are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Spanish, Somali and Vietnamese. None of these are official languages of New Zealand. Maori is. What’s going on? Is it really that much easier to find somebody to translate the website into Vietnamese than Maori? In New Zealand?
And there’s this report from a few days ago. Apparently the armed police doing all that raiding completely buggered up their attempts to speak Maori.
Not being Maori, I won’t claim to present the Maori point of view, but from where I sit in Beijing I can’t see how Maori would trust the police. Not if their website, these raids, and their linguistic incompetence are in anyway indicative of general police attitudes to Maori.
