Green MP Tamatha Paul described the bill to make English an official language of New Zealand as a waste of time. Photo \/ Mark Mitchell<\/p>\n
\u201cLet me tell you why te reo M\u0101ori has a protected language status \u2013 because it was beaten out of M\u0101ori systematically. We had to march our a**** to Parliament demanding that the indigenous first language of this country be recognised and not beaten out of the mouths of its native speakers. <\/p>\n
\u201cDo you know what the ironic thing is too? English isn\u2019t even an official language in England. Even they know that it is just stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n
NZ First MP Casey Costello said there was \u201cvalue\u201d in providing clarity in law of a language\u2019s official status. She said the bill would not impose any new regulatory regimes or obligations. Despite the Opposition saying the bill was a waste of time, the issue was important to NZ First voters, she said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt was assumed the official status already existed. What we do today is turn that assumption into reality,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
She said te reo remained acknowledged in legislation and respected in New Zealand, but \u201cin a mature democracy, we should be capable of acknowledging multiple truths at once\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cRecognising one fact does not require us to deny another.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bill states that the legislative recognition of English would not impact the country\u2019s two other official languages, te reo M\u0101ori and sign language. <\/p>\n
Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Green MP Tamatha Paul said the bill, given English was already considered a de facto official language, was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[28358,270407,16574,1559,115,4101,2837,11908,64600,2518,776,5338,2720,6368,111,43,139,69,5908,76331,17357,7806,175483,1361],"class_list":["post-550979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-alongside","tag-bastard","tag-bill","tag-called","tag-calls","tag-debate","tag-during","tag-english","tag-fiery","tag-green","tag-language","tag-makes","tag-mori","tag-mp","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-official","tag-parliamentary","tag-paul","tag-sign","tag-tamatha","tag-that"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}