Aotearoa Histories Curriculum is History

The Haps

After two years in hiding, Labour’s policies are emerging to remind us that a leopard can’t change its spots. The proposed capital gains tax is sold as funding doctors’ visits. To believe that you must ignore:

1. There are already subsidised and free visits for Community Service Card holders and under-14s, so the benefit is to wealthier adults.

2. The capital gains are proposed to start accruing from July 2027, and the tax revenue would come years after that when some decent gains had been made. So, the doctors’ visits would either have to start in the 2030s, or not be funded by the capital gains tax after all.

3. New Zealand is not a low-taxed country, we pay more than the developed country average, and far more than Australia in total taxation even without a capital gains tax.

4. The policy has a worrying tone, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it won’t affect you… we’ll go after someone else.’ It’s hardly the kind of policy you build a vibrant, productive, win-win nation on.

Aotearoa Histories Curriculum is History

In the past century the government has gone from about 10 per cent of the economy to about 40 per cent. The law books have gone from a few volumes to a collection of rules that no person could read in a lifetime. Why has this happened?

In part because the Left are better at politics than the Right. People on the Right think you should go to work, do your best for the people around you, and leave others alone if they’re not hurting you. The Left think it’s their historic destiny to perfect our lives for us whether we want it or not.

That’s why they’re good at organising. Unions are just their bread and butter. They also organise protests and hikoi. They submit en masse to select committees. They practice the ‘long march through the institutions’ where they take over schools and universities to spread their way of thinking. Most people on the Right are too busy doing actual work to notice.

ACT was founded by people who knew their enemy. Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble came out of Labour where they fought the toughest unionists and leftists around. A fisherman sees another fisherman, from afar.

The ACT Party Coalition agreement called for the Government to ‘Restore balance to the Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories curriculum.’ This was after the ‘Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum’ was introduced under Labour.

ACT railed against this politicisation. The Party saw what was happening. Marxist ideology where everything is a matter of colonisation and class struggle was writ large in the four ‘big ideas.’ It was using a children’s curriculum to advance an adult political project.

These so-called ‘big ideas’ were:

• Māori history is the foundational and continuous history of Aotearoa New Zealand.

• Colonisation and settlement have been central to Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories for the past 200 years.

• The course of Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories has been shaped by the use of power.

• Relationships and connections between people and across boundaries have shaped the course of Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories.

These so-called ‘big ideas’ are gone. They are no longer in the history curriculum. (Note it’s just one history, not ‘histories’. There are not many truths for different peoples, there is one world that all people are capable of studying to find truth). Students will now be given a well-rounded history about our society, and its place in the wider history of humanity.

Māori history is interesting alone, and should be taught. But, it’s even more interesting if you can compare the way pre-European Māori lived with the way many cultures developed their customs and technology over the centuries. That’s what the new history does.

Perhaps best of all, children actually want this wider view. A review by the Education Review Office found children were bored with the Aotearoa Histories Curriculum. Children want to learn new things about the big wide world, not just local history that is already familiar.

Of all the changes the Government is making to promote equal rights for all New Zealanders, taking the politics out of the history curriculum may be the most important long-term change. The Left always have a plan, but the ACT Party has the DNA to see them coming, and stop them in their tracks.