The Human Rights Commission is being accused of double standards by the Act Party for failing to condemn racist material by Christchurch Author Tusiata Avia.
The Commission received multiple complaints following Tusiasta’s racist material, which the Stuff website published and supported.
Seymour said “the Human Rights Commission spent $1.3 million on its ‘give nothing to racism campaign,’ but won’t even comment on the blatant racism in Tusiata Avia’s poem.
Its double standards show the HRC is ineffective, unprincipled, and needs to go.”
Last week, ACT called on the Government to withdraw $107,280 of taxpayer money given to a stage show that suggests descendants of Captain Cook and all white people be tracked down and stabbed through the ribs with pig knives because they might be criminals, too.
Newshub reported that the HRC’s Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon had nothing to say when asked about the work. Although the Commission released a general statement.
Seymour said “if the commissioner refuses to comment on genuine instances of racism, then what exactly is the point of his role, or the HRC for that matter?
“Written Parliamentary Questions released to ACT this week show that the HRC spent $73,657 on the ‘Give Nothing to Racism’ website. The full Give Nothing to Racism campaign has cost more than $1.3 million.
“Taxpayers are funding an organisation that only speaks up when something fits its left-wing agenda. It is no longer interested in helping real people with actual human rights issues, or combatting racism.”
“The Race Relations Commissioner was quick to label New Zealand police as racist over his concerns with Police Ten 7, and he had no issues laying into Simon Henry over his remarks about Nadia Lim, he also had a go at Amy Adams for getting a colleague’s ethnicity wrong by mistake. Why is he so reluctant to speak up when someone is inciting violence against an ethnicity?
“The definition of racism is to see people as like others of the same race, regardless of their actual characteristics. It is the -ism that puts race above all other characteristics. This poem goes a step further, suggesting white people are inherently guilty of crimes, deserving of violent vigilante justice. Incitement to racially motivated violence doesn’t get any worse than this” Seymour said.
“The Government says it wants to “Give Nothing to Racism”.
Yet it actively funds racially motivated hate speech like this poem. And the government-funded groups that are meant to oppose this sort of divisive language sit in silence.
“ACT sees no purpose for the Human Rights Commission. If they refuse to represent all New Zealanders and not just those that fit into their ideological bubble then taxpayers shouldn’t be funding them.”
