Mike's Minute: Are these tribunal hearings value for money?

Once again we ask the question: who is paying for the Waitangi Tribunal?  How much of it is what you would loosely call value for money?  There is a new urgent hearing this week. It is to do with the new Government's promise to have non-Māori Government departments use English for their name. Think the NZTA and the Ministry of Education.  The argument brought forward by a Tauranga iwi is this does harm to te reo.  A small irony so far, is it doesn't seem to many that the instruction had been sent out at all.  The waters were somewhat muddied when it was suggested that Oranga Tamariki might keep their name as well as Kainga Ora, given they were the names most of us knew the department by.  How they came up with that I don’t know. I assume they meant that given those two departments in particular had spent a lot of time in the news, the commonality of the reference might have stuck.  Which, if you think about it, was sort of the idea in the first place.  Having the vast majority of us exposed to another language, especially an official language, may help the language live, breathe and expand.  But what also happened is Māori terms, names, and phrases got tossed about with mad abandon and muddied the waters of comprehension.  The media have, broadly speaking in a fit of wokeism, embarrassed themselves and in part further damaged their already damaged reputations by embracing the activity with an alacrity that has been humiliating.  Tokenism is not language, but tokenism is what you get in news bulletins; a peppering of Māori with the English that leads to nothing more than a trendy nod to a fad.  But it's a national crisis, apparently, so much taxpayer money must once again be dispersed to lawyers and full-time agitators to, once again, front the tribunal, who will write their usual report, which will be treated in the usual way.  What's the Māori word for bin?     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.