Alan Duff on the “bone-headed” Harawira

 

What do you call a "leader" with no idea to where me might lead his followers, or what he might lead them into? Answer, says Alan Duff of Hone Harawira: "bone-headed."

After a career of non-achievement, Harawira has just announced another "comeback," another effort in another election to lead “his people” who knows where. Another from “the bone-headed fighter? No thanks,” says Duff.

Duff, author of Once Were Warriors and co-founder of the tremendously successful Books in Schools programme, recognises Hone as just another blowhard who sees politics itself as the only game in town – a game where you seek out failure as a route to power without ever offering a solution of your own to bless it.

A man with a hero-complex is not what Maoridom needs. They - our people - do not need someone pandering to our lowest common denominator, telling them their failures are not their fault but the fault of rich white people, greedy capitalists, a stacked system, government, all on the assumption these people are incapable of helping themselves.
    Not once have we heard offered a solution to "poor" people's woes, to "poverty." He came up with no ideas on creating employment. Nor use of Northland Maori land.
    No ideas on instilling an education ethos in the outlook of the very culture of those he claims to be fighting for. His ideas were and still are zilch.
    He hasn't demonstrated by a single gesture that maybe he should take a less hardline stance. Oh, no. Not Hone. He's the self-described "fighter." Whoopee, that's gonna put a lot of Maori into their own homes and give them jobs, lift us up to the educated, aspiring middle class, a scrapper representing us.

Hone is not alone in seeking political power with no particular end or goal but the political power itself. Just the most obvious.

 Had Hone opened up by saying yes, he's making a comeback, now let's start with the awful fact that yet another Maori has murdered a child. Followed by ideas on what to do about it. A book on parenting skills, perhaps, Hone? Nah. Too hard. …
    He wants to lead. Not as in heading a large number of Maori into the Promised Land.
    He just wants to be a heroic figurehead yet don't dare subject him to scrutiny or criticism…

When you do scrtch that surface, you don’t find a warrior – you find only the crybaby underneath.

Maoridom doesn't need tough-guy rhetoric, or protest for its own sake, a ceaseless outpour of negativity and blame-laying…
    He could try sitting down with people who are reasonable and come up with solutions to end Maori poverty and all our other problems….

Yes, he could try. But he wouldn’t be interested. Too few headlines. Too little interest. Because those who pursue political power are not about solutions. That’s because if the problems they go on about go away, so too, they think, does their powerbase. They feed on misery like flies on dung.

Such sham redeemers love poverty—of course, poverty of others. They remind me of Ayn Rand’s ‘Fountainhead.’ In this novel, Rand has beautifully delineated the personality of the socialist art critic Elsworth Toohey, a key character in the novel:
“You’re a maggot, Elsie,” she [his aunt] told him once. “You feed on sores.” “Then I will never starve,” he answered.
Nor will the NGOs. They feed on sores, wounds, lacerations—the more the merrier. Wherever there are sores and wounds, they ensure that the wounds are not healed, so that they can, like maggots, feed on them.

Politicians feast on misery.

Hone is just another politician.

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