SATIRE: I'm so relieved we're to be spared the dreadful confusion of bilingual signage, writes Stacy Gregg. And then the potholes will be fixed and the nurses will come home.
The other day I went to Waikato hospital to have triple bypass surgery but discovered I couldn't because there was a sign in te reo blocking my way.
"But this is really urgent," I told the sign painter.
"Is it though?" the sign painter said as he carried on splodging paint over the words Te Whatu Ora. "I mean, yeah maybe you'll die but you can see the bind we are in here. Either we have these signs in Māori or we do life saving surgery. It's literally impossible for us to achieve both these things at once. So they've got to go – it's a top priority."
He didn't look up from his painting but I noticed that from behind his bald head made him look a lot like Chris Luxon.
All the same I perservered. "Are you actually saying that Māori signage has been the key factor destroying our health outcomes?" I asked. "And the reason the average New Zealander is unable to access the health care they desperately need is because their brains simply cannot process reading a Māori word even with a perfectly clear equivalent English word right beside it?"
"Precisely!" The sign writer replied, "It's a huge concern. Why else would the government be being quite so proactive about getting rid of Māori words? Sure, people think our health system is failing because doctors are heinously overworked and doing insane hours due to massive staff shortages and nurses are underpaid and sodding off to Sydney but first and foremost all our healthcare problems are a signage issue."Another sign writer had come to join him now. He had very thick, lustrous hair in brylcreemed waves and he began to attack the sign with brusque, assertive strokes.
"What's she standing there for?" He asked the other painter.
"She wants healthcare," the bald one replied.
“Listen sunshine," Brylcreem turned on me, "Common sense is coming back and it’s going to prevail. Which is to say we're going to spend enormous amounts of government money deleting words or swapping the order of the words around. That should solve everything."
"It's just," I said, my heart pounding quite hard by now, "It's just that I'm not entirely sure you have explained what the problem is with these signs in the first place."
The one that really did look remarkably like Chris Luxon actually stopped painting now and took a well worn cue card out of his pocket.
"I just simply want all New Zealanders to be able to navigate their government. The feedback we got throughout a lot of the campaign was that people don't actually know what Waka Kotahi is or Te Pūkenga or Te Whatu Ora is and can't tell the difference. If they can't understand the government agency then they can't hold them to account."
"Gosh," I said, "I never realised that our IQ level as a nation was so dreadfully low that we can't read and/or learn a Māori word that is frequently and vigorously on display right next to its Pākehā equivalent. I think perhaps for safety's sake it would be a good idea to prohibit all New Zealanders from travelling to other countries like perhaps Wales, or even Scotland and Ireland where all the signs are bilingual."
Another sign painter had turned up now and this one was very smiley in a way that terrified me. "New Zealanders are sick and tired of being accused of racism for wanting equal rights," he said.
"I actually hadn't accused anyone of racism," I said. "Although I suppose I had accused them of being wilfully thick."
"Why should they learn Māori?" all three of the painters had turned on me now and they seemed quite united on this one point. "What's that got to do with being in a hospital and being sick?"
I hadn't been expecting to have to explain the insidious downstream effects of colonisation this early in the morning. Mostly I had been expecting a triple bypass. "Here's the thing," I said, "The Māori relationship with healthcare has always been problematic and founded on enormous distrust of government. During the 1918 flu epidemic Māori were denied even the most basic medical treatment and as a result the death toll for Māori was four-and-a-half times that of Europeans. Historians actually believe the rates were far, far higher still as Māori deaths largely weren't notified. And right now, today, statistically Maori continue to die at four times the rate of non-Māori of cardio-vascular disease." And I could feel my heart skipping irregularly now as I added, "My mum died of an angiogram in this very hospital when she was 42. That's not a statistic, that is an actual person."
"I wasn't working here then," the bald one said. "I was running an airline."
"I wasn't here either," Brylcreem said, "I was on a march with Dame Whina Cooper."
"We're going to have a referendum soon," the smiley one said, "and then we'll all be even stevens and there'll be no such thing as history or Tangata Whenua anymore and ergo no more problems."
"Anyway," the three of them said in unison, "Off you hop and let us get on with painting these signs out. We've got a busy day of important health priorities ahead. We need to get more taxable cigarettes into the hands of all New Zealanders as soon as possible."
"Especially Māori," the smiley one said.
Outside in the fresh air, my heart was pounding like a highly irregular jackhammer. Common sense was certainly having a field day out here too! Signs were being painted over everywhere you looked. Waka Kotahi had been renamed NZ Transport Agency and suddenly the vast weight of financial resources that had previously been exhausted in the effort of trying to implement two words in Māori had been magically diverted into fixing potholes and as a result all the roads around the country were as smooth as spun silk!
"This new government is really onto something," I mused as I drove my car, which was most definitely not a waka, towards my home, which was again most definitely not a kāinga. "If we eliminate the Māori language in all government departments think of the efficiencies this will create. There is a golden era of race relations and economic prosperity ahead of us all as long as we all stop speaking te reo immediately."
And then I got home and discovered that another sign writer had been at work on the walls of my whare. Vast words, reaching to the sky in bright red paint. And they said Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou, mō te āke āke āke. We will keep fighting forever and ever and ever. I didn't paint over them.
Stacy Gregg, (Ngāti Mahuta/Ngāti Pukeko/Ngāti Maru) is an author who has just completed Te Reo level 5 Rōnakitanga at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. Her new novel Nine Girls, set In Ngāruawāhia and published by Penguin Random House, is out next year.
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