A concerned tax payer

I emailed the Prime Minister today, here's his email address if you would like to as well Christopher.Luxon@parliament.govt.nz

Kia ora Chris, how are you?

I am working from home today as my eldest child is sick with a nasty cold. But I am grateful that I can keep him home from sharing bugs with his teacher and classmates and so he can get properly well. I am also very relieved that we live just an 8 minute drive away from the nearest hospital and after hours doctor if his chest infection gets worse.

I’m telling you this because I know you’ve got kids too and no doubt remember what it was like to feel helpless and scared when they were sick and you didn’t know how to make sure they’d be ok. But I know I am so lucky, he’s so lucky and will almost certainly be ok.

Because we don’t live in a war zone.

Unlike the terrified Palestinian Māmā I just saw on Instagram, screaming for her baby who is dying of starvation in Gaza. And she knows there is no safe drinking water, no healthy food and certainly no medical care. Because the hospitals are being bombed and the doctors and aid workers are being shot and the food trucks are turned away at the border and the water pipes are destroyed. Because of the genocide that Israel is enacting on innocent families. 

I think we’re a similar age, you and I? Did you do your secondary schooling in Aotearoa like me? I loved learning history but was pretty bored with the units we had to do on the trench warfare in France during World War 1 and the Treaty of Versailles and how the United Nations was formed and all that. I did however, really get into learning about the origins of Nazism in Germany and how the general public became indoctrinated to hate the Jewish people so much that they deemed them inhuman and only worthy of gas chambers. I was also learning the German language at the time and had a number of friends in Germany and I was always interested in what their reflections were on their homeland a few years after the Berlin Wall came down and a couple of generations on from the Holocaust. They unsurprisingly didn’t really want to talk about such things.

They wanted to move on. 

And that’s the legacy of folk like you and I, privileged Pākehā who see our histories written as the good guys in the text books and the biopics. But that social amnesia that Dr Moana Jackson referred to as our ‘misremembering’ - when we turn away from how we’re implicated in the social injustices of our time because we dislike the discomfort that facing them brings. I often wonder about all of those in Nazi Germany who knew that what Hitler and his cronies was doing was deeply wrong but decided to be complicit for their own safety. They sold their souls to stay alive.

I didn’t vote for you or your party and I disagree with most of your politics. But you are the elected representative for my country on the world stage. And you’re accountable to me as a tax paying citizen of Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Today my son saw me crying while looking at my phone and he asked what was wrong. I showed him the footage (the tamest I’d seen in the last 2 days) of aerial shots of the devastation on Gaza in comparison with 2022. He was very upset at the obvious carnage and said that he thought you and your colleagues should watch it too because "if only you knew" how bad it was for the Palestinians of Gaza, you’d speak up and call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and place extensive embargoes on Israel to send a clear message that their violent attempts to exterminate an entire nation of people is not ok.

So, here’s the link.

I am sending it despite knowing that your inaction on this kaupapa isn’t due to you not knowing how bad it is in Gaza right now. Or that you’ve not seen how immoral and illegal Israel’s actions are.

But I'm asking you to watch it anyway because I told my son I would and I am a person of integrity. And I believe that there’s always hope for change and maybe you just needed a reminder of your humanity from a sick 8 year old boy in the provinces. Because he believes that the Prime Minister of our country should absolutely speak up about the outrageous injustices Israel is enacting on Palestine once they knew about them. They would not be complicit. 

Be that guy, Chris. Actually be a leader. Lead our country through this horrific period in history and be known for changing your mind, owning your mistakes and learning from them. 

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Ngā mihi maioha