Hide Rodney: Human Rights (One Law For All) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Hide Rodney: Human Rights (One Law For All) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:632;Page:4042] 
RODNEY HIDE (ACT—Epsom) 
: 
 I move  
That the Human Rights (One Law for All) Amendment Bill be now read a first time 
. It is quite amazing. I went dancing for a few weeks and have come back and found myself voting twice in a row for Green bills. I must have become all soft and cuddly in the process. I hope the Greens will extend the courtesy in supporting my bill going to select committee. 
I think Sue Bradford’s bill is a very important bill affecting the lives of several people. I believe that the bill I have before the House is one that affects the direction of our country. Indeed it goes to the heart of what sort of nation what sort of country and what sort of people we are. I take members back—when I look around this Chamber—to our youth. [ 
Interruption 
] I know Shane Jones is struggling to remember. We go back to the ideals we had. We had a simple ideal; it was to be blind to a person’s skin colour. 
Hon Dr Michael Cullen 
: Yeah right! 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I heard Michael Cullen cynically yell out: “Yeah right!” but it was a powerful ideal that we strove to live up to. It was to look past a person’s skin colour past his or her ethnicity to see the person underneath; to see his or her character and actions and to judge the person accordingly. 
That is a very very hard ideal to live up to and we have failed so often but what an ideal it is. There is nothing we can do about the colour of our skin; we are born with it. There is nothing we can do about our ethnicity because we are born with it. But there is so much we can do about our character and how we behave. That is why racism is so wrong; it condemns people by their birth—not by what they do not by what they make of their lives not by the decisions they make but by the simple fact of the colour of their skin and the accident of their birth. I am proud of the fact that we belong to a generation around the world that has strived to live by that ideal. I am saddened that Dr Michael Cullen feels so cynical about it because I think it is a beautiful ideal. Who could not be thrilled by Martin Luther King’s speech? Who could not have been thrilled by that speech when we were young people? 
I come to where we find ourselves today. We are required by law to have regard to a person’s skin. We have turned the ideal inside out and upside down so that now when we go to the doctor we have to declare the colour of our skin and our ethnicity. Everywhere we go and interact with government suddenly the colour of our skin matters. In a generation we have taken a fine ideal and turned it on its head. We now have State-sponsored racism because race matters. I remind the House that there is nothing we can do about it; we are born with our skin colour and ethnicity. So how wrong is it that our relationship with the State our relationship with society and our relationships with each other should be determined on that basis? 
We have the Human Rights Act that outlaws discrimination on the basis of race so that we cannot discriminate. Yet this legislation has an exclusion; an exclusion for the State. So you and I Madam Speaker cannot discriminate on race but the Government can. I say that is wrong and New Zealanders say that is wrong. Sure look after the people in need and acknowledge that Maori in particular are in need but let us not draw a line based on skin colour and say that that is a proxy for need because that is to become racist. It has become so topsy-turvy that Michael Cullen the Attorney-General has had the Ministry of Justice prepare a paper to say that my bill to get rid of discrimination—based on race—in the State is itself discriminatory. The paper states: “The provision appears to discriminate against those groups of particular race colour ethnic or national origin that the Government identifies as needing assistance because of disadvantage. This is because the bill denies the Government the ability to assist those groups to achieve substantive equality with groups of other races colours ethnic or national origins that are not disadvantaged.” 
This was written by the way by the Ministry of Justice and I want to read the names of those who wrote it. They are Ivan Kwok Acting Chief Legal Counsel Office of Legal Counsel Ministry of Justice and Margaret Dugdale Policy Manager Bill of Rights / Human Rights Public Law Group Ministry of Justice. These bureaucrats are saying that one has to discriminate not to discriminate. So if a racial group is falling behind in some particular category there have to be special laws for that group to bring them up to speed otherwise we are discriminating. What Martin Luther King stood for—and people who stood against racism for hundreds of years stood for—has now been turned inside out by our Ministry of Justice and declared to be discrimination. 
I beseech members of this House to go back and ask themselves what sort of nation we want. It is one where all our children—all our babies—are treated equally before law equally with policy and not divided by the colour of their skin. We know this is a hot button issue in this country and we have heard some fine talk on the election trail from political parties saying yes we should get rid of State-sponsored racism. Well this is the test for each MP in this House and for each political party in this House as to what side of the fence they stand on. Do we want to create a society where civil servants politicians and petty bureaucrats spend their lives—and our money—filling out boxes and ticking them declaring us to be of this or that racial group? Having ticked those boxes they then decide what we can have from the Government. It is not based on our circumstance on our situation or on our need; it is simply based on the colour of our skin and the box that a bureaucrat ticked. 
 What we are doing is dividing our country on racial lines because some people get the tick in the box and others do not. There is nothing they can do about it; it is where they were born. So the resentment is huge. The idea that some racial groups cannot succeed without special treatment is itself racist. Of course the programmes themselves are inherently counter-productive. There is probably no bigger issue that is cleaving this country and that has the potential to rip us apart than the idea of affirmative action positive discrimination or a State determining what one is entitled to based on race. At the very least this bill should be debated properly. There might be parties that do not agree with it but we should have the debate because that is what this great nation is so desperately in need of.