It's an extremely bizarre situation where the language your legislation is written in isn't formally recognised.

This is fine English probably should be an official language. But this is low tier culture war bait from an unpopular party. I was pretty disappointed to see Chole bite on it. It made her look bad.

I agree, this should be a tick box exercise at best.

We teach it in schools, it is the first language of the vast bulk of kiwis....we write all out legal documentation in English.

The way to avoid the culture war is just to tick the box and don't mention it.

When they next try the bait, just say "oh yes, that was an oversight, it is already done". Dismiss the concern, and when they claim victory, give them a "well done, but we do have more important things to work on now" type response.

I disagree. We don't have laws that grass is green or that the sky is blue.

The idea of writing a law to make Māori or NZ Sign Language official languages are to enshrine access, as in if you are dealing with the government you can use these languages and the government must allow it.

We don't have it for English because it's the defacto official language, writing it down in law is fine but having an entire bill just for this purpose is a dogwhistle to racists.

Here's an article that touches on it:

It's not common for Anglosphere countries to have English as an official language, says Louisa Willoughby, an associate professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne. (Canada is an exception, where English and French have equal status.)

This is because, as Adams said, English is already the default.

"People tend to legislate around language when they're worried about preserving that language," Willoughby says.

"It's hard to make a legal argument that English is threatened in New Zealand, Australia, or the United States, for example."

What, then, would the proposal change?

"Nothing," says Andrew Geddis, a professor of law at the University of Otago.

Legislation is intended to solve problems, he says. "What is the social problem here that requires a solution? English is already an official language. It can be used in all public settings."

Basically it's quite unusual for an English speaking country to feel the need to write that in their laws.

is a dogwhistle to racists.

Usually you can't hear a dog whistle, this one's pretty, uh, broad spectrum.

Well I'd expect most of the general public to see this and think "huh, I support that, I'm surprised it's not already in law as an official language", so I'm not sure the racism would be that obvious to the average person.

Typically we'd rely on news media to do this critical thinking for us.

It's a shame that now we mostly have mainstream reporters just reporting events rather than journalists analysing events.

Well the article I linked above from 2023 does much of the analysing and is how I became aware that it's unusual the put this in law so I think we can give journalists some credit 🙂

That's a good point. I hadn't really thought of the reasons that minority or pre-colonial languages are made official.

I guess the use of enshrining English would be to make sure the government issues forms in it, which they probably already do. (I'm not ANZAC) On the other hand, it would likely allow the same (or a future) government to PROHIBIT publishing or accepting forms in other languages, which would tend to limit minority access to power.

Yeah. That was pretty good.

Maybe but please don't pretend this isn't the result of a racist party working to make their racist voters happy but signaling to them that they are going to keep making sure their race continues to dominate all other races.

“This bill won’t solve the push of this virtue signalling narrative completely,” Peters said.

He views protecting Te Reo as virtue signalling.