New Zealand

[John Hill]

The language most people of NZ will be speaking in the not-so-distant future will be a form of pidgin courtesy of those beautiful people at Orkland TeeVee.

[OneHungLow]

Not what one might usually expect in New Zealand...

A gunman shot and killed two people and wounded several others in a mass shooting in Auckland, New Zealand.

The gunman is also dead, according to police.

The New Zealand Herald said six people had been shot, including a police officer who was able to walk to an ambulance with help from colleagues.

The shooting did not have an apparent ideological or political motive, according to prime minister Chris Hipkins.

The incident comes on the eve of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, which is due to kick off on Thursday.

The Cup will still continue as planned.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 78513.html

Gunman in Auckland shooting was on home detention for domestic violence
New details have emerged about the man behind the Thursday morning shooting in Auckland, New Zealand, that killed two people and injured at least six others.

The perpetrator, who also died in the shooting, was reportedly a 24-year-old on home detention for domestic violence charges and subject to electronic monitoring, according to The New Zeland Herald.

He had previously been sentenced to five months’ home detention on charges of impeding breathing, injuring with intent to injure, wilful damage, and male assaults female.

[FD2]

Another person just off his head, or perhaps off his head on crack, or maybe just a twisted nobody who wanted his moments of fame before oblivion. No doubt we will hear all the usual 'reasons' about an unhappy childhood and abuse etc., at the inquest.

[bob2s]

FD2, you left out the bit where one of his relatives mentions--"but he was a good boy"--

[prospector]

Very likely Suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome

[FD2]

Looks like he was sacked from that construction site the day before and had a history of being unable to control his temper. Had been convicted of assaulting his partner. It will be interesting to read what the sayers of the bleeding obvious* have to say about his upbringing and the excuse makers about deprivation, racism etc etc etc.
*psychologists.

[Karearea]

Justice Minister Kiri Allan has resigned as a Cabinet minister after being charged with reckless driving and resisting arrest in Wellington last night.
Allan was taken into police custody on Sunday night after a car crash in Wellington and “is assisting with inquiries”.

A statement from Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said Allan was taken into custody and held in Wellington Central Police station after the crash on Evans Bay Parade in Wellington at 9pm last night.

She was released early today.

In a statement, police said they received a report of a crash involving two vehicles on Evans Bay Parade in Roseneath shortly after 9pm.

“One person was taken in to custody and is assisting police with inquiries into the circumstances of the crash.

“The road was blocked for a short time, no injuries are reported.”

RNZ has been provided photos taken last night of a Hyundai Kona - a electric car available to ministers - blocking one lane of a road.

Allan returned to her full ministerial duties on Monday last week after taking some time away from Parliament due in part to a relationship break-up.

While she was taking a few days of mental health leave, separate allegations were reported regarding her treatment of staff, which she strongly denied.

She then took another two weeks off over Parliament’s recess.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins spoke to Allan on July 14 after returning from his trip to Europe and confirmed then she would return to work.

Otago Daily Times/breaking/Justice Minister Kiri Allan resigns after car crash, resisting arrest

[FD2]

Another blow to Chippy's election hopes. He does seem to be having a really long spell of bad luck.

[Karearea]

NZ Herald/Opinion: Barry Soper: Dame Jacinda Ardern left Chris Hipkins to clean up the mess she created

Dame Jacinda Ardern was perplexed, after quitting the Prime Minister’s job in January, when she was asked to write a book, which will probably be worth more to her than her five years as leader.

She was perplexed as she was unsure of what to write about. After all, this woman was on record not long before being anointed to become Prime Minister as saying she would never want to do the job. Pity she never made good her musings.

Someone suggested to her she should write it about leadership and she liked the idea and that’s what we’re going to get in the bookstores some time in the future.

It should be compulsory reading for all aspiring MPs, essentially so they can avoid the sort of leadership she’ll be writing about. Her five years at the top were a disaster, showing how ill-equipped she was for the job.

Okay, there was her outpouring over the ghastly Mosque massacre in Christchurch, even if wearing the hijab was frowned upon by some who felt it degraded women. She said the right words, but then anyone who was leading the country at the time would have expressed similar sentiments.

What Ardern has done, though, is to leave her colleagues this year to clean up the mess she created.

The sous chef in her kitchen Cabinet, Chris Hipkins, has done his best to distance himself from her acquiescence to factions, particularly to Māori. Her Cabinet appointments and her arm’s length approach to them (think Michael Wood telling her he’d sold his Auckland Airport shares) has left Hipkins to clean up the mess as the true face of her Cabinet appointments is becoming clear.

Hipkins did learn something from her though: To capitulate until the inevitable happens, with him running out of options and the public running out of patience. Four ministers have now surrendered their warrants this year after, with the exception of one, being given chance after chance to redeem themselves. The exception is Meka Whaitiri, although Ardern did stand her down for a while after she got pushy-shovey with one of her staff members.

In the end, Whaitiri had had enough and threw her support behind the Māori Party, to add to the chaos.

The on-again off-again leave given by Hipkins in recent weeks to Justice Minister Kiri Allan is another example of the Ardern treatment of transgressors.

This Government has become as messy as the last two-term Government, ironically also led by a populist leader, David Lange. He exited in the same way as Ardern, although his reasons were a little more salacious.

There are more than 20 new Labour MPs who came in at the last election who will now be filling out job applications.

The Ardern/Hipkins Government have failed on so many fronts, despite their unbridled power, the strongest majority since the first Labour Government of Mickey Joseph Savage 1935. At least Savage left a legacy of state housing and free medical care, as did the Lange Government, the economic foundation stone which set the country on the difficult recovery path after the Muldoon misery.

This Government has left a lawless, impoverished, struggling country, longing for relief.

To repeat that last sentence:

"This Government has left a lawless, impoverished, struggling country, longing for relief."

[Karearea]

NZ Herald/Opinion/Dr Bryce Edwards - Political Roundup: Chris Hipkins failed to prevent the Kiri Allan tragedy

Electoral calculation was surely at the centre of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ unfortunate decision to keep flailing Minister Kiri Allan on in her job when alarm bells were going off about her integrity and mental health. That decision has now led to tragedy for both the former minister and a Government that is rocked by the unprecedented downfall of a Justice Minister being arrested in chaotic circumstances.

Allan’s final downfall was shocking, but not entirely surprising. For many months the Justice Minister displayed all sorts of puzzling behaviour suggesting she was in trouble and not necessarily fit to be a minister. And yet she was kept on in one of the top roles in politics despite the warning signs. That decision is something that Hipkins is now struggling to justify.

A history of Allan’s integrity violations

Kiri Allan’s downfall on Sunday night didn’t come out of the blue - the politician had been in trouble numerous times this year. And every one of those scandals could have been enough to have her suspended or even sacked. So despite the focus now being on Allan’s mental health, it’s worth reasserting that Allan’s conduct in the last few months raised serious questions about the politician’s integrity.

Integrity violation #1: Interference with RNZ. Allan’s first misdemeanour that raised questions about whether she had the integrity and judgment to be a minister was when she gave a hard-hitting speech at an RNZ event, calling out the state-owned broadcaster about its treatment of Māori staff, including her then fiancée, Māni Dunlop, who was leaving her job. The March speech at Dunlop’s farewell violated the rule that ministers must not interfere with the operations of state media.

Integrity violation #2: Failing to declare a conflict of interest. In April it was discovered that the Minister of Justice had failed to declare that the then Race Relations Commissioner - a person under the employment of the Justice Minister - had given her election donations totalling over $10,000 in 2020.

Integrity violation #3: Ministerial office relationships. The third set of integrity questions arose out of media reporting in June about Allan’s “workplace relationships”, which had caused four senior public servants to speak out publicly about her behaviour. One staff member decided to leave in mysterious circumstances, and numerous government department bosses were involved in discussions about the problem.

Hipkins’ call to keep Kiri Allan on
Allan’s series of integrity red flags raises questions about whether Hipkins made a serious mistake in not dealing with her situation earlier. The Prime Minister had to judge whether to suspend, demote or sack the Minister over these integrity issues. And mental health concerns meant there were added reasons to relieve her of her portfolios, or even to just give her more time off.

This would have been for the good of Allan herself. Arguably, the latest tragic result could have been avoided if the Prime Minister had dealt more firmly with Allan when she was under a cloud over her various integrity violations - particularly when the allegations arose about her misbehaviour and mistreatment in relation to staff in her ministerial office.

The last time a Cabinet Minister was in serious trouble for their treatment of ministerial staff was when Iain Lees-Galloway was immediately forced to resign in 2020 when he was outed for having previously had an affair with one of his staffers.

In the case of Allan, Hipkins took his time to get to the bottom of the allegations of problematic working relations in the minister’s office and decided Allan didn’t have to go. Neither he nor Allan has yet fronted up about the details of the mystery allegations and reasons that Allan’s staff member left the ministerial office.

Alarm bells ringing over Allan’s mental health
The fact that Allan has been suffering mental health problems has also entered the picture, and this too has made Hipkins’ decision more fraught. Today it’s reported that colleagues regarded Allan as “a ticking time bomb” and a “car crash waiting to happen”. Journalists are asking how the Prime Minister ignored the “red flags” about her behaviour. Was enough duty of care extended to Allan?

Allan’s openness about her mental health challenges was made particularly stark on social media. And one particular post she made on July 6 should have set off alarm bells. As reported on by Stuff political editor Luke Malpass on 8 July, Allan had posted to Instagram to suggest she was in emotional trouble, saying her former fiancé had “found new love less than a few weeks after we parted”, and that her own future was bleak as she believed that allegations directed at her “will stick”. She added: “with all these allegations thrown about, it looks like I’ve got no future in the one thing I do above all else - mahi”.

Reporting on this, Malpass pronounced that “Allan is clearly not in a good way” and he essentially argued that Hipkins needed to give her a more extended break from Cabinet for the sake of her wellbeing.

The very short period of time that Allan took off the job clearly wasn’t enough to deal with her mental health challenges. Much is now being made of the fact that Allan herself didn’t want more time off. And of course, there would have been a temptation for the PM to take the minister at her word when she said she was okay.

Hipkins might even be praised for giving her the benefit of the doubt, as he had with so many other ministers when they initially fell into trouble (in particular, Stuart Nash and Michael Wood).

Of course, Hipkins would also have been on dangerous ground in sacking someone with poor mental health. As Hipkins himself has said, “If the message is that someone who confesses or reveals that they are struggling with mental health should be immediately sacked, I think that’s going to make the problem worse rather than better”.

Hipkins couldn’t afford to lose another minister
Hipkins would have been keenly aware of the need to avoid yet another major loss of talent from his government. Losing Allan under a cloud of scandal would have been something to be avoided at all costs. To have sacked her was to invite electoral risk.

Hipkins would have calculated that the impact of suspending, demoting or sacking Allan would be yet another black mark against his government. After all, he had already had to endure the departures of Stuart Nash, Meka Whaitiri and Michael Wood - all under very dark clouds.

BusinessDesk journalist Dileepa Fonseka reports today that “Hipkins has almost had one minister resign on him every seven weeks since he became prime minister”. And losing his Justice Minister would have been something he was also desperate to avoid.

The Prime Minister might also have worried that he didn’t have the quality of ministers to replace her in her portfolios of Justice and Regional Development.

It was therefore something of a “roll of the dice” for Hipkins in keeping on a minister under a cloud of all sorts of unanswered integrity questions and mental health challenges. As Danyl Mclauchlan wrote for the Listener website yesterday, this decision to keep Allan on “left him vulnerable to the risk that Allan’s situation would deteriorate rather than improve. He would lose another minister anyway, but in circumstances outside his control. Beehive insiders were gloomily aware that this was not an unlikely outcome. And this worst-case scenario has now come to pass”.

What happens now?
It is inevitable that the public will form a judgment on Hipkins’ management of the Allan scandal, and connect her departure to all the other ministers that have gone this year. It is hard to ignore that there have been five Cabinet reshuffles during his very short time as PM.

The latest polling on this came out last week in the 1News Verian survey, which asked voters if Hipkins was doing a good job managing his Cabinet ministers. Voters were split - with 40 per cent saying he was doing a good job, and 39 per cent disagreeing. Unless there is a surge of public sympathy for the fact that Hipkins has been dealt a difficult hand to play with, the judgment about his management of his government is likely to drop further.

Of course, voters won’t be thinking about integrity issues, ministerial management, or Kiri Allan when they go into the voting booths in October - it’s more likely they will be considering whether the Government has delivered, particularly on cost of living and justice issues. But a narrative will now be embedded in many voters’ minds that there is a core problem of competency and judgment that is lacking in the Beehive this year.

Further details of the Kiri Allan scandals – particularly the working relationships in her Beehive office – could still come out in the near future, raising more questions about why Chris Hipkins was aware of the alarm bells going off about his Justice Minister but decided against doing more. Voters will judge him poorly on this if they feel that the decisions he made were more about electoral calculation than doing the right thing.

[FD2]

"This Government has left a lawless, impoverished, struggling country, longing for relief." +1

It looks as though there are many youngsters who don't know the difference between right and wrong. Lockdown took them out of school and some of them realised that they could make a living by thieving. Like Scotland, the country used to have an educational system to be proud of but 'educationalists' seem to have wrecked it. What is very heartening is walking past a group of teenagers while out walking the dog and have them smile and say good morning, so it's not all doom and gloom! I won't start on the contentious policies Ardern pushed throughout her tenure.

[FD2]

Talent Pool.png (132.04 KiB) Viewed 1621 times

[Karearea]

Diversions, detours and lane shifts are expected to be in place for months on a busy central Auckland road as the council continues to deal with a growing sinkhole, and says heavy rains could cause more to open elsewhere.

Part of College Hill Road near the police headquarters started to cave in on Monday and by Wednesday the collapse was big enough to swallow a car.

The hole would probably get bigger because of rain, Auckland Council Healthy Waters strategy head Andrew Chin told Morning Report.

And more could open up, in other places in the city, he said: "[That's] not a surprise at all. The system's under a massive amount of stress, the ground is absolutely saturated so there's a lot of ground movement, so where the infrastructure's in a fragile state you'll start to see these problems cropping up."

The rain had opened the sinkhole because of a dodgy stormwater pipe.

"It's an old pipe, over 100 years old ...an old clay pipe," Chin said.

"It probably will be getting bigger because of the rain. What's happening is ... as the rainfall falls into the hole it washes the dirt into the pipe and it keeps flowing down the pipe and making the hole larger."

Repairs to the stormwater pipe had been planned after the Auckland Anniversary deluges and had been weeks from starting, but had now been brought forward. The pipe would need to be replaced through the whole street, from England Street down to Victoria Street West.

Chin has said it would take about four months to fix the pipe.

Businesses in the area were concerned about the loss of business while the road was disrupted.

Council staff would keep the area safe in the meantime, Chin said.

"It's only going to get marginally worse ... the team's gone out with a ground-penetrating radar and gone all the way up the road.

"We knew about the pipe - it was old and we'd surveyed it.

"In the Anniversary Day floods the damage started to really accelerate, so we had a project not only to repair the pipe, but to do an upgrade, make a much larger pipe and improve the overall situation right down the road. ... It had been designed [and] the contract had been awarded and they were due to start in early August, so that's all just been brought forward now."

For now, Auckland Council recommended motorists use Franklin Road to avoid College Hill Road.

Eastbound lanes through the College Hill Road to the central city were closed, with one westbound lane open for traffic heading toward Ponsonby. And a diversion was in place for drivers to access Gudgeon Street and a detour through England, Ireland and Scotland streets.

Radio NZ: Sinkholes could open up in other areas of Auckland city - council - photos of sinkhole at link.

" as the council continues to deal with a growing sinkhole "

" where the infrastructure's in a fragile state "

" "We knew about the pipe - it was old and we'd surveyed it." "

- and then ?

Is there a 50-year, 75-year, maintenance plan to be carried out, or do they just survey stuff?

Auckland will not be the only place where this kind of thing is happening.

[Karearea]

Hawke's Bay locals are calling for the military to help with the clean-up, over 170 days on from Cyclone Gabrielle, which left a massive mess in the region.

They say the clean-up job is too overwhelming for them and what they need now is the might of the military.

Almost six months on from the disaster, members of Parliament are still facing tough questions from the community, including where the Defence Force is to help.

Some locals in Hawke's Bay have been forced to live in a shed, crematorium, caravan and a tent as some residents are still stuck in the mud.

Places like Eskdale and Puketapu are still littered with logs and the constant days of cleaning up have become unbearable for some.

"The aftermath has been so much worse than the floods," one local said to politicians.

Politicians from several parties were in the region on Friday night to hear from the community.

The most common question was: "Where is the Defence Force?".

"They were certainly deployed in the very early stages," Napier MP Stuart Nash said, only for locals to shout back, "but we need them now".

They need the strength of numbers and the tools to recover from Cyclone Gabrielle.

"We had a business, home and orchard... but now everything is gone," one local said.

The Defence Force's presence is wanted not only for the clean-up but for law and order too.

"Why was the Defence Force used to guard our Managed Isolation and Quarantine hotels... but we couldn't have them on the roadblocks while our communities were getting looted," one local said.

Around 400 Defence Force members were deployed in the immediate response, but they're long gone now.

"The conversation about using the Army in a policing role, that's a conversation that's more possible than bringing the Army here to help with the clean-up," Nash said.

"Because the only two people that can deploy the Army in that sort of role are the Prime Minister and Minister of Defence."

The Prime Minister's Office told Newshub any further deployment would have to be a decision of NEMA and the Defence Force.

Leaving locals none the wiser.

Newshub: Cyclone Gabrielle: Hawke's Bay locals call for military help as clean-up approaches sixth month

[FD2]

They seem to have taken their collective eyes off the ball - yet again. How else are those poor folk going to dig all the zillions of tons of sand, mud, clay, trees etc etc out of their properties and farms? Yet another vote loser for Chippy? Any progress on getting the forestry owners to clear up all the slash yet?

[PHXPhlyer]

Lost in translation: How New Zealand’s plan for bilingual road signs took an unexpected turn

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/29/asia/new ... index.html
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/ste ... ill/f_webp

It was meant to be an inclusive gesture to New Zealand’s indigenous Maori community. But plans to introduce bilingual road signs featuring both the English and te reo Maori languages have sparked a divisive, racially charged debate ahead of the country’s looming general election.

New Zealand – or Aotearoa as it is known to the Maori – recently hosted a public consultation on whether to include te reo Maori on 94 types of road signs, including for place names, speed limits, warnings and expressway advisories.

The idea, according to the national Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency (whose name means “traveling together as one”), is to promote “cultural understanding and social cohesion” with the Maori community, which makes up almost a fifth of New Zealand’s population of 5.15 million.

But the idea hasn’t gone down well with right-wing opposition parties, who have attacked the signs claiming they will jeopardize road safety. An extra language will mean less space for the English words, the theory goes, and smaller type will be harder for motorists to read.

“Signs need to be clear. We all speak English, and they should be in English,” the main opposition National Party’s spokesman Simeon Brown told reporters, insisting the signs could confuse people “traveling at speed.”

That claim prompted criticism from the ruling Labour Party government, with Prime Minister Chris Hipkins accusing the opposition of thinly disguised racial politics. “I’m not entirely sure where they are going with this unless it’s just an outright dog whistle,” he said.

While the National Party has since insisted it is not opposed to bilingual signs “per se” – rather, it says, it wants the government to prioritize other things like fixing potholes and improving traffic networks – the issues has sparked heated debate in the run up to the vote in October where Labour are facing a tough fight to hold onto power.

New life for a once dying language
For many in the Maori community, the plan is as much about signposting and preserving their cultural heritage as it is about understanding road directions.

Slightly less than a quarter of New Zealand’s 892,200 Maori speak te reo Maori as one of their first languages, according to the latest government data.

While opponents use this as an argument against the signs – pointing out that 95% of New Zealanders speak English according to the most recent census in 2018 – supporters use the same data as an argument in favor.

Part of the reason that te reo Maori is not so widely spoken is that back in New Zealand’s colonial era there were active efforts to stamp it out. The Native Schools Act 1867 required schools to teach in English where possible and children were often physically punished for speaking te reo Maori.

That led to a decline in the language that the New Zealand government of today is trying to reverse. It wants to preserve the language as part of the country’s cultural heritage and sees bilingual signs as one way of encouraging its use.

As Maori language expert Awanui Te Huia, from the Victoria University of Wellington, put it: “Having bicultural signage allows us to see our language as part of our daily surroundings and contributes to the development of a bilingual national identity.”

To this end the government in 2018 launched a five-year plan aimed at revitalizing the language. Five years ago just 24% of New Zealanders were able to speak “more than a few words or phrases” of te reo Maori; by 2021 that had risen to 30%.

Over the same period, support for bilingual signs rose from 51% to 56%.

The longer term vision is that by 2040, 85% of New Zealanders will value te reo Maori as a key part of their nationality; 1 million people will be able to speak the basics, and that 150,000 Maori ages 15 or above will use it as much as English.

For Professor Tania Ka’ai, director of The International Centre for Language Revitalisation at Auckland University of Technology, bilingual signs are at least a move in the right direction.

“I would describe it as a ‘work in progress’ because the language is still at risk of dying and it does not deserve to die – no language does,” Ka’ai said.

Are bilingual signs safe?
While the transport agency acknowledges some people have “safety concerns” over the plan, it points to the example of Wales in the United Kingdom, where it says signs featuring both English and Welsh have managed to “improve safety” by catering to speakers of the two most common local languages.

It also says the parallel between New Zealand and Wales will be “particularly salient if te reo Maori becomes understood more widely in the future” – as the government is hoping.

Several other experts have downplayed the suggestion bilingual signs pose a hazard. Even so, the issue is not entirely clear cut.

Kasem Choocharukul, an engineering scholar who specializes in traffic behavior, told CNN there is no evidence that bilingual road signs in themselves negatively impact a driver’s comprehension.

However, design and placement of road signs, as well as the languages and the context in which they are used, have to be treated with care, said Kasem, associate dean of the engineering faculty of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.

Research by the University of Leeds suggests road signs consisting of four lines, or more, are likely to slow drivers’ response time significantly.

Kasem said that in cases where signs featured multiple languages all based on the same alphabet – for instance, both Welsh and English are based on the Latin alphabet – greater care was needed to differentiate them, such as by using different colors or font sizes.

“The primary objective of these standards is to guarantee that all road signs are unambiguous, uniform, and legible to all,” he said.

Essentially, poor design can be dangerous, not multiple languages, if done badly.

PP

[PHXPhlyer]

Lost in translation: How New Zealand’s plan for bilingual road signs took an unexpected turn
Part 2

A tale of two languages
The example of Wales – situated more than 10,000 miles away from New Zealand – isn’t as random as it may seem.

Commentators say there are a host of uncomfortable parallels between the fortunes of te reo Maori and Welsh, which was also once in danger of dying out but has since witnessed a resurgence.

At the same time as 19th century European settlers in New Zealand were punishing students for speaking te reo Maori, the British government was actively discouraging the use of the Welsh language, or Cymraeg, in the wake of widespread social unrest.

In 1847 (20 years before New Zealand’s Native Schools Act) a British government report into Welsh linked the language to stupidity, sexual promiscuity and unruly behavior, prompting a drive to remove the language from local schools.

This led to the notorious punishment known as the Welsh Nots. These were planks of wood with the initials W.N. on them that would be hung around the necks of students caught speaking the language in school.

The turning point for Welsh came a century later, following a series of civil disobedience campaigns by the Welsh Language Society in the 1960s. One of these campaigns involved activists defacing and removing English-only signs on streets and roads. Bilingual road signs began to spring up.

Three decades later, and the British Parliament was actively encouraging the use of Welsh.

In 1993, it passed the Welsh Language Act to ensure the language shares the same status as English during day-to-day business in Wales. The language is now spoken by more than 900,000 people in Wales, out of a population of more than 3 million.

James Griffiths, author of “Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language” and a former CNN journalist, said Wales was a prime example of how sound policies could revive a native language, but he noted that, as in New Zealand, there had been resistance from some quarters.

“I think for a lot of people, if they speak the language of the majority, they don’t appreciate the type of recognition and representation of having it on road signs,” he said.

Across the Irish Sea, bilingual signs bearing both Irish Gaelic and English have existed in the Republic of Ireland dating back to the start of the 20th century.

The Hawaii comparison
Other commentators draw parallels to how the US state of Hawaii has used road signs to encourage use of Olelo Hawai’i which, like te reo Maori, is a Polynesian language.

Before the passing of the Hawaii State Constitutional Convention in 1978, which made Hawaiian an official language of the the state, there had been concerns it might go extinct.

In the 1980s, teaching of Hawaiian in schools began to pick up momentum and parents began making greater efforts to pass the language on to later generations, said Puakea Nogelmeier, professor emeritus of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii.

This momentum continues to build to this day, with Hawaii’s Department of Transportation last year moving to introduce diacritical markings such as the okina and kahako – dots and lines that indicate glottal stops or longer vowels – to its road signs to help non-native Hawaiian speakers grasp correct pronunciations.

Linda Yuen Lambrecht demonstrates the sign for "fish" in the critically endangered Hawaii Sign Language (HSL). Experts estimate fewer than ten people in the world can use HSL fluently.
The fight to save Hawaii Sign Language from extinction
According to a local government survey in 2016, about 18,000 residents now speak Hawaiian at home in a state with a population of more than 1.4 million.

But Nogelmeier says that while it has become more common to hear conversations conducted in Olelo Hawai’i, the battle to revive the language is far from over.

Unlike in New Zealand, where the Maori people reached an agreement with the New Zealand government to preserve te reo Maori under the Maori Language Act 2016, he says the movement in Hawaii is driven primarily by the community, making the cause “more decorative than functional” and akin to “a bit of a hobby.”

Nogelmeier also says that efforts in Hawaii are largely limited to using Olelo Hawai’i for place names, rather than more complicated linguistic uses.

He should know: On Hawaiian buses, it is Nogelmeier’s voice that calls out the names of stops in the local language.

Lost in translation
Using indigenous place names also allows outsiders to have a better understanding of how to pronounce words and boost tourism.

Both Wales and New Zealand have some famous tongue-twisters for those unfamiliar with the local language.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyll – or to give it its full title Llanfair-pwllgwyngyll-gogery-chwyrn-drobwll-llan-tysilio-gogo-goch – is a little village on the Welsh island of Anglesey and lays claim to being the longest town name in Europe.

That however it is dwarfed by New Zealand’s own Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, a hill near Hawke’s Bay which prides itself as the world’s longest place name.

With New Zealand having wrapped up its public consultation on the signs at the end of June, one other challenge remains should the plan go ahead: ensuring there aren’t any translation bloopers.

One road sign in Wales made national headlines in 2008 when local council officials sought a translation for a road sign that was meant to say: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.”

Their mistake was to email the in-house translation service and not scrutinize its reply too closely.

Officials requested a sign that read: “Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithy.”

Only later did they realize that is the Welsh for: “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”

PP



PP

[John Hill]

At the same time as 19th century European settlers in New Zealand were punishing students for speaking te reo Maori

Do not be tempted to read too much in to this.

[prospector]

That is a very polite way of saying most maori parents of the time were very keen for their children to learn English. There was never a Maori written language, bit hard for Nga Puhi in the North Island to write a letter to the Ngai Tahu in the South Island. And even more difficult to deliver said letter. The chances of any postman carrying out such a delivery would be nil, and the chances of ending up in a big pot and on the menu would be great. This is the parts of history that many, including the prime ministers mother appear to have conveniently forgotten when writing the new syllabus for New Zealand science lessons for gullible youngsters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aotearoa

"" The original meaning of Aotearoa is not known.[11] The word can be broken up as: ao ('cloud', 'dawn', 'daytime' or 'world'), tea ('white', 'clear' or 'bright') and roa ('long'). It can also be broken up as Aotea, the name of one of the migratory canoes that travelled to New Zealand, and roa ('long'). One literal translation is 'long white cloud',[5] commonly lengthened to 'the land of the long white cloud'.[12] Alternative translations are 'long bright world' or 'land of abiding day', possibly referring to New Zealand having longer summer days in comparison to those further north in the Pacific Ocean.[13]

The first Māori dictionary, published in 1844, had no entry for Aotearoa. An early reference to Aotearoa in New Zealand's newspapers was in January 1854 in the Māori-language newspaper Māori Messenger: Te Karere Maori, where 'Aotearoa appeared in a farewell message to Governor Grey by the sovereign chiefs of Rotorua.[14] Another appearance of "Aotearoa" in an 1855 article in Māori Messenger: Te Karere Maori, explicitly equated Aotearoa to Niu Tireni (that is, New Zealand; see § Usage).[15] By the 1870s "Aotearoa" became synonymous for the region widely known as the King Country. One King Movement flag also has the words Niu Tireni on it. By the 1860s there are examples of the use of the phrase "the island of Aotearoa" meaning the North""

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Did Te Reo even exist as a language then?