Highway to hell or NZ’s nod to their own Indigenous voice?

A bilingual sign welcoming people to Rotorua. Picture: Supplied

Australian visitors in New Zealand may soon be navigating their way around the country’s roads using bilingual traffic signs.

The government local transport agency here recently completed a round of public consultations on a large package of new signs to replace the existing English-only versions to add their Maori equivalent.

These would be gradually phased in.

Set for a linguistic makeover are signs indicating destinations, public transport, motorways, general advisory and warnings.

An EXPRESSWAY sign, for example, would also have ‘te ara puaki’ above the current English word, a TEMPORARY warning will read taupua, and so on. In all, 94 different signs are earmarked for the change.

The process has been initiated by the land transport agency in the wake of its own ethnic-style rebranding a few years ago — nowadays it goes by the name of Waka Kotahi.

In a nation known for sometimes treacherous roading, not to mention the highways that were severely damaged by Cyclone Gabrielle earlier in the year, the transport agency’s new-found emphasis is a little odd at first glance.

But the publicly funded agency employs one of New Zealand’s single-largest concentrations of former journalists and media activists — if adjusted for Australia’s size, the comms team would number nearly 500 — tasked with finding interesting new angles on a typically dull subject.

Increasingly over recent years, the land transport authority has moved into sociological issues, not least in respect of finding new ways to accommodate the Indigenous voice.

Early last year, for example, the activist-agency splashed out NZ$330,000 in public funds on a highway-opening dawn event here in the capital, replete with cultural prayers and performance along with a tremulous address given to more than 300 guests by then prime minister Jacinda Ardern.

Once upon a time, and not so long ago, such an event might have had a smattering of elderly onlookers and officials sipping lukewarm coffees.

Announcing the latest change in May, the agency said the new style offers an opportunity for the Maori language “to be seen in our communities and support language learning and revitalisation”. Making the vernacular more a part of the country’s everyday life “promotes cultural understanding and social cohesion,” it explained.

The agency also notes that bilingual signage is no big deal in many countries around the world, whether in Europe, much of Asia or the Middle East and Africa.

Indeed, New Zealand is one of only a small group of nations — Australia is another — where the language of the nation’s original inhabitants doesn’t appear on the roads.

With the general exception of New Zealanders whose family origins are in Asia, Kiwis also tend to be notably monolingual.

Even the revival of the Maori vernacular is in many instances limited to memorising expressions and phrases. Often these have been recently minted by a small battalion of government consultants like the ones charged with haggling over the correct words for the new road signs.

Cyclone Gabrielle devastated roads in NZ’s North Island. Picture: NZ Herald.

To critics, what’s ultimately being signalled isn’t so much about this or that word next to the motorway but the Labour-led unmandated makeover of the culture at large.

Certainly, in the six years since the current government took office, the use of the Maori language in public life, including government departments, institutions of learning and publicly funded art and culture, has dramatically increased since 2017.

In the health system, for example, it was recently announced that patients for elective surgery would now be prioritised according to ethnicity, with preference given to the one in every seven New Zealanders who self-identify as Maori.

Such initiatives are seldom tested for popular support. Or else, when they are, tend not to do so well.

A couple of years ago, the nativist Maori Party initiated a petition to abolish the name New Zealand in favour of the undeniably prettier-sounding Maori word Aotearoa. Their prediction was that the proposal would easily win outright majority support in this nation of 5.1-million.

In the event, the intensive campaign waged by the party marshalled fewer than 70,000 signatures.

Whether any groundswell of public support exists for changing the road signs, it’s likely to proceed apace regardless.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon argues priority should be given to the ‘shocking state’ of NZ’s highways. Picture: Getty Images.

National leader Christopher Luxon, who on current polling seems more likely than not to become prime minister at the next general election this October, has said he is “not opposed per se” to the bilingual initiative.

Luxon argues that priority should instead be given to the “shocking state” of the highways themselves. The party has this past week pledged to spend A$450m on improving the poorly tended roads.

Nearly nine people per 100,000 die in traffic accidents in New Zealand each year, twice as many as who die on the roads in Australia.

Striking an less accommodating note, David Seymour, the leader of the country’s libertarian ACT party and of Maori background himself, says the initiative is yet another example of how the current government has “accelerated the drift towards separatism with their constant insertion of race-based policy into everything”.

In anyone’s language, he would say it’s the highway to hell.

• David Cohen is a Wellington-based author and journalist.