IAIN MIDDLETON
When the documentary film Mondo Cane (a Dog's World) was first shown to New Zealand audiences in the early 1960s it was greeted with a mixture of shock and scepticism. Young educated people living in this affluent society found it hard to believe that in parts of the world, some not far away, there were people who still held what seemed to be very naive beliefs and practices.
One scene showed Solomon Islanders keeping vigil beside a rough airstrip that they had carved on a mountaintop. They were waiting patiently for one of the passing aeroplanes to land and bring them the cargo that they believed had made the Europeans rich. Cargo cults are a Melanesian religious movement, originating in the 19th century, with a belief in a messianic spirit figure who will bring about the arrival of cargo and a new paradise on earth. We might have suspected that as the people of these islands became better educated such practices would disappear but it seems that rather than disappear they have mutated into different forms. The underlying cargo cult mentality still exists with the belief that one group should be given special privileges or rights and that from this would flow the riches of paradise. What is unfortunate is that for some individuals this has indeed come true.
In the emergent nations of the South Pacific, some individuals, through their birth into tribal nobility, have been able to obtain personal wealth. These new nations have been subjected to outside pressures from around the Pacific Rim. These pressures include those from criminal gangs in America, Russia and China, from fishing and logging interests in Japan and Korea, and from corrupt business and banking interests in Australia, New Zealand and America, who have offered these small island nations various dubious get rich quick schemes. When you have people who are guaranteed power through the position of their birth alone, you increase their susceptibility to corruption - their propensity to accept an undisclosed payment that can be used to increase their individual wealth or be shared in measured amounts with relatives and tribal members to bolster their personal popularity and power base.
Fiji is an example of a country where perpetual special rights for one ethnic group were enshrined into the constitution at independence in 1970 and restated in all subsequent constitutions. But these special rights have failed to provide wealth for the majority of that group and have led to increasing corruption and the mistaken cargo cult belief among the least privileged of the group that even more special rights will bring about the elusive paradise. New Zealand was perhaps fortunate, for when it achieved full universal adult suffrage and the status of the world's first full democracy in 1893 and moved to eliminate privilege it set the foundation to achieve one of the world's lowest corruption rates.
Care needs to be taken not to confuse perpetual special rights with affirmative action that is transient in nature. Affirmative action, when needed, is justified to correct or improve the position of a minority that falls behind the average of society.
One of the greatest achievements of humanity is the recognition of the
principle of individual and universal human rights. It is a fallacy to
believe that any group should hold special rights as a group - this generally
leads to tragedy. As long as universal individual rights apply, no group, be
they a majority or a minority, can force their beliefs or special status on
others.
IBM