Party wants all original te reo Māori place names to be officially restored across the country in the next five years

The Māori party has launched a petition to change New Zealand’s official name to Aotearoa, the te reo Māori, indigenous language name for the country.

“It’s well past time that Te Reo Māori was restored to its rightful place as the first and official language of this country,” Te Pāti Māori leaders, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said in a statement launching the petition. “We are a Polynesian country – we are Aotearoa.”

Our wellbeing is inextricably linked to our childhoods, which in turn is influenced by the lives of our parents and grandparents

If there is one patient who has opened my eyes to my own cognitive bias and who has helped me to recognise the profound effect of the past on a person’s health, it is my patient Arama*.

“Hey, what’s up, doc?” says Arama as he walks into my consulting room one day. He’s weaving a little, his breath reeks of alcohol, his speech is slurred. He wants to get some antibiotics for a chesty cough that he’s had for a week.

The early European explorers understood the power of naming and so do Māori today

New Zealand is, in its own imagination, a progressive utopia. The first country in the world where women won the right to vote, the first country in the world to introduce workplace arbitration, the Anglosphere’s chief critic of nuclear weapons, and the former British colony with “the fairest treaty ever made by Europeans with a native race”.

Related: New Zealand Māori may have been first to discover Antarctica, study suggests

In this extract from her new memoir, the New Zealand writer explains why children need to read about people like them

In 1987 I presented a paper at the Fourth Early Childhood Convention in Wellington. I titled the paper “Books Are Dangerous”. Always in my mind were the experiences of teaching reading in the small country schools, and what a difference it made to children’s learning, their self-confidence, their joy, when there were stories about them. Not only about them, but by them. This didn’t mean that they did not like the stories and books about others, because they did, but in writing their own stories and sharing them, they were able to see themselves as worthy protagonists too.

In preparation for the paper, I thought about my own childhood reading. Though I had always liked books, any books, any written-down words or expressions, the ones I read as a child were always exotic. I never found myself in a book.

The critical questions of who is really in charge and who has the money still need to be answered

After decades of neglect, inequality, and outright racism in New Zealand’s health system, a shift toward indigenous sovereignty and tino rangatiratanga in healthcare is long overdue. The Māori Health Authority that the government announced this week seems like a step in the right direction. But the devil will be in the details, as we wait to see if this will produce true change, or just more window dressing.

The failure of the health and disability system to serve Māori has been apparent for decades. A visit to the Ministry of Health website will yield report after report documenting the seven-year life expectancy gap between Māori and non-Māori, higher rates of cancer and other preventable illness, worse outcomes in care, and a myriad of other inequities. Being able to describe Māori health inequities is necessary. But ultimately, it’s insufficient.

Literary canons have real-world effects – they steal limelight from everyone else. We can challenge them by drawing attention to how they work

I feel sheepish to admit how deeply affected I was when I encountered the research of Gauri Viswanathan, a professor in English at Columbia University in New York City. In Masks of Conquest: Literary study and British rule in India, she traces the history of English back to when it was first systematically taught as a secular discipline. I ask my students: where do you think English was first taught as a discipline? “England?” someone will always guess, realising it seems so obvious there must be a trick.

And yes, they’re right. It’s a trick.

Covid hardships mean pounamu is increasingly being targeted for its value, Indigenous leaders say

The rugged west coast of New Zealand is home to many secrets. Rivers that run flush with gold, beaches that conceal ambergris, and waterways dotted with boulders of the sacred Māori stone, pounamu.

Imbued with spiritual significance to New Zealand’s Indigenous tribes, pounamu – otherwise known as greenstone or New Zealand jade – is highly prized. For centuries Māori have fashioned it into jewellery, tools and even weapons, which could denote status or be used as ceremonial objects or symbols of peace agreements.

A piece of clothing that descends from the codpiece and is designed to promulgate white male power should be optional

Last week it was reported that the Speaker of the House, Trevor Mallard, had decided to keep the requirement that male MPs wear neckties in the New Zealand parliament’s debating chamber after asking members of parliament to write to him about what constitutes appropriate business attire in the House.

If there was ever a year to change New Zealand’s anachronistic parliamentary dress code, it should be 2021, when the new parliament is the most diverse and inclusive ever, including 48% women, 11% LGBTQ, 21% Māori, 8.3% Pacific, and 7% Asian New Zealand members.

‘Don’t be a dick’ was one useful motto we came across in our podcast examination of how to be a modern man

In a Wellington cafe, one of New Zealand’s most respected academics talked about the disconnect between his feelings and the way he knew he was supposed to be: “I could not understand why anyone would see putting your head between two other men’s buttocks as being the high point of New Zealand culture. I was staggered by it. But I never said that, of course – I just buried those thoughts.”

Jock Phillips would go on to become the national historian, but as a boy growing up in the 1960s he knew the wisdom of keeping his cranium down in a land where rugby was next to a religion.