Academic supports MP’s Land Wars national day campaign

Tuesday 8 December 2015

Academic supports MP’s controversial Land Wars national day campaign

Professor Paul Moon, a historian at Auckland University of Technology, has stated that the Labour MP Nanaia Mahuta’s campaign to have a national day commemorating the New Zealand wars of the nineteenth century is long overdue.

“We commemorate wars in other countries, monarchs from other countries, but turn a blind eye to monumental nation-forming events that took place in our own back yard,” he says

Students from Otorohanga College, have led the charge for a national day for New Zealanders to remember the wars of the 1800s, and Labour MP Nanaia Mahuta has also backed the campaign, presenting a petition at Parliament today on the matter.

Professor Moon says that the wars fought in in the country in the nineteenth century were crucial to the country’s development: “the Musket Wars, Heke’s campaign, and the Land Wards collectively may have involved the death of up to 25,000 people, and their effects still reverberate strongly in the present day. Much of New Zealand’s political and social landscape was shaped by these conflicts.”

He says the commemoration does not have to be a national holiday, but some form of official recognition is needed.

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