Martin Luther King Jr. once said that “the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the appalling silence of the so-called good people.”

I don’t see myself as a ‘good person’ nor would I register myself as a so-called ‘bad person’, yet one thing I know for certain is that everyone should have the liberty and dignity to be treated humanly. Social justice is an existential fundamental of what it means to live in community. Whether it be New Zealand’s atrocious record of child abuse or the epidemic of suicide (500 people per year commit suicide, that’s 6 times higher than NZ’s annual road fatalities) or even the blatant lie of having the best race relations in the world; New Zealand is a country in which deep societal issues remain blanketed by the norms of individualism and the generational loop of miseducation. I am only a person, writing for the advocacy of authentic and politically meaningful social justice in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Te Kaituhi Lewis