A New Zealand real estate agent has gone to court to fight a government regulator’s requirement that she take mandatory training related to the nation’s indigenous Māori values.
Radio New Zealand reports that Auckland-based Janet Dickson could face a five-year ban from her profession if her license is revoked. Dickson refused to complete the Te Tiriti training course mandated by the Real Estate Agents Authority, a government agency. The mandate, which went into effect last year, requires all real estate agents to undertake a one-and-a-half-hour compulsory professional development course called Te Kākano (The Seed), which the regulator promotes as a “practical introduction to Māori culture, language (te reo), custom (tikanga) and Te Tiriti o Waitangi in the real estate context”.
Dickson pushed back at the mandate, stating the training from the course had little value to her work because Māori land was not covered in her practice. According to Dickson’s attorney Nikki Pender, “She would not have objected if a course like Te Kākano had been offered as a voluntary topic for them, so to speak clear on that, this really is about the mandatory nature of the directive, not the decision to offer a course of this kind.”
Andrew Butler, a lawyer for the Real Estate Agents Authority, rejected Dickson’s argument on the value of the mandatory course.
“It’s important that licensees when conducting their business and engaging with consumers are conscious of the fact that not everybody is like them, that different people have different cultural understandings and the way conducting oneself can have a negative impact on a person,” he said, adding the potential cancelation of Dickson’s license is the result of federal law. “This is not the Authority that chose these consequences – Parliament chose them in a context where it was trying to emphasize new era, new regime, new way of regulating this industry in which there needs to be increased public confidence.”
Dickson’s action has received the backing of Hobson’s Pledge, a conservative lobbying group that used Dickson in social media postings calling on New Zealanders to “join the fight to end woke madness.”
Photo: Rawf8 / iStock
;
In the USSR it was called “re-education” and people were usually sent to camps.