Why I left InternetNZ?

This post is a bit of an overview on why I chose to stand down from the InternetNZ Council. I know a lot of members and people have been asking me for more details and I want to share with you what has happened.

It was on Friday June 18 at 12:46pm I sent an email to the membership list for InternetNZ. I really did this because I felt like I had let our members down. I had ultimately been voted in to serve you all, a role I took really seriously. So me resigning a year earlier than the term served it was important to share with you why I chose to leave.

I did a very simple email as outlined below:

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Kia ora team,

I thought I would drop a personal note to all of the members on InternetNZ.

I am sorry to inform you that I have chosen to resign from the InternetNZ Council.

I know you voted for me and I wanted to serve you the best I could. However, recently the lack of a consensus acknowledgement of systemic racism within the organisation at the Council table is unacceptable to me.

I am no longer willing to sit at the council table.

Ngā mihi nui,
Amber Craig.
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InternetNZ has been a very emotionally draining place for me while I’ve been searching and finding my own whakapapa and identity. I’ve had to suck up my own feelings for the greater good of educating and sharing with fellow councillors of:

• How Te Tiriti o Waitangi works?
• What is privilege?
• How te ao Māori is not just a Māori version of today’s society and how some actions are tokenistic.
• How we might want to partner and have Māori led initiatives for better outcomes for us all.

If the Council knows that this work is needed. Why haven’t they planned for and paid for it like we would any other work that Council needs in order to operate effectively? Why is the work left to me and other Māori councillors? I can only surmise that, it’s because it is not valued by the Council.

Additional examples over my past 8 years on the council:

• Having to break down in tears telling the Council why we shouldn’t hire an openingly racist IT contractor to do work for us as a Council.
  → After having many Pākehā at the table already sharing they were uncomfortable working with this person because of their open racism it took me having to break down in tears as to why I refused to hire this person before anything happened.
• Having to deal with Council and staff being “uncomfortable” and them mistaking that for being “unsafe” within te Ao Māori.
  → In my opinion — Uncomfortable is a feeling that you can leave or walk away from — Unsafe is a physical threat to your person or family — they are very different.
• Being accused of pushing ‘an agenda’.
  → InternetNZ is a Te Tiriti partner — yes pushing INZ to be a good treaty partner was my agenda.
• Having Council and staff members consistently not talk to the Māori people in the room about Māori projects because they did not want to ‘burden us with it’ while we have to clean up messes when these projects don’t go to plan.
• At multiple stages over my past 8 years of serving I personally, as well as many others, have advocated for Māori to be in the top 3 priorities to give the operational team the mandate to work with and for Māori as well as having the Māori Chief Advisor reporting directly to the CEO and being shut down every time.

So when another Māori woman on the board raised the death threats our Māori whānau had through a YouTube video in an email on Monday 24th of May, we were shocked at the response back from Council. Given all the work, not just with Māori but since the Christchurch Act of Terrorism that these were the issues.

• A few of our Council seemed more concerned about the process and procedures of mailing lists then actually the harm and threat we faced as a people.
• The lack of response and silence from our senior management team was deafening to us and our community that I helped to serve. Yet the Council couldn’t see issues with it until we raised the issue and then pushed hard about it.
• When we were raising it internally the defensiveness we received from other senior councillors was frustrating.

On Friday 28th May I rang one of the senior Councillors to share my massive concerns and to indicate the seriousness of it all. I also informed them that I was actually thinking of resigning. They encouraged me not to resign, told me I didn’t have the full story and to email the Council. So I did and I shared my open and honest feelings on this situation.

• When I raised that the organisation was systemically racist I got the comment back “It’s not for me to say that” from a Pākehā on the council. If we’re not willing to acknowledge our harm in the process then we’re not willing to fix the actual problems.
• Every time we tried to raise issues (with examples of how it impacts on the ground) we were told that the issues raised were ‘operational and not council issues’.
• This meant the Council missed the opportunity to make decisions, strategies and prioritise and to enact the changes for operational staff. Council literally missed the opportunity to be an Internet for Good, and an Internet for All.
• There were multiple apologies which to be honest I got sick of. I’m a firm believer that apologies without change is manipulation.
• It felt like we were there to educate the rest of the councillors about how racism and privilege works.

It was decided to meet as a Council and when we did it seemed to be a round table of feelings, which when you have impacted people at the table is really offensive. I didn’t really want to hear how upset and sad non Māori were about the situation when it was obvious they were very far removed from the actual harm occurring. I wanted to hear how we as a Council would help enable our Chief Executive and their team to get stuff done.

Out of these conversations was a decision to prioritise Māori into the top three and to let members know what had happened. Some effort went into meeting a few Māori people and apologising to them.

However, a few weeks later the same organisation came out in the media highlighting a position that went against what many Māori in IT would support. This for me highlighted again the systemic racism within the organisation. Our policies, our position, our everything had been done without Māori. If we’ve apologised to Māori and said we’d do something different, then we had better do something different. In addition there were a few events where I felt our people were out of their depth in terms of speaking about racism and colonisation. Not a safe place to place our staff. So when it was raised with our council we just got a response of “well that was our position” as if we as Council had no place in commenting on it.

The ignoring of the root cause of these issues being Imperialism, colonisation, systemic racism for me will only mean tokenism responses for our Māori people. Any new initiatives like the Māori Design Group that got approval at the last Council hui, will mean bringing Māori into unsafe environments. If as an organisation they’re not willing to accept the harm they’re putting onto our community there is no way they will engage or work with our people.

In addition I saw the delay of real change, being left until after the AGM. Which I don’t know about you, but when your whānau and their children have had death threats against them, have had their addresses published online, and as a nation the hate is escalating — would you wait? The only people that I saw benefiting from delaying any such move was the status quos.

Even a report from the UN Human Rights Council about these types of events talks about the escalation of these threats.

“The Special Rapporteur notes that attacks, including killings of human rights defenders, often come in a context of structural violence and inequality”

So when I sat there and thought — is the best use of my time spent on the InternetNZ Council that refuses to actually listen to the Māori councillors on the board? Is this worth my mental, emotional and spiritual labour? Am I still passionate about InternetNZ? The answer to all three was no. I figured my skills are better used serving my whānau directly, outside of InternetNZ.

I’m sure there will be debate and ‘another side’ to most of this. I’m not really down for drama or rumours. I’ve heard so many other rumours about the council and their view on me. But what I’ve shared above is what I’ve seen, experienced or heard. I’m telling you my side of the story because I report to no one other than the people who voted me in. These issues will not be resolved if they continue to be closed conversations at a very specific, privileged, table. In its current state, with its current behaviours, is INZ living up to its own values? I’m happy if people want to acknowledge work needs to be done and say they don’t know but that excuse gets worn and tired after 8 years, after multiple te tiriti workshops, after years invested personally by three Māori councillors.

At the moment I don’t believe InternetNZ is living up to the whakataukī it was gifted by Takawai Murphy.

Kua rāranga tahi tātou he whāriki ipurangi mō āpōpō.

Because they are not weaving a better internet for my future mokopuna and I believe I can work with my Māori IT whānau outside of InternetNZ to do a better job. Nothing for us without us. This is why I stepped down.