a wanker in Wanaka

It is wankers like Carrick Jones, a Wanaka Community Board member, that give some towns a bad reputation. Apparently carrick finds maori a bit hard to pronounce and just cannot understand why some street names should be named in maori. As he so sweetly puts it, from ODT,

"I would understand it if we were in the far north, where there is a sizeable population of Maori, but that's not the case here [in Wanaka]," he said.

You might not see us, but maori are around, just as we always have been - after all, generations of our people walked, hunted, loved and died all over the south - they still do. Perhaps carrick should get a maori dictionary and look up wanaka.