In a move you could have seen coming from the moment it was first announced, or if you couldn’t see it coming you hoped it would come, Auckland University has decided its Waipapa Taumata Rau course will now be optional instead of compulsory. 

For a generation who have been appallingly let down over the Covid period by Government and education decisions, the Auckland University desire to force you into Māori courses seemed not just ill advised, but cruel. 

Kids of the past half dozen years have been soaked, to the point of drowning, in Māori issues and doctrine in their schooling and they are sick of it. 

The Labour Government's obsession with race has had the opposite effect intended. It didn’t cajole and encourage, it rammed and forced and overwhelmed us with condescending overlord-type instruction. 

University is not about being told what to learn, it was supposed to be the opposite. 

From our personal experience this year it appeared to us that the course was not just ill conceived, but shonkily run by people barely qualified to deliver a curriculum that seemed largely made up with no real focus or discipline. 

Students hated it, resented it, and were dragged kicking and screaming through it. 

Not just that, but to add insult to injury you had to pay for it. They forced you into it, then sent you a bill. 

As in all these areas of race the trick has always been that if you seek it, want it, desire it, whether broader study or the specific language, it's freely available and fill your boots. 

But the determination to square peg it only ever led to pushback and resentment. 

The last thing I would have thought universities wanted to do was put people off study. 

Once again from personal experience, we know people who not only avoided Auckland University, but in fact ended up studying offshore. None of this is a desirable outcome for the country. 

The upside is when asked by the university the feedback was as you would have expected. And to their credit they have at least read the room and backed off. 

But not before another year for thousands has been lost in a whirlpool of woke-enforced nonsense that never had to be.