WELLINGTON – Maori MPs are calling for state broadcaster TVNZ to apologise and retract “racist” questions from a survey which seeks to find out how “Kiwi” New Zealanders are.

The KiwiMeter survey asked New Zealanders questions about nationhood and, in a Maori section, touched on Maori culture and asked whether Maori should not have special treatment.

Te Tai Tokerau MP Kelvin Davis said that question was designed to incite racial intolerance and he wanted it withdrawn.

“I was left thinking, what’s special about having our land stolen from us, higher Maori incarceration rate, worst health outcomes, lower educational outcomes – just what exactly is the special treatment we’re getting?”

The survey also asked whether discrimination was stifling Maori success.

TVNZ head of news and current affairs John Gillespie said he would not apologise for the question.

“We think that in the survey it is important to be robust and to have questions in it that reflect all parts of society so we won’t be taking out questions where we thought long and hard about why they’re in there,” he said.

Clifton van der Linden, the chief executive of Canadian company Vox Pop Labs, was in charge of the survey and said MP Davis’ claims were “categorically false”.

He said his company was reflecting the views that already existed in what he called “the discourse”.

“Asking the question doesn’t imply Maori received special treatment. If I were asking the question, ‘John shouldn’t paint his house yellow’, it doesn’t imply John is painting his house yellow.”

Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei disagreed and said the questions were a disgraceful approach to serious issues facing Maori in Aotearoa.

“What exactly are they asking people about? Are they asking people about having Treaty rights recognised and reparation for land stolen by the Crown, are they talking about the special treatment of not getting access to housing or our parents being kicked out of bars for being Maori?

“The questions are fundamentally misleading and racist.”

TVNZ’s Gillespie did not see it that way, and said 120,000 people had already participated in the survey, including Maori.

Van der Linden was also in favour of keeping the survey as it was.

“We can learn more about the mechanisms through which racism and prejudices operate and find ways to combat these prejudices,” he said.

“If you don’t ask the question, how do you hope to find the answer?”

The Human Rights Commission was also looking into the issue, and said the question about Maori receiving special treatment assumed that was the case.

Maori Party co-leader Marama Fox said she wanted to know more about how the survey was undertaken.

The whole survey “is trying to gauge what New Zealanders think about New Zealanders”, she said. “But when you look at questions over religion, immigration and Maori, why do we need a Canadian company on behalf to TVNZ to write a survey about ourselves?” - RNZ