P Dey in criticising Cr. Lally's Maori ward stance (The Weekend Sun, December 8) fails to understand that councillors are elected to represent all of their community, including Maori, and advocate for all. A Maori ward is the opposite, being elected and answerable only to an ethnic group and required to promote their needs as opposed to that of the wider community. Promoters of Maori wards should reflect on the words of Massey University academic Dr Brian McDonnell of Tuhoe descent. 'We must have one standard of citizenship for all and the over-arching identity in the progressive NZ state must be unified citizenship, not class divisions based on 1840 groupings. The order in which your ancestors arrived as migrants, settlers to this country, cannot give you a constitutional status that is different from anyone else. We cannot have two types of citizenship depending on your ethnic group – one made up of people like myself who whakapapa back to iwi and hapu and those who don't. To embed this in some permanent way is intolerable. People who are born here belong to this land equally”. Special rights based on ethnicity will only sow the seeds of resentment and create a divided society.

R Prince, Welcome Bay.