Typical

The right's response to research showing that poor Maori health statistics are a matter of race as well as socio-economic status? It's "lying with statistics", of course. Add in a hefty dose of blaming the victim, implying that its simply a political put-up, and alleging that the primary researcher doesn't like smoking (somehow the epistemic link here escapes me...) and you have the standard response to inconvenient facts: they're lies, told by evil liberals! The paucity of this response should be obvious.

The fact is that in the case of health at least, race is need. And all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the right over the failure of the world to conform to their ideology is not going to change that one iota.