'ILLEGAL’ INVASION?
The Kingites and their affiliates claim that Crown land confiscations and the Crown's "invasion" of the Waikato in the 1860s were "illegal."
Bollocks!
The Treaty of Waitangi was not with a collective "Maori." It was with tribes in a constant state of war with one another and inhabiting two main landmasses. The was no country until the English came and created one under the sovereignty vested in Queen Victoria by the Treaty of Waitangi.
Some 512 chiefs signed the TOW, and a substantial minority in the centre of the North Island (Tainui, Tuhoe, and Tuwharetoa) refused to, meaning there were probably around 600 of these individually insignificant groups.
Under the legal doctrine of privity of contract, only the parties to an agreement are bound by it, or can claim its protection in the event of a breach. Tainui never signed the Treaty, so the Kingites should never have been included in the Treaty settlement process.
Back in the day, the Kingites loudly proclaimed that because Tainui didn't sign the Treaty, they could organise as they saw fit on their own land, including electing a 'king" to govern themselves.
I'm inclined to agree with that view.
However, all that changed once the Kingites started projecting power outside their rohe.
They began a series of escalating provocations that led Governor Grey to first issue strongly-worded warnings, then move into the Waikato to put the Kingites in their place.
Followers of the self-anointed Tainui upstart ‘king’ were either aggressive challengers to the Crown’s sovereignty (tribes who hadn’t signed the Treaty of Waitangi) or rebels (Treaty signatories who’d repudiated their undertaking by mobbing up with the Kingites).
The Kingites and their allies refused to accept the legitimate government, had tried to set up a rival kingdom, and to force Europeans out of their territory. They’d fought against the Government in Taranaki, threatened Auckland, and murdered settlers.
After war, some of their land was confiscated. This was legitimate under law -- as well as according to Maori custom -- and the Kingites had been forewarned.
Only about 4 percent of NZ's land area was eventually – and quite rightly – confiscated from tribes who'd challenged the Queen's sovereignty and lost. They had been warned in advance this would happen if they didn’t pull their heads in.
When conflict was brewing in 1863, Governor Grey made this crystal clear:
“Those who wage war against Her Majesty, or remain in arms, threatening the lives of Her peaceable subjects, must take the consequences of their acts, and they must understand that they will forfeit the right to possession of their lands as guaranteed to them by the Treaty of Waitangi.”
Here’s Sir Apirana Ngata on this matter:
“Some have said that these confiscations were wrong and that they contravened the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi. The [majority of the] chiefs placed in the hands of the Queen of England, the sovereignty and the authority to make laws. Some sections of the Maori people violated that authority. War arose from this and blood was spilled. The law came into operation and land was taken in payment. This itself is a Maori custom—revenge, plunder to avenge a wrong. It was their own chiefs who ceded that right to the Queen. The confiscations cannot therefore be objected to in the light of the Treaty.”
Once peace was finally made, the Kingites were treated as British subjects, a far more benevolent fate than they'd have suffered if conquered by another Maori tribe, and indeed considerably better treatment than the Tainui tribes had meted out to others during the Musket Wars of the 1830s.
Here’s how Tainui invaders conducted themselves in the Taranaki at the sacking of the Puke-Rangiora pa:
"It is said that twelve hundred of Te Ati-Awa and their allied hapus were killed or captured in the final overthrow of the pa. The greater part of the prisoners were women and children, and these were driven back into the pa to be killed or tortured at leisure. That day Waikato glutted themselves on the bodies of the slain lying in gore around the pa.
"The next morning the prisoners were brought out, and those amongst them whose faces were well tattooed were decapitated on a block of wood, with the view of making mokaikai, or preserving them, as trophies to be taken back to the country of the Waikatos. Others, with little or none of this decoration, were immediately killed by a blow on the skull. It is asserted that Te Wherowhero [the first Maori ‘king’] — the head chief of Waikato and principal leader of the invaders — sat in the gateway of the pa, and as the prisoners were brought to him he killed one hundred and fifty of them by a blow on the head with his jadeite mere named 'Whakarewa,' and that he only desisted because his arm became swollen with the exercise. The headless bodies were thrown across a trench, which was dug to carry off the blood lying in pools about the plateau on which Puke-Rangiora stood. Others, less fortunate, were killed with every conceivable form of torture; some again were cast into the ovens alive, to the amusement of their sanguinary foes. Young children and lads were cut open by incisions made hastily down the stomach, enviscerated and roasted on sticks placed round large fires, made of the palisading of the pa.”
Interesting to note that twice as many Maori were killed by other Maori in this one massacre, than in all the fighting between Maori and colonial forces in the entire Waikato War.
Grey was entirely justified in putting down an increasingly aggressive foreign power on his doorstep that threatened the peace and security of the colony. As victor, the Crown was entitled to deal with the vanquished Kingites as it saw fit, including taking land off them as punishment for picking a fight.
Let it be said again: the victor dealt remarkably mercifully with the vanquished.
If the Ihumatao land in South Auckland was in fact confiscated from Ihumatao Maori in the 1860s -- something nobody has done more than assert without providing proof -- the Crown was fully within its rights in asking them to take a loyalty oath to establish their peaceable intentions.
Nothing "illegal" about that either under the Treaty of Waitangi or outside it.
It would have been military suicide to leave a group of potentially hostile fifth columnists to the rear of the troops, astride their line of supply, and close to an undefended Auckland.
Anyone refusing to take a loyalty oath and electing instead to retire to the Waikato and stand with the Kingites made their bed and got to lie in it, I say. ENDS.
NOT A LEG TO STAND ON
Scrutiny attracted by Ihumatao’s illegal occupiers has turned up information that undermines claims of long association with the land, and shows why land there was confiscated.
Protest leader Pania Newton said her Te Kawerau a Maki iwi had lived at Ihumatao for hundreds of years, yet they weren’t regarded as the landowners there in 1848 when Ngati Whatua, considered to have mana whenua, sold land there to settlers.
Newton says the illegally occupied land was ‘stolen’ but neglects to mention the land was confiscated because the people there sided with tribes fighting against the Crown.
A letter from a district commissioner at the time confirmed that Ngati Whatua in 1848 sold land at Ihumatao to settlers named Geddes and Imlay. [1] Te Kawerau a Maki’s settlement deed shows numerous instances in which they say they were ignored in land transactions in Auckland.
The punishment aspect of confiscation has been downplayed since 1985, in the most recent round of compensation payments, giving rise to the view that Maori land was taken from innocents.
This view ignores the complexities of 10 years of sporadic armed conflict in New Zealand from 1860 that spread from Taranaki and involved fighters from Waikato.
In this conflict, some Maori fought for the Government and some against. As a result, Maori were required to take an oath of allegiance to show which side they were on.
When the Government moved against Waikato fighters in 1863, starting from Auckland, Ihumatao Maori refused to take the oath and left for the Waikato, according to a letter from H. Halse to the Government dated July 11, 1863.[2]
This refusal shows that people living in Ihumatao chose loyalty to Waikato relatives who fought against the Government over loyalty to the Government.
After Waikato fighting finished, 1100 acres or 445 hectares in Ihumatao were confiscated under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863. This was a consequence of opposing the Government either by fighting against it, or by supporting or conspiring with rebels.
Native Compensation Courts were set up under the Act to deal with complaints and several applicants from Ihumatao were heard in 1866.
Puketapapa, the site of Newton’s protest, was ruled to have been lost forever to Te Ahiwaru on account of “the whole tribe” rebelling. Other owners at Ihumatao had 260 acres (105ha) returned, leaving 840 acres (340ha) that remained confiscated.[3]
Gavin Wallace of County Argyll, Scotland, moved on to land there in 1867, either by grant, lease, or purchase. If it was by grant, as Newton says, it could be under Section 16 of the Act in return for military service.
In 1998, the Wallace family sold the Stonefields part of their farm to Manukau City Council, the Auckland Regional Authority, and Department of Conservation, for well below market value.[4] That, plus land sold by three other farmers, became the 100ha Otuataua Stonefields Historic Reserve.
In June 2015, Fletcher Residential bought the remainder of the Wallace farm and proposed to build 480 homes.
Te Kawerau a Maki iwi inked a Treaty settlement in 2015 that included financial redress of $6.5 million and more.[5] The Deed of Settlement does not mention confiscated land, although the Te Kawerau a Maki website says that land was confiscated.
Former Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Chris Finlayson has told Magic’s Sean Plunket that the treaty negotiations covering Ihumatao are "full and final.”
Following extensive negotiations between the Crown and Te Kawarau a Maki, a full and final settlement was arrived at of all the tribe’s outstanding Treaty grievances. This was given effect to by Act of Parliament in the Te Kawerau a Maki Claims Settlement Act 2015.
Finlayson was explicit in stating that this settlement was full and final. He also made it clear that the same Green Party now supporting the Ihumatao illegal occupiers backed the Te Kawerau a Maki Claims Act into law at the time.
Under the Treaty Settlement process, private land cannot be used to settle Treaty grievances. This derives from the legal principle that one injustice cannot be remedied by creating another, since the current owner of disputed land purchased it in good faith from an earlier legal owner, regardless of how it came to be alienated from Maori customary title in the first place.
This explains why redress under the Treaty settlement process typically involves a cash payment, transfer of surplus Crown land in a tribe’s rohe, and options on further Crown land that may become surplus at some point in the future.
What we have at Ihumatao is a raggedy-arsed band of illegal occupiers prepared to ignore Te Kawarau a Maki’s full and final settlement; squatting on private land and preventing Fletchers from going about its lawful business. They should be ordered by police to leave, then batoned to the ground and dragged off to jail if they won’t go.
Even had there been no full and final settlement, there is reasonable doubt that the disputed land was in fact confiscated after the Waikato War of 1863 as the protesters and their supporters today assert.
Protest leaders need to explain why the land claimed to have been confiscated does not appear on a map of post-1840 government confiscations. That map on the “Confiscation” page of the Government’s Te Ara Encyclopaedia at https://teara.govt.nz/en/zoomify/25776/land-confiscation shows all confiscation areas in the North Island.
Ihumatao, which is to the west of Auckland Airport on the Mangere side of Manukau Harbour, is far away from the confiscation line that extends only to the southern shore of that harbour.
Someone clearly doesn’t have a leg to stand on here.
The police must uphold the rights of the landowner by evicting the illegal occupiers.
Rather than giving the illegal occupiers any further oxygen, the Government must state that Treaty settlements involving that area are full and final, to allow both Te Kawerau a Maki and Fletchers to proceed with their lawful business.
[1] John Grant’s description of Oruarangi, http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-TurEpit-t1-g1-t3-g1-t9-g1-t22-body1-d2.html
[2] Letter, H. Halse. https://www.flickr.com/photos/archivesnz/48377496731/
[3] Confiscated lands and other grievances, 1928. P16. https://atojs.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/atojs?a=d&d=AJHR1928-I.2.2.6.13&e=-------10--1------0--&
[5] https://www.govt.nz/treaty-settlement-documents/te-kawerau-a-maki/
TREATY, MAORI LANGUAGE & CULTURE
“With the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, all Maori (including the chiefs) became not ‘partners’ but subjects of the Crown. And at that point, the language and culture of the public square became the English language and Western post-Enlightenment culture brought by the settlers.”
When Europeans came to these shores they found various raggedy-assed bands of subhuman cannibal savages existing in a Hobbesian state of nature with one another, in which “every man’s hand was against every other man’s,” "no man was secure in his life or in his property" and "life was nasty, brutish and short."
There was no such thing as a collective "Maori" or a nation state. Since some 512 chiefs signed the TOW and a substantial minority refused to, there were probably around 600 of these individually insignificant groups.
In the absence of a universally acknowledged civil government and laws to provide for land ownership, in 1840, the various tribes owned NOTHING. They simply used or occupied it until a stronger bunch of bullyboys came along and took it off them. The only universally acknowledged system of laws was "te rau o te patu" [the law of the club] aka "might makes right."
Throughout the 1830s, various Maori chiefs were begging the Crown to intervene in New Zealand.
It seems clear that in the lead-up to the signing of the Treaty, most chiefs had come to view British sovereignty and its associated rule of law as the only way to put a conclusive end to the Musket Wars that had ravaged the land for almost two decades prior to 1840.
With the coming of the musket, the various tribes possessed for the first time weapons of mass extermination with which to be revenged upon traditional enemies. The farsighted came to see that only outside intervention could arrest this ever-escalating cycle of inter-tribal violence.
Ngapuhi had been the first tribe to obtain muskets after Hongi Hika returned from England in 1821 with a large quantity of firearms, powder and shot. These weapons were used by Ngapuhi to overrun much of the North Island in the first of the Musket Wars.
A destructive arms race ensued. Thousands of Maori were killed as other tribes acquired European weapons of their own to wage war on immediate neighbours and further afield. The Lyttelton Times of 4 September 1861 retrospectively reported that as a result, “Whole districts were depopulated, and large and powerful tribes driven from their ancestral lands.”
Tribes fleeing from Ngapuhi began pressing upon their neighbours all the way down the North Island. “[W]ar spread from tribe to tribe, till the whole North Island became one scene of bloodshed and massacre.” In 1824, this carnage reached the South Island, after Te Rauparaha, having obtained a large supply of guns and ammunition, crossed Cook Straight to attack Ngai Tahu.
These inter-tribal conflicts also led to significant indirect loss of life. Thousands of Maori died of recently introduced respiratory ailments after moving down from their well-ventilated hilltop pas to low-lying, miasmic swampland to cut flax to trade for guns. But by far the greatest killer was mass-scale starvation.
For pre-European Maori, fighting was a ritualised pursuit traditionally taking place once the kumara crop had been harvested. After the onset of the Musket Wars, fighting became a year-round activity, because many tribes no longer bothered to cultivate, thinking instead to conquer their neighbours and take their food.
Since everyone else was operating on the same assumptions, thousands starved to death if they weren’t killed and eaten first by hungry war parties. As an indication of how scarce grown or gathered foodstuffs were at that time, the Lyttelton Times reported that: “Hongi [Hika] and his party, in returning home [to Northland] through the districts they had overrun, were compelled to live almost entirely on human flesh.”
The Maori population in 1840 is today believed to have numbered around 100, 000. By various estimates, the Musket Wars had led directly or indirectly to some 60, 000 – 100, 000 deaths over the period 1821 – 1838, after which the bloodshed tapered off because every tribe now had guns.
Maori culture’s ongoing requirement to extract utu (payback) from enemies meant this uneasy balance of power would always rest on a knife-edge, and a number of commentators have suggested that only by signing the Treaty did Maori avert their complete self-destruction as a race.
The words of the chiefs themselves display a full awareness that their acceptance of Governor Hobson would place him in authority over them, and that behind Hobson stood Queen Victoria. Eyewitness accounts of the pre-Treaty debates make it clear that none of the chiefs who signed it thought they were going into “partnership” with the Crown. Those who spoke up for Hobson also leave no doubt that they expected British sovereignty to bring lasting peace to the land.
Maori accepted the Treaty of Waitangi because the Maori way wasn’t working. Out: intertribal warfare, murder, cannibalism, revenge killing, female infanticide, and slavery. In: a settled form of civil government, the rule of law, private property rights, democratically elected limited government, individual rights and freedoms, religious tolerance and pluralism, science, literature, technology, schools and hospitals, houses that didn’t leak. Flush toilets and indoor plumbing, baths.
Their nasty-ass whakapapa even got toilet paper and soap.
Quite a good deal, most would agree.
With the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, all Maori (including the chiefs) became not “partners” but subjects of the Crown. And at that point, the language and culture of the public square became the English language and Western post-Enlightenment culture brought by the settlers.
Starting with [but not limited to] Maori language and culture, all subcultural associations – expressed within the law – became private matters for those concerned.
“Do it in your own time and on your own dime” would sum it up.
It never ceases to amaze me why any part-Maori alive today would choose to accentuate the primitive over elevating the civilised.
ENDS
NGAPUHI AND THE TREATY
On Waitangi Day 2014, Prime Minister John Key, publicly offered an upfront payment in an unspecified amount to facilitate settlement of the Ngapuhi/Muriwheua Treaty grievance. The iwi has indicated it wants up to $600 million, which would eclipse all previous settlements and possibly trigger the renegotiation of some.
In dealing with any Treaty matter today, one should be mindful of the prescient words of outgoing Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe in his 1922 farewell address: “In the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King; and he that does not know his own history is at the mercy of every lying windbag.”
Key’s offer to settle was presumable on advice from people who have read the Waitangi Tribunal’s Muriwhenua Report, then accepted its bogus premises without further inquiry.
The Muriwhenua Report is a 478 page doorstop riddled with assertions in search of a supporting fact. Facts that weaken Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua’s case are buried, glossed over, or omitted altogether.
In short, like all Waitangi Tribunal reports, it represents a marathon piece of special pleading on behalf of the claimants. If one has only read the Tribunal’s account of events, the catalogue of wrongs [sic] suffered by Ngapuhi/Muriewhenua seems extensive and crying out for redress.
The historical record tells a different story.
Shorn of its excess verbiage, the Muriwhenua Report mythologises assorted subgroups of Rousseauian noble savages living in peace and amity with one another, who failed to understand that in signing the Treaty of Waitangi, they were ceding sovereignty in perpetuity to the Crown. Instead, they thought they were getting a co-governance arrangement under which the Crown would exercise authority only over Europeans, and that Maori would continue to be ruled in tribal style by chiefs.
Yet the words of the chiefs on the lawn at Waitangi and elsewhere make it abundantly clear Maori were well-aware that their acceptance of Captain Hobson as Governor would place him in authority over them, and that above Hobson sat Queen Victoria.
Furthermore, these noble savages were too stupid to understand what a land sale meant, believing instead that they were granting some kind of temporary occupancy right, so as to benefit economically from the presence of white men living alongside them.
In drawing these conclusions, the Tribunal has applied a number of false premises and selectively ignored the historical record.
As usual, the principle applied by the Waitangi Tribunal in its Muriwhenua Report seems to be the one that says you can have your cake and eat it too. It accuses the Crown of not ensuring the iwi’s pre-European way of life remained intact, and on the other hand of failing to ensure that it enjoyed all the advantages of the white man’s world. Ngapuhi were entitled to keep their old hunting and fishing grounds, and to have thousands of acres set aside too for the time it would pay to go dairy farming.
Such assertions are based on Lord Normanby’s 1839 written instructions to Captain Hobson that: “The acquisition of land by the Crown for the future settlement of British subjects must be confined to such districts as the natives can alienate without distress or serious inconvenience to themselves.”
This directive was captured in the Treaty by the Article II pre-emption clause giving the Crown sole right to purchase land from Maori tribes and thus to be applied by subsequent Governors and Parliaments as they saw fit. Maori tribes were afforded the same right as any other British subject to sell land they “owned,” but were disbarred for their own protection from selling privately.
Reinterpreting the Treaty on the basis of correspondence and discussions that took place before it was signed is analogous to construing an Act of Parliament on the basis of the Select Committee Report to the House and the Parliamentary Debates that took place before it was passed and ratified. Not to put too fine a construction on it: arrant nonsense.
The Treaty of Waitangi is what its black letter clauses say that it is. There are no “principles” to be distilled out of it. To admit of this possibility is to open a Pandora’s box to anything Maori claimants might wish to demand, for as long as New Zealanders are prepared to accept European-Maori (with an ever-declining portion of Maori blood) asserting that they are “Maori” for unearned financial gain.
The Treaty’s black letter clauses are:
Article I
The Crown would henceforth be sovereign over the entire land area of New Zealand.
Article II
The Crown would guarantee to all the people of New Zealand (not just to Maori tribes) that existing private property arrangements would be respected.
Article III
As British subjects under Article I, all Maori (not just the chiefs) would enjoy all the rights and privileges of British subjects.
Another example of Tribunal revisionism is the canard that the Crown was obliged to protect the Maori way of life in its entirety. The source of this claim is a pre-Treaty korero that took place at Hokianga, where Bishop Pompallier had established a Roman Catholic mission. Primed by their spiritual advisers -- who feared that the Church of England wanted them run off -- Maori Catholics asked if the Crown, as incoming sovereign, could guarantee freedom of religion. Hobson replied that all religions, including “Maori customs,” would be protected.
Freedom of religion was captured in Article III of the Treaty, which accords individual Maori “all the rights and privileges of British subjects.”
Again, the Tribunal starts out by reinterpreting the Treaty for the benefit of the claimants on the basis of prior discussions, rather than its black letter clauses. In drawing its conclusions, the Tribunal also wilfully disconnects the Hokianga discussion from the context in which it occurred, so as to give it an unintended wider meaning considerably more favourable not just to Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua, but to any and all claimants.
With respect to land sales, even a small child knows the difference between giving something away and allowing someone to use it for a period of time. The Ngapuhi/Muriwhena chiefs knew full well the difference between a permanent alienation and a temporary occupancy right.
They were well aware that if one sold a pig or a bundle of flax to a ship’s captain or trader, accepting the trade goods offered in exchange meant it was gone for good.
The chiefs also clearly understood that a customs or berthage charge levied against a ship anchoring at the Bay of Islands conveyed just a temporary occupancy right, and that each time the ship departed and returned, a fresh impost became payable.
Nor does it seem to have eluded them a ship girl wasn’t sold, only rented.
The Tribunal itself admits that the permanent nature of pre-Treaty land sales was recorded in deeds, all written in Maori, and all stressing the permanent nature of the alienation. It then does its unsuccessful best to argue this down.
Historically, Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua had raised issues about a handful of specific land sales, all long since resolved by the Courts. These mostly related to disputes about the actual boundaries of the land sold and the exclusion of areas not intended to be included.
It is only since the Tribunal was created and empowered to measure the actions of past white settler governments against a modern-day set of Tribunal-fabricated “principles,” which those governments and Maori alive at that time had never heard of, and would have dismissed as absurd if they had, that a claim of the magnitude and impertinence of the one submitted by Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua could achieve any oxygen.
As Richard Prebble always said: “If you haven’t known about a claim for 150 years, that’s probably because it doesn’t exist.”
Anahera Herbert-Graves, chief executive at Te Runanga-a-Iwi o Ngati Kahu, told Northland Age readers on June 3 that the Crown supported the "theft of almost all of Ngati Kahu’s lands by 1865" by using "sanitised terms like pre-treaty transactions or old land claims, surplus lands, Crown grants, scrip awards and purchases."
First up, the land was sold, not “stolen.” Nor was Ngapuhi land ever confiscated like that of tribes in the centre of the North Island who’d waged war on the Crown.
Ms Herbert-Graves relies on the fact that most of her audience don’t know their own history and thus the meaning of the terms she’s using. From 1842, land claims commissioners investigated all “pre-Treaty transactions” by white settlers aka “old land claims.” If a purchase was invalid, as many were ruled to be, it was voided.
If the commissioners concluded that a purchase was made in good faith, they could validate it and award a Crown Grant of up to 4 square miles (1037 ha). But since the Governor at that time had no war chest to purchase land from Maori tribes, the Crown arbitrarily decided that if a legitimate purchase was of a greater size, the excess (or “surplus”) land would become Crown land.
And if the Crown wanted a particular parcel of such land, they’d take it from the settler who’d bought it, and give him a “scrip award” which he could use to purchase an equivalent acreage at a future Crown land sale elsewhere in the colony.
Those who got ripped off in the above process were not the original Maori sellers, but the legitimate European purchasers, who ended up with less land than they had properly paid for, or who had to wait a decade or more for replacement Crown land to become available for purchase.
Another thing John Key appears to have overlooked is that effectively admitting the full Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua claim as set out in the Muriwhenua Report -- without this matter being debated in Parliament and without any apparent awareness that the assertion sovereignty wasn’t ceded is unsustainable -- is likely to have profound and far-reaching Constitutional implications in terms of the co-governance agenda of Maori Sovereignty activists.
Key has effectively acknowledged that the Treaty created a Crown-Iwi partnership, when it in fact did nothing of the sort.
The Reverend John Warren, a Wesleyan missionary and an eyewitness to events surrounding the signing of the Treaty in Northland, wrote: "I was present at the great meeting at Waitangi when the celebrated treaty was signed, and also at a meeting which took place subsequently on the same subject at Hokianga. There was a great deal of talk by the natives, principally on the subject of securing their proprietary right in the land, and their personal liberty. Everything else they were only too happy to yield to the Queen, as they said repeatedly, because they knew they could only be saved from the rule of other nations by sitting under the shadow of the Queen of England.
“In my hearing they frequently remarked, ‘Let us be one people. We had the Gospel from England, let us have the law from England.’ My impression at the time was that the natives perfectly understood that by signing the treaty they became British subjects, and though I lived among them more than fifteen years after that event, and often conversed with them on the subject, I never saw the slightest reason to change my opinion.”
End of story, really.
ENDS
POLITICAL MANIFESTO
NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY
New Zealand is a sovereign nation state.
No international body whose officers have not been elected by regular, secret ballot of New Zealanders has any mandate to determine New Zealand’s domestic or foreign policy -- including (but not limited to) human rights, environmental policy, immigration policy, and policy with respect to minority ethnic groups or religions.
New Zealanders, through their elected representatives in the New Zealand Parliament, are the sole determinants of New Zealand’s domestic and foreign policy.
Immediate, binding public referendum on UNEXIT.
ONE NATION, ONE PEOPLE
A single common language and culture, to which everyone is required to broadly subscribe, occupies the public square. This is the English language and the New Zealand culture as it has developed since 1840. With the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, by which Maori chiefs agreed that all Maori would become British subjects, the language and culture of the public square became the English language and the Western post-enlightenment culture brought by the settlers.
Minority subcultural associations -- starting with but not limited to Maori language and culture – are thus private matters for those who value them and have no place in the public square. No New Zealander has any rightful claim on any other New Zealander to fund or promote a minority language or subculture.
The language of all public business is to be English only.
Street and shop signage by law to be in English only, the only exception being if a street or place has a Maori name in long-established general usage.
All prospective immigrants over the age of 10 years old, not just the principal applicant for residency, must demonstrate acceptable proficiency in English before they will be permitted to enter New Zealand.
SINGLE STANDARD OF CITIZENSHIP
Rights stem from New Zealand citizenship alone, not from membership of any group. In a free society all citizens enjoy individual equality in citizenship. This is so whether some of a citizen’s ancestors arrived in a waka in 1350, a sailing vessel in 1850, an ocean liner in 1950, or more recently by airliner. Even someone who put his hand up 30 seconds ago at a swearing-in ceremony is entitled to all the rights of citizenship. Prior arrival or ancestral longevity in the land is no basis for special privilege.
Group rights, whereby one group enjoys separate, different, or superior rights on the basis of group membership, are anathema to a free society. Group rights create two classes of citizenship where only one existed before. They require the intervention of an activist government forcibly taking rights from one group to bestow upon another. As Richard Prebble reminds us: “One group’s positive discrimination is another group’s negative discrimination.”
RECIPROCITY
If New Zealanders can’t do it in your country, non-citizens don’t get to do it in ours. For example:
If we can’t start a business in your country without a local majority-equity partner, non-citizens don’t get to start a business in ours without a local majority-equity partner.
If we can’t freely move to your country and become a citizen, you don’t get to move to ours and become a citizen.
If we can’t buy freehold property in your country, non-citizens don’t get to buy freehold property in ours.
If we can’t buy land, erect a church, and freely preach Christianity in your country of origin; you don’t get to buy land, erect a mosque, and preach Islam in ours, even if you are a naturalised citizen.
IMMIGRATION POLICY
Immigration policy is for the benefit of those who already live in a country, not for the benefit of anyone who might want to come and live there.
We take immigrants with skills that add value for New Zealanders. Immigrants who will hit the ground running, not swell welfare rolls. Preference will be given to applicants whose culture is a good fit with New Zealand’s existing Judeo-Christian, post-Enlightenment culture. This means Europeans, South Africans, North Americans, South Americans, Commonwealth Africans and Indians, skills-qualified Pacific Islanders, Filipinos.
We no longer accept immigrants or refugees from Islamic states. The evidence of other jurisdictions, 30 years further down this path than New Zealand, is way too compelling. Muslims will never integrate, because their religion tells them not to. The rest of the world has seen that wherever Muslims achieve critical mass, they self-segregate and start flexing their religious muscles to the detriment of the host community and culture.
We no longer accept immigrants from Communist countries, as there is an unacceptable risk that they remain loyal to advancing the strategic interests of a foreign power.
We no longer take refugees, most of whom statistically never become productive citizens. There are already enough homegrown bums, bludgers, and moochers without needing to import more.
Anyone arriving in New Zealand without a passport shall be immediately removed to country of origin by the airline that brought them in, with all removal costs the responsibility of the airline concerned.
Any naturalised citizen or permanent resident convicted of acts of terrorism in New Zealand or abroad, or of acts of sedition, espionage, or industrial espionage for the benefit of a foreign power, shall have their citizenship or permanent residency revoked, and shall be immediately deported to country of origin.
If a naturalised citizen or permanent resident is convicted of involvement in acts of terrorism in New Zealand or abroad, or of involvement in acts of sedition, espionage or industrial espionage for the benefit of a foreign power, all family members of such an individual shall have their citizenship or permanent residency revoked, and shall be immediately deported to country of origin.
Any naturalised citizen or permanent resident convicted of a crime carrying a maximum penalty of three years imprisonment or more shall have their citizenship or permanent residency revoked, and shall be immediately deported to country of origin upon the expiration of any custodial sentence imposed by the New Zealand courts.
If any naturalised citizen or permanent resident is convicted of a crime carrying a maximum penalty of three years imprisonment or more, all family members of such an individual shall have their citizenship or permanent residency revoked, and shall be immediately deported to country of origin.
We no longer take “family reunification” migrants unless their naturalised citizen sponsors agree to accept full, permanent responsibility for their upkeep. This means such additional migrants have no claim on New Zealand taxpayers for healthcare, welfare, or superannuation, even if they become naturalised, unless they have worked full-time in New Zealand for an aggregate period of 10 years or more.
If guest workers are needed, they come on fixed-term 12-month guest worker contracts. These can be rolled over for up to 60 months. Upon final expiration of any such contract, guest workers must revert to country of origin. A rolled-over contract or New Zealand-born children confer no ongoing rights of residency or citizenship. For a guest worker to achieve permanent residency, they and any non-citizen family members must leave the country, then apply through the usual channels.
Babies born in New Zealand to one or more non-citizen parents do not achieve New Zealand citizenship by having been born here. They are citizens by birth of their non-citizen parent(s) country of citizenship.
Babies born in New Zealand to one or more permanent resident parents do not achieve New Zealand citizenship until their permanent resident parent(s) become naturalised citizens.
Non-citizens and non-permanent residents do not receive taxpayer-funded treatment within the New Zealand health system. They must carry their own health insurance, meet their own medical costs, or solicit crowd-funding from liberal bleeding hearts in the event of illness or injury.
NATURAL-BORN CITIZENS
Only natural-born New Zealand citizens are eligible to run for public office, or to work in government departments. There is an unacceptable level of risk that those born in foreign countries may remain loyal to political ideologies or hold religious beliefs that threaten the rights and freedoms of New Zealanders.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
There is no such thing as a right not to be offended.
All other freedoms flow from freedom of speech, the freedom to challenge being the best prophylactic against tyranny. The assault on freedom of speech -- the mob shouting-down of dissenting opinions, the labelling and demonisation of those challenging received dogma and leftist orthodoxy -- began in the universities, spreading out from there into the public square.
The Education Act designated New Zealand’s universities: “The critic and conscience of society.” This opened the door for leftists to mount an essentially destructive attack on our existing society, by taking over the Academy, then using it as a beachhead for their “long march through the institutions.”
Rhetorical question time: “How many ACT or National voters would you expect to find in a university sociology department? And if a known ACT or National voter did apply, do you think they’d be accepted?”
Leftists must be removed as the gatekeepers to how we talk about our society. The Education Act is to be re-written, requiring universities to provide balanced coverage of all sides of contentious issues, including conservative and libertarian viewpoints. As an intellectual counterweight to the Marxists and liberals which they are currently riddled, universities must be required to employ equal numbers of conservative and libertarian professors, teaching staff, and tutors.
ENDS
THE BOTTOM LINE POLITICAL ACTIONS NECESSARY TO DISMANTLE THE EDIFICE OF TREATYISM.
[1] The abolition of the racist Maori seats.
[2] The removal of all references to race/culture/ethnicity from the statute books.
[3] The removal of all references to the TOW and its fabricated "principles" from the statute books.
[4] No more taxpayer funding for the teaching of Maori language, culture, and 'history’ and no more tax funding for Maori immersion schools at all levels. If radical 'parts' want these things let them use their Treaty settlement money to do it privately.
[5] The defunding of all parallel social service delivery systems to Maori. If radical 'parts' don't want to use the services available to all NZers, let them use their Treaty settlement money to do it privately.
[6] The restatement in statute that seabed, foreshore, and water are in Crown ownership and held in trust for ALL NZers.
[7] All Maori incorporations to be taxed at the company tax rate with no 'charitable' exemptions allowed.
[8] All communally-owned Maori land to be brought into the Torrens Title system by creating limited liability companies with shares issued to beneficial owners on a pro-rata basis. Shares can be bought/sold/traded with anyone of any race, thus allowing the motivated to build up a majority shareholding to move forward with land that because of current ownership structure cannot be used as security for bank finance. Maori Land Court to be abolished.
[9] Local authority rates to be levied on all Maori land -- including marae and kaumatua housing -- with standard enforcement procedures applied in the event of non-payment. No more free riders on non-Maori ratepayers.
[10] The immediate repeal of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 and abolition of the racist Waitangi Tribunal, with [[part-] Maori claims of any kind against the Crown to be dealt with in the Courts and proper evidential procedure applied.
[11] Re-writing the Education Act to change the mission of our universities from being "the critic and conscience of society" to "required to provide intellectual balance and rigour, and equal space for conservative and libertarian viewpoints."
And of course any downstream proposal that the beneficiaries of state-sponsored identity politics revert to being treated the same as everyone else will make such groups squeal like stuck pigs. As Thomas Sowell reminds us: “When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.'
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NO PARTNERSHIP OR PRINCIPLES
NZ's "true and only" Treaty is the Te Reo version. This was what was presented orally to the chiefs, and this is what they agreed to. There is no English version. Te Tiriti o Waitangi 1840 does not contain the Maori words for "partnership" and "principles."
FIRST OPEN CHALLENGE TO TREATYISTS: point to the words “partnership” and “principles" in Te Tiriti.
This nonsense is of recent invention, and originated in what we might call "The Treaty of Wellington (aka Section 9 of the State-Owned Enterprises Act) 1986.” Activist judges on the Court of Appeal hearing a 1987 case involving the NZ Maori Council then took Section 9’s unclarified in the statute reference to “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” to concoct “partnership” and "principles" out of thin air.
Everything the chiefs said on the lawn at Waitangi and elsewhere, as well as the words of those who refused to sign it, make it abundantly clear they were well-aware that by signing the Treaty this would place Captain Hobson in authority over them, and that behind Hobson was Queen Victoria. Reiterated at the Kohimarama Conference of 1860.
SECOND OPEN CHALLENGE TO TREATYISTS: produce a single primary source account recording the words of a chief who thought he was going into "partnership" or some kind of sovereignty-sharing arrangement with the Crown.
Eyewitness accounts of the pre-Treaty debates make it clear that none of the chiefs who signed it thought they were going into “partnership” with the Crown. Those who spoke up for Hobson also leave no doubt that they expected British sovereignty to bring lasting peace to the land, as well as protecting them from less benevolently inclined foreign powers, such as the French.
THIRD OPEN CHALLENGE TO TREATYISTS: explain why, for 147 years between 1840 and 1987 and the Court of Appeal decision in the New Zealand Maori Council Case, nobody knew that the Treaty of Waitangi was a “partnership" or some kind of sovereignty-sharing arrangement.
It was only after the Court of Appeal invented “partnership” and “principles” in 1987 that demands along these lines first surfaced. If nobody knew that the Treaty of Waitangi was a racial partnership for 147 years, that's probably because it isn’t.
On 5 February 1840, the Treaty was first debated at Waitangi by Ngapuhi chiefs assembled there for that purpose.
Te Kemara (Ngati Kawa) spoke first, observing that the effect of signing the Treaty would be for “the Governor to be up, and Te Kemara down.” Under the Governor, he could be “tried and condemned” and even “hung by the neck” should he behave badly enough.
Rewa (Ngati Taweke) spoke next, saying: “This country is ours … we are the Governor.” Like Te Kemara, Rewa saw that chiefly authority would be trumped by that of Hobson: “[Authority over] Your land will be taken from you and your dignity as chiefs will be destroyed.”
Moka (Patukeha) then stood up. “Let the governor return to his own country. Let us remain where we are [as ruling powers in the land].”
Tamati Pukututu (Te Uri-o-Te-Hawato) was the first to speak up for Hobson: “Sit, Governor, sit, for me, for us. Remain here, a father for us.”
Matiu (Uri-o-Ngongo) stood next, reiterating what the previous speaker had said: “Do not go back, but sit here, a Governor, a father for us.”
Kawiti (Ngati Hine) was another who rejected the Governor: “We do not want to be tied up and trodden down. We are free. Let the missionaries remain, but, as for thee, return to thine own country.” His fellow chiefs were warned that acceptance of Hobson meant the Governor would be able to order: “Kawiti must not paddle this way, nor paddle that way, because the Governor said ‘No.’”
Pumuka (Te Roroa) rose next, saying: “I will have this man a foster-father for me.” To the Governor: “I wish to have two fathers – thou and Busby, and the missionaries.”
Warerahi (Ngaitawake), then addressed his fellow chiefs: “Is it not good to be in peace? We will have this man as our Governor” and “Say to this man of the Queen, Go back! No, no.”
Hakiro (Ngatinanenane) was another recalcitrant: “We are not thy people. We are free. We will not have a Governor.”
Tareha (Ngatirehia) stood after Hakiro and told Hobson: “We, we only are the chiefs, rulers. We will not be ruled over.” Never would he accept “the Governor up high” and Tareha “down, under, beneath!”
Rawiri (Ngatitautahi) rose to greet the Governor in English as his “Father,” saying, “Stay here, O Governor! … that we may be in peace.” Hone Heke (Matarahurahu) reiterated what previous speakers in favour of Hobson had said: “Remain, Governor, a father for us.”
Hakitara (Te Rarawa), also stood up for the Governor, though most of his words were drowned out by side conversations taking place after Heke had spoken.
Tamati Waka Nene (Ngatihao) then told Hobson: “[R]emain for us – a father, a judge, a peacemaker. Stay thou, our friend, our father, our Governor.”
Eruera Maehe Patuone, Tamati Waka Nene’s older brother, spoke next, saying: “Remain here with us, to be a father for us, that the French have us not.”
Te Kemara (who’d spoken first) here jumped up again, saying to the Governor: “Go away; return to thine own land.” To the chiefs, he said: “Let us all be alike [in rank, in power].” Then in an abrupt about-face he told Hobson: “O Governor! remain. But, the Governor up! Te Kemara down, low, flat! No, no, no.” After all that, he still signed it.
After the Treaty was endorsed by the chiefs at Waitangi, Crown agents went throughout New Zealand seeking signatures. Most chiefs could see the benefit of signing and soon did so, but a substantial minority, centred on the Tainui, Tuwharetoa and Tuhoe tribes did not. The words and actions of non-signatories make it clear they had no intention of being ruled over by someone else.
Revisionist assertions that the word “mana” (prestige, evidence of breeding) should have been used in the Treaty instead of “kawanatanga” (governance) to ensure the chiefs understood what they were actually being asked to give up are politically useful but factually vacuous.
For example, Piko, a chief at Coromandel, rejected the Treaty because he could “see no necessity for placing himself under the dominion of any prince or queen, as he was desirous of governing his own tribe.”
Mananui Te Heuheu, paramount chief of Tuwharetoa also refused to sign, saying “I will never consent to the mana of a woman resting upon these islands. I myself will be chief in these isles: therefore begone!”
Potatau Te Whero Whero, paramount chief of Tainui, was greatly angered to learn that a handful of minor Tainui chiefs had signed the Treaty at Port Waikato on their own initiative and without his prior approval. To head off any suggestion that the Queen’s authority might extend over the Tainui tribes, he made them return the Crown’s red blankets they’d been given in return for their signatures.
The Kohimarama Conference of 1860 was attended by 112 Maori Chiefs, many of whom were Ngapuhi. It had been called to discuss the direct challenge that the Kingitanga [Maori King] Movement was mounting to the Queen’s sovereignty, something the loyal chiefs expected the Crown to quell in the interests of national unity.
Its recorded proceedings further explode Waitangi Tribunal myth-making that those who signed the Treaty had no idea this would make British subjects of all Maori. In opening the Conference, Governor Gore Browne told the chiefs there assembled: “Her Majesty has instructed the Governors who preceded me, and she will instruct those who come after me, to maintain the stipulations of this Treaty inviolate, and to watch over the interests and promote the advancement of her subjects without distinction of Race.”
Speeches by the chiefs, many of whom had signed the Treaty 20 years before, reiterated their understanding of what this commitment entailed:
Wi Te Tete: “Listen ye Pakehas, and ye Maori Chiefs! We have now become one people under the Queen.”
Hori Kerei Te Kotuku: “When you arrived we were dwelling in ignorance, we were blind. First came Christianity, after that the Law. I saw that there was salvation for me. You appointed magistrates. We received them. It was during the time of Governor Grey that we first recognized the Queen's authority. He said there is no other Sovereign for us but the Queen. I did not receive the Law without consideration. I sought it carefully in the pages of Scripture. I did not search in ignorance. I saw its benefits, and then I embraced it. Now the Queen is my Sovereign.”
Te Ahukaramu: “These are the things which I desire. First, God: secondly, the Queen: thirdly, the Governor. Let there be one Queen for us. Make known to us all the laws, that we may all dwell under one law.”
Raniera Te Iho: “I offer my land, in the proper manner, to the Governor. True the land passes across to the Governor, but then I get my price for it. Should I afterwards stretch forth my hand after my land that would be wrong. I prove my allegiance to the Queen by parting with my lands. I give up my land to Queen Victoria, and to the Kings and Queens, her successors.”
Tohi Te Ueurangi: “Let the Queen be above all. I have nothing more to say.”
In 1863, supported (and often aided in the field) by the majority of leading North Island chiefs, the Crown fulfilled its Treaty promise to uphold the sovereignty of New Zealand against the challenge of the Tainui tribes who’d never signed the Treaty in the first place. It put down the Kingitanga Movement by force of arms and punished Tainui with land confiscations as it had earlier warned.
The Reverend John Warren, a Wesleyan missionary and an eyewitness to events surrounding the signing of the Treaty in Northland, wrote: "I was present at the great meeting at Waitangi when the celebrated treaty was signed, and also at a meeting which took place subsequently on the same subject at Hokianga. There was a great deal of talk by the natives, principally on the subject of securing their proprietary right in the land, and their personal liberty. Everything else they were only too happy to yield to the Queen, as they said repeatedly, because they knew they could only be saved from the rule of other nations by sitting under the shadow of the Queen of England.
“In my hearing they frequently remarked, ‘Let us be one people. We had the Gospel from England, let us have the law from England.’ My impression at the time was that the natives perfectly understood that by signing the treaty they became British subjects, and though I lived among them more than fifteen years after that event, and often conversed with them on the subject, I never saw the slightest reason to change my opinion.”
In 1922, Sir Apirana Ngata summarised the effect of the Treaty of Waitangi with considerable clarity, finality, and certainty: “Article I of the Treaty transfers all chiefly authority to the Queen forever, and the embodiment of that authority is now the New Zealand Parliament. For that reason, all demands for absolute Maori authorities are nothing more than wishful thinking.”
The partnership fallacy came about because the 1984 Labour Government placed references to “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” into key legislation that it passed. These references had first appeared in Section 6 of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, but lay unnoticed and dormant until included in the State-Owned Enterprises Act 1986, which at Section 9 states: "nothing in this Act shall permit the Crown to act in a manner that is inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi."
Richard Prebble was Minister of State-Owned Enterprises in the Fourth Labour Government when the Bill which became the SOE Act was in its final drafting stage. Prebble wanted to sell off a number of state-owned enterprises he’d identified as suitable to be privatised. Labour’s Maori MPs were becoming increasingly resistant to this proposal, which they feared would open the door to the selling off of substantial Crown landholdings, thus preventing them being applied to future Treaty settlements.
To hose down these concerns, Prebble’s colleague, Attorney-General Geoffrey Palmer, inserted the wording quoted above into the new State-Owned Enterprises Act. By Prebble’s retrospective account, Palmer told him at the time that the clause was meaningless, would never apply to anything, and was just a way to get Labour’s Maori MPs off his back.
What many would regard as a deliberate failure to define these “principles” in statue then allowed the Waitangi Tribunal and activist judges on the Court of Appeal to usurp the proper law-making function of Parliament.
The tricky Palmer, a Victoria University of Wellington Law Professor before going into politics, was likely to have been well aware of what he was doing. His supposedly meaningless clause handed judicial activists the opportunity to make far-reaching rulings that the electorate would never have accepted had they came from politicians. Labour could then turn around and blame the judges, thus washing its hands of responsibility for outcomes it had actually wanted to promote in the first place.
While this dodge may have fooled low information voters, the New Zealand Parliament is our supreme source of law, not the Courts. Had the Fourth Labour Government been truly unhappy about the way in which liberal judges fell over themselves to flesh out the “principles” clause, it could have appealed the ruling to a higher Court, repealed the clause altogether, or amended it to provide firm direction to the Judiciary.
The Appellate Court in the relevant case would have been the Privy Council, an overwhelmingly conservative body known throughout the Western world for interpreting the law according to law and precedent, rather than according to the social and political opinions of its constituent judges.
Thousands of kilometres away in England, the Law Lords might be expected to have been above the trendy Treatyism prevailing in New Zealand, and to have made the correct ruling. This would have been to strike down the judicial adventurism of the New Zealand judges, and to refer the matter back to the New Zealand Parliament for proper clarification in statute.
No prizes for guessing why Helen Clark’s Fifth Labour Government later abolished appeals to the Privy Council, thereby rendering New Zealand’s highest judicial body a local one.
The partnership myth entered the public square through an erroneous decision of the Court of Appeal in a 1987 case involving the New Zealand Maori Council. It is founded upon what researcher, Alan Everton describes as: “nothing more than the opinion of five judges, who combined a lamentable ignorance of New Zealand history with a willingness to ignore the constitutional principle that they were appointed to apply the law, not make it.”
The New Zealand Maori Council had asked the Court of Appeal whether the government’s plans to transfer land to state-owned enterprises breached the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. To answer that question the Court took it upon itself to decide what those principles were.
The Court of Appeal’s proper response in this matter would have been to reserve its decision, then ask Parliament to define in statute how (if at all) “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” differed from its simple black letter clauses. Yet the President of the Court of Appeal, Cooke J. managed to state in his ruling that “The Treaty signified a partnership between races ...”
He went on to pepper the balance of his ruling with a raft of other such references and concluded: “[the Treaty] principles require the Pakeha and Maori Treaty partners to act towards each other reasonably and with the utmost good faith.”
The notion that the Treaty established a partnership was independently agreed to by all five members of the Court of Appeal, though expressed in somewhat different terms by each. More insidiously, the Court took the view that, to use Cooke J’s words: “The Treaty should be seen as an embryo, rather than as a fully developed set of ideas …”
This “living document” approach taken by the Court of Appeal’s activist judges effectively turned the Treaty’s black letter clauses into a kete (flax basket) for anything that Maori activists wanted to lay subsequent claim to.
The Court’s partnership invention was then slid into various Waitangi Tribunal reports, such as the Tribunal’s Muriwhenua Fishing Report of 1988, which suggested that Maori had a right: “to tribal self-management on lines similar to what we understand by local government.”
The sanction of the Courts and pro-claimant Waitangi Tribunal was all that Maori Sovereignty activists and their white liberal enablers in the Fourth Labour Government needed to begin spinning a revisionist narrative of the Treaty’s meaning and intent.
In 1989, the Fourth Labour Government noted that “the Government, the Courts, and the Waitangi Tribunal are each developing their own set of ‘Treaty principles’” because this was “not defined in legislation.” How very perceptive.
Prime Minister, David Lange, acting under “executive authority,” announced a laundry list of “principles” under which his Government intended to operate. To this day, these have never been presented to Parliament for ratification.
Successive governments, both National- and Labour-led, have left the Fourth Labour Government’s 1989 “Treaty principles” undisturbed for the last 27 years. The Treaty Gravy Train based on a fabricated and misconstrued version of the Treaty chugs on and on, gathering carriages and picking up momentum as it rolls.
Powerful vested interests -- Treaty lawyers, revisionist “historians,” politicians seeking moral preening opportunities for “saving the Maori,” public servants employed in the Treaty Industry, and a Brown Table Iwi elite with snouts buried deep in the public trough -- make this Gravy Train increasingly difficult to derail.
In point of fact, subsequent governments are free to modify Lange’s highly presumptuous nonsense at any time as they see fit. Currently, they are not obliged to genuflect to it in perpetuity, which explains why the Maori Party is so keen to get the Treaty of Waitangi (or rather its bogus “principles”) into a written Constitution. Then we will never remove its strangling tentacles from our national life. Nor will we ever be rid of the permanently embedded, self-anointed part-Maori racial aristocracy such a move would create.
The Treaty’s simple black letter clauses were never intended to create a “living document” or as a blueprint for an ongoing racial partnership. As Alan Everton reminds us, “the Treaty was a treaty of cession, and like all such was concerned with rights and territory, with defining what rights and territory were held or ceded by the contracting parties.”
ENDS
"RACISM" AND CULTURAL IDENTITY
New Zealanders who care about their country are tired of being hectored about “racism” by indigenous pretenders like Lizzie Marvelly simply for believing that our government should govern for all New Zealanders, rather than being a font of special privilege for a favoured few.
Racism is often conflated by the ignorant with simple prejudice, which it is not. Principled opposition to unearned racial privilege is not racism. Nor is it typically evidence of prejudice. Racism occurs where a group of prejudiced individuals get together to create a system affording them separate, different, or superior rights to everyone else on the basis of group membership.
The elephant in the room is that even if the Treaty of Waitangi provides for racial privilege (it does not), the “Maori” of today are not the Maori of 1840, but New Zealanders of mixed European-Maori descent who have chosen to identify monoculturally as Maori, elevating one set of ancestors and trampling down another. Yet traditional Maori culture says that one is to honour all ancestors equally.
The reality is that we have a Maori race in name only, with racial mixing giving the lie to the existence of a unique race called Maori. Imported bloodlines have diluted the original Maori race to such an extent that it now exists only as a cultural concept. Denying one's mixed ancestry and adopting a monocultural identity doesn't make it go away.
For many decades, there has been no discrete or separate Maori ethnic group. All so-called Maori alive today have European ancestry. Indeed, it would be virtually impossible to find a “Maori” who doesn’t possess more of the blood of the colonisers than that of the colonised.
To illustrate this point, prior to the passage of the Electoral Amendment Act 1975, the legal definition of “Maori” for electoral purposes was “a person of the Maori race of New Zealand or a half-caste descendent thereof.” After panicked complaints from its Maori MPs that soon nobody would be eligible for the Maori Roll, the then-Labour Government changed this to read “or any descendent of such a person.”
Under current electoral law, New Zealanders with Maori ancestry can determine once every electoral cycle if they wish to be on the Maori Roll or the General Roll. We thus have a legal definition of “Maori” that defies definition in the Courts, since it is entirely based on an individual’s periodic decision to identify as “Maori.”
Writing in 1972, historian Joan Metge offers a compelling explanation as to why a subset of New Zealanders today might continue see themselves as “Maori.” She states: "New Zealanders, both Maori and Pakeha, tend to identify others as 'Maori' if they 'look Maori,’ that is if they have brown skin and Polynesian features. Those whose Maori ancestry is not so evident in their appearance are left to make their own choice."
Since the Maori phenotype tends to predominate in a person’s appearance, Many New Zealanders who are considerably less than half-Maori will be identified by others as Maori whether they like it or not. This psychic wound is often compensated for by aggressively embracing a collectivist Maori identity and seeking utu upon the majority culture these people feel shut out of.
As Frantz Fanon, one of the many disreputable Communists enshrined as intellectual icons by the academic Left, reminds us: “The native is an oppressed person whose constant dream is to become the persecutor.”
The psychological roots of Treatyism may well amount to little more than the hurt child looking for someone to punish. The rest of us should not be obliged to validate someone else’s adjustment issues. Nor should public policy support the notion that anyone who is less than half-Maori be regarded as “Maori.” And nor should it dignify their cultural pretensions, particularly with other people’s money.
Lizzie Marvelly claims on her Facebook page to be “Ngati Whakaue.” If she wasn’t so noisy about this ancestral connection, nothing in her appearance would suggest she was part-Maori. This young woman might better be described as a Pakeha with a dash of Maori blood. The standard response when such an inconvenient truth is held up is: “Maori will decide who is ‘Maori.’”
In a free society, individuals are at liberty to enter into groups or combinations for any lawful purpose. Indeed, many choose to do so. There are rugby clubs, bowling clubs, bridge clubs, film clubs, swingers’ clubs, various religious congregations, and any number of other organisations catering to the sporting, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual needs of members.
The right of an individual of mixed European-Maori descent to identify with Maori culture and affiliate to a Maori kin group is not in dispute here. But since this is a personal choice and thus a private matter, Maori groups rightly have the same status as any other community group founded upon principles of voluntary association, such as a rugby club or a bowling club.
And the same moral right as the members of a rugby club or bowling club to demand large sums of money and political patronage from their fellow New Zealanders. None.
TREATY, PARTNERSHIP, PRINCIPLES, WARS, CONSTITUTION.
Only in the last 25 years or so has anyone thought to suggest that the Treaty of Waitangi created a Crown-Maori racial partnership. For almost 150 years, this view was largely unheard of. There is not a shred of historical evidence that the British authorities meant to establish such a partnership, nor that the chiefs saw this as the Treaty’s object.
Modern-day revisionists claim the Maori understanding of the Treaty was that the chiefs were not ceding sovereignty to the Crown at all. Instead, they were getting some kind of co-governance arrangement under which the Crown would exercise authority only over white settlers, and Maori would continue to be ruled in tribal style by chiefs. Such assertions are not supported by the historical record.
The chiefs of coastal tribes had lived and worked alongside European whalers, sealers, missionaries, and traders for more than two decades. Their young men had travelled all over the world in British ships, observed British sovereignty in operation, and returned to tell the tale. It seems clear that in the lead-up to the signing of the Treaty, most chiefs had come to view British sovereignty and its associated rule of law as the only way to put a conclusive end to the Musket Wars that had ravaged the land for almost two decades prior to 1840.
Musket Wars
With the coming of the musket, the various tribes possessed for the first time weapons of mass extermination with which to be revenged upon traditional enemies. The farsighted came to see that only outside intervention could arrest this ever-escalating cycle of inter-tribal violence. Ngapuhi had been the first tribe to obtain muskets after Hongi Hika returned from England in 1821 with a large quantity of firearms, powder and shot. These weapons were used by Ngapuhi to overrun much of the North Island in the first of the Musket Wars. A destructive arms race ensued. Thousands of Maori were killed as other tribes acquired European weapons of their own to wage war on immediate neighbours and further afield. The Lyttelton Times of 4 September 1861 retrospectively reported that as a result, “Whole districts were depopulated, and large and powerful tribes driven from their ancestral lands.” Tribes fleeing from Ngapuhi began pressing upon their neighbours all the way down the North Island. “[W]ar spread from tribe to tribe, till the whole North Island became one scene of bloodshed and massacre.”
In 1824, this carnage reached the South Island, after Te Rauparaha, having obtained a large supply of guns and ammunition, crossed Cook Straight to attack Ngai Tahu. These inter-tribal conflicts also led to significant indirect loss of life. Thousands of Maori died of recently introduced respiratory ailments after moving down from their well-ventilated hilltop pas to low-lying, miasmic swampland to cut flax to trade for guns. But by far the greatest killer was mass-scale starvation. For pre-European Maori, fighting was a ritualised pursuit traditionally taking place once the kumara crop had been harvested. After the onset of the Musket Wars, fighting became a year-round activity, because many tribes no longer bothered to cultivate, thinking instead to conquer their neighbours and take their food. Since everyone else was operating on the same assumptions, thousands starved to death if they weren’t killed and eaten first by hungry war parties. As an indication of how scarce grown or gathered foodstuffs were at that time, the Lyttelton Times reported that: “Hongi [Hika] and his party, in returning home [to Northland] through the districts they had overrun, were compelled to live almost entirely on human flesh.”
The Treaty
The Maori population in 1840 is today believed to have numbered around 100, 000. By various estimates, the Musket Wars had led directly or indirectly to some 60, 000 – 100, 000 deaths over the period 1821 – 1838, after which the bloodshed tapered off because every tribe now had guns. Maori culture’s ongoing requirement to extract utu (payback) from enemies meant this uneasy balance of power would always rest on a knife-edge, and a number of commentators have suggested that only by signing the Treaty did Maori avert their complete self-destruction as a race.
The words of the chiefs themselves display a full awareness that their acceptance of Governor Hobson would place him in authority over them, and that behind Hobson stood Queen Victoria. Eyewitness accounts of the pre-Treaty debates make it clear that none of the chiefs who signed it thought they were going into “partnership” with the Crown. Those who spoke up for Hobson also leave no doubt that they expected British sovereignty to bring lasting peace to the land.
On 5 February 1840, the Treaty was first debated at Waitangi by Ngapuhi chiefs assembled there for that purpose.
Te Kemara (Ngati Kawa) spoke first, observing that the effect of signing the Treaty would be for “the Governor to be up, and Te Kemara down.” Under the Governor, he could be “tried and condemned” and even “hung by the neck” should he behave badly enough.
Rewa (Ngati Taweke) spoke next, saying: “This country is ours … we are the Governor.” Like Te Kemara, Rewa saw that chiefly authority would be trumped by that of Hobson: “[Authority over] Your land will be taken from you and your dignity as chiefs will be destroyed.”
Moka (Patukeha) then stood up. “Let the governor return to his own country. Let us remain where we are [as ruling powers in the land].”
Tamati Pukututu (Te Uri-o-Te-Hawato) was the first to speak up for Hobson: “Sit, Governor, sit, for me, for us. Remain here, a father for us.”
Matiu (Uri-o-Ngongo) stood next, reiterating what the previous speaker had said: “Do not go back, but sit here, a Governor, a father for us.”
Kawiti (Ngati Hine) was another who rejected the Governor: “We do not want to be tied up and trodden down. We are free. Let the missionaries remain, but, as for thee, return to thine own country.” His fellow chiefs were warned that acceptance of Hobson meant the Governor would be able to order: “Kawiti must not paddle this way, nor paddle that way, because the Governor said ‘No.’”
Pumuka (Te Roroa) rose next, saying: “I will have this man a foster-father for me.” To the Governor: “I wish to have two fathers – thou and Busby, and the missionaries.”
Warerahi (Ngaitawake), then addressed his fellow chiefs: “Is it not good to be in peace? We will have this man as our Governor” and “Say to this man of the Queen, Go back! No, no.”
Hakiro (Ngatinanenane) was another recalcitrant: “We are not thy people. We are free. We will not have a Governor.”
Tareha (Ngatirehia) stood after Hakiro and told Hobson: “We, we only are the chiefs, rulers. We will not be ruled over.” Never would he accept “the Governor up high” and Tareha “down, under, beneath!”
Rawiri (Ngatitautahi) rose to greet the Governor in English as his “Father,” saying, “Stay here, O Governor! … that we may be in peace.”
Hone Heke (Matarahurahu) reiterated what previous speakers in favour of Hobson had said: “Remain, Governor, a father for us.”
Hakitara (Te Rarawa), also stood up for the Governor, though most of his words were drowned out by side conversations taking place after Heke had spoken.
Tamati Waka Nene (Ngatihao) then told Hobson: “[R]emain for us – a father, a judge, a peacemaker. Stay thou, our friend, our father, our Governor.”
Eruera Maehe Patuone, Tamati Waka Nene’s older brother, spoke next, saying: “Remain here with us, to be a father for us, that the French have us not.”
Te Kemara (who’d spoken first) here jumped up again, saying to the Governor: “Go away; return to thine own land.” To the chiefs, he said: “Let us all be alike [in rank, in power].” Then in an abrupt about-face he told Hobson: “O Governor! remain. But, the Governor up! Te Kemara down, low, flat! No, no, no.”
After the Treaty was endorsed by the chiefs at Waitangi, Crown agents went throughout New Zealand seeking signatures. Most chiefs could see the benefit of signing and soon did so, but a substantial minority, centred on the Tainui, Tuwharetoa and Tuhoe tribes did not.
The words and actions of non-signatories make it clear they had no intention of being ruled over by someone else. Revisionist assertions that the word “mana” (prestige, evidence of breeding) should have been used in the Treaty instead of “kawanatanga” (governance) to ensure the chiefs understood what they were actually being asked to give up are politically useful but factually vacuous.
For example, Piko, a chief at Coromandel, rejected the Treaty because he could “see no necessity for placing himself under the dominion of any prince or queen, as he was desirous of governing his own tribe.”
Mananui Te Heuheu, paramount chief of Tuwharetoa also refused to sign, saying “I will never consent to the mana of a woman resting upon these islands. I myself will be chief in these isles: therefore begone!”
Potatau Te Whero Whero, paramount chief of Tainui, was greatly angered to learn that a handful of minor Tainui chiefs had signed the Treaty at Port Waikato on their own initiative and without his prior approval. To head off any suggestion that the Queen’s authority might extend over the Tainui tribes, he made them return the Crown’s red blankets they’d been given in return for their signatures.
Kohimarama
The Kohimarama Conference of 1860 was attended by 112 Maori Chiefs, many of whom were Ngapuhi. It had been called to discuss the direct challenge that the Kingitanga [Maori King] Movement was mounting to the Queen’s sovereignty, something the loyal chiefs expected the Crown to quell in the interests of national unity. Its recorded proceedings further explode Waitangi Tribunal myth-making that those who signed the Treaty had no idea this would make British subjects of all Maori. In opening the Conference, Governor Gore Browne told the chiefs there assembled: “Her Majesty has instructed the Governors who preceded me, and she will instruct those who come after me, to maintain the stipulations of this Treaty inviolate, and to watch over the interests and promote the advancement of her subjects without distinction of Race.” Speeches by the chiefs, many of whom had signed the Treaty 20 years before, reiterated their understanding of what this commitment entailed:
Wi Te Tete: “Listen ye Pakehas, and ye Maori Chiefs! We have now become one people under the Queen.”
Hori Kerei Te Kotuku: “When you arrived we were dwelling in ignorance, we were blind. First came Christianity, after that the Law. I saw that there was salvation for me. You appointed magistrates. We received them. It was during the time of Governor Grey that we first recognized the Queen's authority. He said there is no other Sovereign for us but the Queen. I did not receive the Law without consideration. I sought it carefully in the pages of Scripture. I did not search in ignorance. I saw its benefits, and then I embraced it. Now the Queen is my Sovereign.”
Te Ahukaramu: “These are the things which I desire. First, God: secondly, the Queen: thirdly, the Governor. Let there be one Queen for us. Make known to us all the laws, that we may all dwell under one law.”
Raniera Te Iho: “I offer my land, in the proper manner, to the Governor. True the land passes across to the Governor, but then I get my price for it. Should I afterwards stretch forth my hand after my land that would be wrong. I prove my allegiance to the Queen by parting with my lands. I give up my land to Queen Victoria, and to the Kings and Queens, her successors.”
Tohi Te Ueurangi: “Let the Queen be above all. I have nothing more to say.”
The Sovereignty Wars (Land Wars)
In 1863, supported (and often aided in the field) by the majority of leading North Island chiefs, the Crown fulfilled its Treaty promise to uphold the sovereignty of New Zealand against the challenge of the Tainui tribes who’d never signed the Treaty in the first place. It put down the Kingitanga Movement by force of arms and punished Tainui with land confiscations as it had earlier warned. In 1922, Sir Apirana Ngata summarised the effect of the Treaty of Waitangi with considerable clarity, finality, and certainty: “Article I of the Treaty transfers all chiefly authority to the Queen forever, and the embodiment of that authority is now the New Zealand Parliament. For that reason, all demands for absolute Maori authorities are nothing more than wishful thinking.”
Treaty Principles
The partnership fallacy came about because the 1984 Labour Government placed references to “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” into key legislation that it passed. These references had first appeared in Section 6 of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, but lay unnoticed and dormant until included in the State-Owned Enterprises Act 1986, which at Section 9 states: "nothing in this Act shall permit the Crown to act in a manner that is inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi." Richard Prebble was Minister of State-Owned Enterprises in the Fourth Labour Government when the Bill which became the SOE Act was in its final drafting stage. Prebble wanted to sell off a number of state-owned enterprises he’d identified as suitable to be privatised.
Labour’s Maori MPs were becoming increasingly resistant to this proposal, which they feared would open the door to the selling off of substantial Crown landholdings, thus preventing them being applied to future Treaty settlements. To hose down these concerns, Prebble’s colleague, Attorney-General Geoffrey Palmer, inserted the wording quoted above into the new State-Owned Enterprises Act. By Prebble’s retrospective account, Palmer told him at the time that the clause was meaningless, would never apply to anything, and was just a way to get Labour’s Maori MPs off his back.
What many would regard as a deliberate failure to define these “principles” in statue then allowed the Waitangi Tribunal and activist judges on the Court of Appeal to usurp the proper law-making function of Parliament. The tricky Palmer, a Victoria University of Wellington Law Professor before going into politics, was likely to have been well aware of what he was doing. His supposedly meaningless clause handed judicial activists the opportunity to make far-reaching rulings that the electorate would never have accepted had they came from politicians. Labour could then turn around and blame the judges, thus washing its hands of responsibility for outcomes it had actually wanted to promote in the first place.
While this dodge may have fooled low information voters, the New Zealand Parliament is our supreme source of law, not the Courts. Had the Fourth Labour Government been truly unhappy about the way in which liberal judges fell over themselves to flesh out the “principles” clause, it could have appealed the ruling to a higher Court, repealed the clause altogether, or amended it to provide firm direction to the Judiciary.
The Appellate Court in the relevant case would have been the Privy Council, an overwhelmingly conservative body known throughout the Western world for interpreting the law according to law and precedent, rather than according to the social and political opinions of its constituent judges. Thousands of kilometres away in England, the Law Lords might be expected to have been above the trendy Treatyism prevailing in New Zealand, and to have made the correct ruling. This would have been to strike down the judicial adventurism of the New Zealand judges, and to refer the matter back to the New Zealand Parliament for proper clarification in statute.
Partnership Myth
No prizes for guessing why Helen Clark’s Fifth Labour Government later abolished appeals to the Privy Council, thereby rendering New Zealand’s highest judicial body a local one. The partnership myth entered the public square through an erroneous decision of the Court of Appeal in a 1987 case involving the New Zealand Maori Council. It is founded upon what researcher, Alan Everton describes as: “nothing more than the opinion of five judges, who combined a lamentable ignorance of New Zealand history with a willingness to ignore the constitutional principle that they were appointed to apply the law, not make it.”
The New Zealand Maori Council had asked the Court of Appeal whether the government’s plans to transfer land to state-owned enterprises breached the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. To answer that question the Court took it upon itself to decide what those principles were. The Court of Appeal’s proper response in this matter would have been to reserve its decision, then ask Parliament to define in statute how (if at all) “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” differed from its simple black letter clauses. Yet the President of the Court of Appeal, Cooke J. managed to state in his ruling that “The Treaty signified a partnership between races ...” He went on to pepper the balance of his ruling with a raft of other such references and concluded: “[the Treaty] principles require the Pakeha and Maori Treaty partners to act towards each other reasonably and with the utmost good faith.”
The notion that the Treaty established a partnership was independently agreed to by all five members of the Court of Appeal, though expressed in somewhat different terms by each. More insidiously, the Court took the view that, to use Cooke J’s words: “The Treaty should be seen as an embryo, rather than as a fully developed set of ideas …” This “living document” approach taken by the Court of Appeal’s activist judges effectively turned the Treaty’s black letter clauses into a kete (flax basket) for anything that Maori activists wanted to lay subsequent claim to.
The Court’s partnership invention was then slid into various Waitangi Tribunal reports, such as the Tribunal’s Muriwhenua Fishing Report of 1988, which suggested that Maori had a right: “to tribal self-management on lines similar to what we understand by local government.” The sanction of the Courts and pro-claimant Waitangi Tribunal was all that Maori Sovereignty activists and their white liberal enablers in the Fourth Labour Government needed to begin spinning a revisionist narrative of the Treaty’s meaning and intent.
In 1989, the Fourth Labour Government noted that “the Government, the Courts, and the Waitangi Tribunal are each developing their own set of ‘Treaty principles’” because this was “not defined in legislation.” How very perceptive. Prime Minister, David Lange, acting under “executive authority,” announced the following list of “principles” under which his Government intended to operate. To this day, these have never been presented to Parliament for ratification.
The Kawanatanga Principle/The Principle of Government underscores the Crown’s right to govern and to make laws as set out in Article I of the Treaty. Then the get-out-of-jail card for those looking to promote racial privilege: “This sovereignty is qualified by the promise to accord the Maori interests specified in the second Article an appropriate priority.”
The Rangatiratanga Principle/The Principle of Self-Management asserts that Article II of the Treaty: “[G]uarantees to iwi Maori the control and enjoyment of those resources and taonga which it is their wish to retain. The preservation of a resource base, restoration of iwi self-management, and the active protection of taonga, both material and cultural, are necessary elements of the Crown's policy of recognising rangatiratanga.”
Race-based privileges & rights are born
Suddenly, the Fourth Labour Government found itself obliged to recognise tribal authorities, to resource such groups to set up parallel delivery systems for taxpayer-funded services to group members, and to use taxpayers’ money to promote Maori language and culture. The Principle of Equality states that under Article III of the Treaty, “All New Zealanders are equal before the law.” Then the justification of political preferment for New Zealanders of mixed European-Maori descent: “Special measures to attain that equal enjoyment of social benefits are allowed by international law.” This was all Labour needed to extend special treatment to any New Zealander who could point to a Maori ancestor, thus claiming membership of a “disadvantaged” group. The Principle of Reasonable Co-operation is most damaging. It turns the Court of Appeal’s wrongful determination that the Treaty was a racial partnership into Government Policy with the stroke of a pen: “The Treaty is regarded by the Crown as establishing a fair basis for two peoples in one country.
Duality and unity are both significant. Duality implies distinctive cultural development and unity implies common purpose and community. The relationship between community and distinctive development is governed by the requirement of co-operation which is an obligation placed on both parties to the Treaty. Reasonable co-operation can only take place if there is consultation on major issues of common concern and if good faith, balance, and common sense are shown on all sides. The outcome of reasonable co-operation will be partnership [emphasis added].”
Backroom deals
The Principles of Redress requires the Crown to provide a mechanism for the resolution of grievances arising from the Treaty. “This process may involve courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, or direct negotiation.” The door was now open for the current National Government’s politically expedient under-the-radar Treaty settlements by “direct negotiation.” These backroom deals attract little attention while forming and only acquire public visibility when presented to Parliament for rubber-stamping, by which time they’re already done deals. Successive governments, both National- and Labour-led, have left the Fourth Labour Government’s 1989 “Treaty principles” undisturbed for the last 26 years. The Treaty Gravy Train based on a fabricated and misconstrued version of the Treaty chugs on and on, picking up momentum as it rolls.
Constitution
Powerful vested interests -- Treaty lawyers, revisionist “historians,” politicians seeking moral preening opportunities for “saving the Maori,” public servants employed in the Treaty Industry, and a Brown Table Iwi elite with snouts buried deep in the public trough -- make this Gravy Train increasingly difficult to derail. In point of fact, subsequent governments are free to modify Lange’s highly presumptuous nonsense at any time as they see fit. Currently, they are not obliged to genuflect to it in perpetuity, which explains why the Maori Party is so keen to get the Treaty of Waitangi (or rather its bogus “principles”) into a written Constitution. Then we will never remove its strangling tentacles from our national life. Nor will we ever be rid of the permanently embedded, self-anointed part-Maori racial aristocracy such a move would create.
The Treaty’s simple black letter clauses were never intended to create a “living document” or as a blueprint for an ongoing racial partnership. As Alan Everton reminds us, “the Treaty was a treaty of cession, and like all such was concerned with rights and territory, with defining what rights and territory were held or ceded by the contracting parties.” Article I ceded sovereignty to the Crown “absolutely and without reservation.” If the use of “tino rangatiratanga” in Article II of the Maori Treaty text can be stretched to mean that chiefly authority was to be preserved under the Crown’s governance, surely the relevant clause would have mentioned only “chiefs.” In fact, Article II guarantees “Te tino rangatiratanga/full authority over their lands and taonga/other property [the correct translation in 1840]” not only to the chiefs, but to “ki nga tangata katoa of Niu Tirani” that is, “to all the people of New Zealand.”
All the people of New Zealand
From the moment the Treaty was signed, “all the people of New Zealand” also meant non-Maori. The missionaries who drafted the Maori Treaty text (fluent Maori speakers all) would have been well aware of the Maori words “Hoa” which means variously “companion, friend, partner” and “Whakahoa” which translates as “companionship, friendship, partnership.” Had the Crown’s objective been to create a racial partnership, we would expect this to have been fully explored in Article I using the word “Whakahoa.” The “tino rangatiratanga” of Article II was in fact a word coined by the missionaries to denote property ownership. Correctly construed, Article II contains the same undertaking in both English and Maori: a guarantee of property rights to ”all the people of New Zealand” under the sovereign power acknowledged in Article I as henceforth prevailing.
Any right to “manage their own affairs” which Maori in either an individual or collective capacity might enjoy stemming from Article II is the same right accorded to all New Zealand citizens: the right to ownership and control of personal property. Should doubt remain that the Treaty did not form a “partnership,” Article III grants to the “Natives [not just to the chiefs] all the rights and privileges of British subjects.”
Clearly, individual Maori could not enjoy all the rights of the English but also remain subject to chiefly rule. If “partnership” was the Treaty’s object, we might also have expected Governor Hobson on shaking hands with each chief who signed the Treaty at Waitangi to have stated: "E hoa rua tatou" ("Now we are two partners”), rather than: "He iwi tahi tatou" ("Now we are one people") as he did. Contemporary accounts record the chiefs as being "delighted" by Hobson’s words, which surely wouldn’t have been the case had they thought they were going into “partnership” with the Crown as is today asserted.
Citizenship
There can be no possibility that the Treaty of Waitangi was intended by either party to be a sovereignty-sharing arrangement. Having signed the Treaty, the chiefs became not partners, but subjects of the Crown, as did all other Maori. As subjects of the Crown – that is, New Zealand citizens – all those descended in part from the tangata whenua are today entitled to the same rights as non-Maori citizens: no less, and certainly no more. In a free society all citizens enjoy individual equality in citizenship.
This is so whether some of a citizen’s ancestors arrived in a canoe in 1350, a sailing vessel in 1850, an ocean liner in 1950, or more recently by airliner. Even someone who put his hand up 30 seconds ago at a swearing-in ceremony is entitled to all the rights of citizenship. Prior arrival or ancestral longevity in the land is no basis for special privilege. Group rights, whereby one group enjoys separate, different, or superior rights on the basis of group membership, are anathema to a free society. Group rights create two classes of citizenship where only one existed before. They require the intervention of an activist government forcibly taking rights from one group to bestow upon another. As Richard Prebble reminds us: “One group’s positive discrimination is another group’s negative discrimination.”
In Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, Black American academic, Thomas Sowell records the downstream effect of government-sponsored identity politics. Touted as promoting inter-group harmony, Sowell found that wherever such policies had been tried, they invariably expanded over time in scale and scope, benefited already advantaged members of the preference group (those with the smarts to work the system), and led to increased rather than decreased inter-group polarisation. In many places they have brought about decades-long civil wars.
The “Maori” of today are not the Maori of 1840, but New Zealanders of mixed European-Maori descent who have chosen to identify monoculturally as Maori, elevating one set of ancestors and trampling down another. Yet traditional Maori culture says that one is to honour all ancestors equally. For many decades now, there has been no discrete or separate Maori ethnic group. All so-called Maori alive today have European ancestry. Indeed, it would be virtually impossible to find a “Maori” who doesn’t possess more of the blood of the colonisers than that of the colonised.
Legal definition of Maori
To illustrate this point, prior to the passage of the Electoral Amendment Act 1975, the legal definition of “Maori” for electoral purposes was “a person of the Maori race of New Zealand or a half-caste descendent thereof.” After panicked complaints from its Maori MPs that soon nobody would be eligible for the Maori Roll, the then-Labour Government changed this to read “or any descendent of such a person.” Under current electoral law, New Zealanders with Maori ancestry can determine once every electoral cycle if they wish to be on the Maori Roll or the General Roll. We thus have a legal definition of “Maori” that defies definition in the Courts, since it is entirely based on an individual’s periodic decision to identify as “Maori.”
Writing in 1972, historian Joan Metge offers a compelling explanation as to why a subset of New Zealanders today might continue see themselves as “Maori.” She states: "New Zealanders, both Maori and Pakeha, tend to identify others as 'Maori' if they 'look Maori,’ that is if they have brown skin and Polynesian features. Those whose Maori ancestry is not so evident in their appearance are left to make their own choice." Since the Maori phenotype tends to predominate in a person’s appearance, Many New Zealanders who are considerably less than half-Maori will be identified by others as Maori whether they like it or not. This psychic wound is often compensated for by aggressively embracing a collectivist Maori identity and seeking utu from the majority culture these people feel shut out of.
The psychological roots of Treatyism may well amount to little more than the hurt child looking for someone to punish. The rest of us should not be obliged to validate someone else’s adjustment issues. Nor should public policy support the notion that anyone who is less than half-Maori be regarded as “Maori.” And nor should it dignify their cultural pretensions, particularly with other people’s money.
Reverend John Warren
The Reverend John Warren, a Wesleyan missionary and an eyewitness to events surrounding the signing of the Treaty in Northland, wrote: "I was present at the great meeting at Waitangi when the celebrated treaty was signed, and also at a meeting which took place subsequently on the same subject at Hokianga. There was a great deal of talk by the natives, principally on the subject of securing their proprietary right in the land, and their personal liberty. Everything else they were only too happy to yield to the Queen, as they said repeatedly, because they knew they could only be saved from the rule of other nations by sitting under the shadow of the Queen of England. “In my hearing they frequently remarked, ‘Let us be one people. We had the Gospel from England, let us have the law from England.’ My impression at the time was that the natives perfectly understood that by signing the treaty they became British subjects, and though I lived among them more than fifteen years after that event, and often conversed with them on the subject, I never saw the slightest reason to change my opinion.”
End of story, really.
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MAORI LANGUAGE FUTURE
“The future of the Maori language and culture lies not with the intervening European, but in the Maori home, and in the habits and usages of the Maori parents.”
The fact that succeeding generations of Maori parents chose (for very valid reasons) not to teach the Maori language to their children is no justification for today: [a] forcing me to pay for its revival; and [b] shoving my kids’ noses into a bucket of racial swill.
While the Maori language and culture may be a very great treasure to those who value it, to those who do not, it is not.
End of story, really.
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ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
There is no such thing as a separate Maori ethnic group. Any so-called "Maori" alive today is actually a European-Maori who has chosen to identify monoculturally as "Maori," elevating one set of ancestors, while trampling down another.
This is a voluntary decision on the part of the person concerned, same as joining any other voluntary association. In a free society, one is at complete liberty to affiliate to any group that has a lawful purpose.
This means an iwi thus rightly has the same status as a bowling club, a rugby club, a tramping club, or a bridge club. And the same rightful claim on Other People's Money to promote its objectives, - i.e. NONE!.
The elephant in the room is that racial mixing long since gave the lie to the existence of a unique race of people called "Maori."
Any so-called "Maori" alive today is a New Zealander of mixed European-Maori descent who has elected to identify monoculturally with one set of ancestors while trampling down another.
In a free society one is free to self-identify within the law as one sees fit.
What one is not free to do is put one's hand into other people's pockets and demand that they genuflect to what in this matter amounts to an elaborate self-delusion.