I urge all readers to vote in the Sunday Star-Times poll on constitutional matters.
The article is disappointingly flippant, many of the questions are childish, and the ‘Yep/Nope’ options pathetic for a serious newspaper.
But you’ll need to hold your nose and answer them all if you want to register your views on Maori seats and the entrenchment of the Treaty.
Invoking the spirit of Margaret Thatcher at the Waikanae meeting.
New Zealand badly needs politicians with “the guts to do what’s right”.
PHOTO: NED PEKO.
We had a full house of 160 at the Kapiti Coast U3A meeting on Monday.
Since I’d been there twice before performing my after-dinner speech about the crazy English language, I started a few minutes early with Tom Lehrer’s Elements Song and my own song about Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch!
(With my gruelling day job, it’s good for me to return to the humour now and then. I’ve also just accepted an invitation to to be guest poet at Wairarapa Words in Carterton on May 5th.)
My Treatygate/Together New Zealand presentation was compressed into 45 minutes, which was a little rushed for my liking.
SCF is, of course, South Canterbury Finance.
PHOTO: NED PEKO.
Since most people were not Treatygate groupies, I polled them before and after my talk on how much of a problem they thought Treaty issues had become.
At the start, a handful said ‘not a problem’, but most were evenly split between ‘a bit of a problem’ and ‘a big problem’.
Observer Lindsay Perigo was struck by how many had migrated from ‘bit’ to ‘big’ after seeing my evidence.
Surprisingly, about 70% of this random group of intelligent older folk said they would vote for a single issue party to end Apartheid Aotearoa.
Thanks to my friend Ned for the photos — and the beer and Shiraz afterwards.
I urge all Nelson readers to go to the Kowhai Lounge, Block N, of NMIT in Hardy Street from 1.00–5.00pm today.
Two members of the Constitutional Advisory Panel, John Burrows and Peter Chin, will be holding court on the Constitutional Review.
If there’s any fairness in the process, Bruce Moon will be allowed say the following:
I am very worried about the quantity of misinformation, even straight lies, circulating about the Treaty of Waitangi, much of it emanating from official circles, some alas, from the Constitutional Advisory Panel itself and some of its individual members.
I am also very worried about the credentials of most of the members of this panel for making recommendations to Government on such an important question as the constitution of New Zealand.
Why I am worried about the Panel is answered in chapters 15 & 16 of this book [Twisting the Treaty] which I suggest that all of you should read.
As to misinformation about the subject matter, I confine myself to published statements of the Panel itself, a critique of which has been issued to you at the door today.
If you have not had time to read it yet, do so as soon as you can.
The Panel says: “The Treaty … enabled the British to establish a government in New Zealand and confirmed to Māori the right to continue to exercise rangatiratanga (chieftainship).”
Now what sort of half-truth or less is that??
By Article first of the Treaty, the Maori chiefs surrendered sovereignty completely and forever to the Queen – they did not just ‘enable the British to establish a government’.
There can be no honest doubt about that. Why isn’t the Panel simply honest enough to say so?
All the chiefs at Waitangi and Hokianga knew this, even those who were initially opposed to it. I could quote their actual words if there were time. All the chiefs at Kohimarama in 1860 knew this and I could quote their words too.
Now, by Article first, all Maoris became subject to British law, as did Australian aboriginals and Americans Indians to the colonial powers in those continents but the Treaty gave Maoris much more than they got, because by Article third, Maoris received all the rights and privileges of the people of Britain.
Imagine that for the ten thousand or so Maoris who were slaves of other Maoris! With a few strokes of a pen, from being liable to being killed and eaten at the whim of their Maori masters, they become British citizens in full!
Article second was really redundant because all it did was affirm the rights in law of subjects to own property, a right which had been non-existent under Maori ‘tikanga’. Refer to TtT, Chapter 3.
Moreover this was asserted for all the people of New Zealand, not just Maoris – “tangata katoa o Nu Tirani”.
The word use for ‘ownership’ was ‘rangatiratanga’ because only the class of rangatiras and above owned anything under Maori ‘tikanga’ – the common people owned virtually nothing.
So when the Panel says the Treaty “confirmed to Māori the right to continue to exercise rangatiratanga (chieftainship)” it is making a quite false and misleading statement.
Why does it do that?
So that is the Treaty, ladies and gentlemen, totally and in full.
It conferred absolutely no rights on Maoris or anybody else which were not the rights of all the people of New Zealand. All the claims we hear of Treaty-based rights of Maoris to our water, the electromagnetic spectrum, native plants and animals and anything else they can think of are totally spurious!
The Panel goes on to say “Generally legislation refers to principles of the Treaty rather than the Treaty itself”.
Well, yes it does, but this is something else which is quite spurious, disgraceful doings of our politicians.
The phrase “principles of the Treaty” was first inserted in the State-Owned Enterprises Act, 1986 by the misguided Geoffrey Palmer at the behest of the Maori Council. It is an entirely recent notion which, being undefined, can be twisted by anybody who wants to do so, to “prove” almost anything.
The “principles” are not and never were part of the Treaty.
But it doesn’t end there – it gets worse.
The Panel says “Treaty principles have developed because of the difference between the English and Māori texts, and the need to apply the Treaty to circumstances as they arise.
The Waitangi Tribunal and Courts have played key roles in defining the Treaty, using principles to express the mutual responsibilities of the Crown and Māori.”
It is hard to know where to start in explaining how wrong this statement is.
1. There is no “English Treaty” – there is only one Treaty as there always has been – a document in the Maori language.
The English text referred to here is a bogus document, concocted by Hobson’s pompous secretary, Freeman, after the event. One of his seven variant versions was signed at Waikato Heads (with a few signing at Manukau later) to cope with a very awkward situation which arose through no fault of anybody.
Again, to find out the details, refer to Chapter 2 of TtT.
2. The Treaty was a document signed at Waitangi by which New Zealand became a British colony and Maoris British subjects.
Since then, of course, we have evolved into a free and independent nation. The Treaty was a step in this process and that was all. It did its bit in 1840.
It is nonsense to talk of it as a “living document” as Mike Cullen of the Panel and others do.
If you and I sign a bit of paper by which I transfer my car or house to you, then that is that. It has consequences of course because that property is subsequently in your ownership, not mine but, in itself, it is a done deal.
So was the Treaty of Waitangi.
3. The Treaty does not need “defining” as the panel says. I have told you this afternoon all that is in the Treaty.
If, as the Panel says, the “Waitangi Tribunal and Courts have played key roles in defining the Treaty, using principles to express the mutual responsibilities of the Crown and Māori” then they have usurped a right, our rights, in doing so.
They have done just that in introducing the false idea of “partnership” which occurs nowhere in the Treaty. It arises out of a statement by that learned but foolish judge, Robin Cooke, who exceeded his judicial brief in doing so. [I knew him personally so have some grounds for saying this.]
“Partnership” has grown like a cancer upon our body politic and is a sign of a great sickness in it. Such things should make us all very worried. They worry me.
You, John and Peter, are highly qualified and experienced lawyers, well capable of looking through evidence and distinguishing the true from the false. It is imperative that you do so, immediately, and correct the many false pronouncements of your Panel.
If you can’t do this, then your only honourable course is to resign from it. Your path is clear.
Bruce Moon
Left: Wearing the medals Dad never wore.
Right and below: Dad, 91, after laying the wreath at a BNZ ANZAC Ceremony, 2011.
Dear Dad,
How’s things up there? It’s been eighteen months now. We all miss your warmth and your humour, and will always treasure the example you set us of utter integrity. No doubt you’re having a ball with your old mates. Say hi to Nana and Uncle Bill and Auntie Minna.
And Steve Jobs. Have you persuaded him to be your personal computer tutor, as I predicted at your funeral?
This is just to say that, after 68 years, your medals have finally been to a Dawn Parade.
You never wore them, did you? Not even when your beloved BNZ asked you to lay the wreath at that ANZAC service in 2011.
I was so proud to be there with you that day. Your interview for the Archives has become a family heirloom. I’ve even put it on You Tube.
(Don’t ask. Just know that someone from Qatar has just been watching you talk about Guadalcanal.)
Anyway, my old mate John T suggested it might be good for us to go to yesterday’s Dawn Parade.
I wasn’t so sure. Had to admit I’d never been to one. You know I’m not a morning person, Dad.
But then I thought of you.
I thought about how you once volunteered for something even more traumatic than getting up at five.
World War Two.
That must have been a tad daunting, given your position as the world’s least violent man. How could you possibly have killed anyone?
(Yes I know — you’d have used your legendary persuasive skills to politely convince your Japanese opponent to fall on his sword.)
Then I thought about how, in 1919, Nana named you Vivian after her brother John Vivian Telfer, who hadn’t made it back from Gallipoli four years earlier.
(The vicar at the service told us that one in seventeen New Zealanders died in that war. That’s one in eight men. Maybe one in four young men. Then Spanish flu followed them home and decimated the survivors.)
I thought about young J.V. being ordered to go over the top at daybreak, and the odds against him replying: “Honestly I’d love to, Sarge, but if it’s all the same to you — what with all the noise and the flies and the body parts flying everywhere — I haven’t been sleeping well lately and I could really do with another couple of hours’ kip.”
Either way he was done for.
How much my boys’ and my generation take for granted, thanks to him — and you.
John Vivian Telfer, my great-uncle.
Killed at Gallipoli, 1915.
And so, since I’m a John and you’re Vivian, I thought I’d honour that young man — as well as my favourite old one.
Well before sunrise, I lifted your medals out of that old Pitcairn Island book box to which you unceremoniously consigned them after the war.
I took care to pin them on the right side of my jacket — to make it clear that they’d been earned by someone else, not me.
(No, I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to wear the bar as well!)
Thought I’d better wear a suit, in case you were watching. John wore shorts. Most wore jeans. But all the old guys wore jackets, and I was representing one of their finest.
It was a moving occasion, as dozens if not hundreds of Martinborough locals fell sombrely in behind the town’s tiny and dwindling band of old soldiers, their numbers swelled by firemen and servicemen and schoolchildren.
The bugling was stirring, the singing atrocious — a typically Kiwi monotonous mass mumble — especially the first verse of the national anthem.
As the vicar’s soothing words trailed away in the dawn’s early light, we trooped off to the Town Hall for refreshments, where the woman from the church who served me coffee was one Deborah Coddington.
(We greeted each other politely. What Deborah didn’t know was that I’d been thinking of challenging her to a Treaty debate in that very venue. But ANZAC Day didn’t feel like the time.)
Deborah — ACT MP turned Constitutional Advisory Panellist and wife of iwi lawyer Colin Carruthers — reminded me of the other reason I was there.
It was to remind myself that you and all your mates, Dad, did not help God defend New Zealand just so a bunch of gutless appeasers — a chamber of Chamberlains — could one day give away the country you fought for to a bunch of conniving fractional-descendants of the tribesmen who wanted to wipe out your great-grandmother.
(Where else in the world do the descendants of the winners of a war of rebellion pay reparations to the descendants of the losers?!)
I remember you telling me how you kids in the 1920s hated having to kiss great-grandma’s furry face at family picnics. So I looked her up…
Alice Telfer. Born: Auckland, 1845. Died: Auckland, 1946. What a life — from Heke’s War to Hiroshima!
But here’s the sobering fact they don’t teach in our state indoctrination facilities…
If Governor Grey hadn’t made the Kingites think again after they’d threatened to massacre every man, woman and child in Auckland, Alice Telfer would have been dead — shot, if she was lucky, tomahawked if not — at fifteen.
Sergeant Viv Ansell, bottom left, between puffs.
The tribal tripe is getting worse by the month, Dad.
Just last week some loony judge fined a chopper pilot $3750 for offending our highest mountain — now officially, would you believe, a Ngai Tahu ancestor.
The Taupo troughers are not only stinging triathletes like jellyfish for swimming in our largest lake, they reckon they can get away with charging millions a year to power generators for storing their water in it.
Water that has very conveniently fallen out of the sky!
(A sky which they do not yet own, but undoubtedly will the next time the Maori Party hold the balance of power — which, after the Maori roll campaign, according to Colin James, is going to be more often than not.)
Come to think of it, with foxes like Finlayson in charge of the Treaty henhouse, they probably won’t have to wait that long.
Anyone with a nanodroplet of brown blood, an ounce of creativity, and an ability to keep a straight face while emotionally blackmailing Tangata Whinlayson (not easy, admittedly) is quids in.
Dad (left) and an army mate with a Fijian chief.
Sorry my generation’s been such a disappointment, Dad. Sorry we’re letting the country you fought for break in two.
(Your church, by the way, has broken in three — the ‘Anglican church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia’.)
Your old colleagues still talk about you as the BNZ’s change agent of the 60s and 70s. The way your successors brought the bank to its knees in the 80s made you as angry as I’d ever seen you.
Well, that’s how I feel about what my former employer Key has been doing to New Zealand.
A bank can be bailed out. But once a country’s gone, it’s gone.
And New Zealand is going fast. Key is driving more people away than Clark did. The escapees write to me from Queensland. They all give the same reason: the Maorification of Everything.
(And a lot of them are Maori.)
I don’t have your patience, and we don’t have the time. It’s next election or never.
I’ll do the best I can with what I’ve got.
See you later,
John
Te Herenga Waka Marae, 46 Kelburn Parade, Wellington,
venue of the third NZCPL Constitutional Debate.
Tomorrow is going to be a busy day for me, with my 11.00 am meeting in Waikanae followed by a drink with Lindsay Perigo.
The first event should go well. The second could be dangerous. (‘Perigo’ is Portuguese for danger.)
So could the third. Assuming I’m fit to drive back to Wellington — and assuming the man on the roof doesn’t get me! — I’ll be at the above Te Herenga Waka Marae, 46 Kelburn Parade, at 6.30pm for the third of the NZCPL Constitutional Debates.
Here’s the blurb:
Maori Aspirations for Constitutional Change
Featuring Tai Ahu, Dr Rawinia Higgins, Veronica Tawhai, and Valmaine Toki
This debate brings together four newer voices from the Maori community to discuss the nature of Maori aspirations for constitutional change, broadly conceived.
The discussion will move well beyond the status of the Treaty of Waitangi, and include consideration of alternative models of Maori-Crown relationships, the development of a kaupapa Maori or tikanga-based constitution, and Maori constitutional aspirations in the context of indigenous peoples’ rights at the international level.
I hope to see you there. Oh, and if you’re wondering what that character on the roof is so steamed up about, here’s the back view…
Kupe and dog, Te Herenga Waka Marae, Victoria University.
As I write, I’m listening to the National Radio broadcast of Constitutional Debate II, to see whether they broadcast the first and second questions, asked by myself and John Robinson respectively.
(Encouragingly they did broadcast my first question last week.)
UPDATE: They did broadcast both our questions — well done, Radio New Zealand.
They also broadcast a much better question from a young man whom I congratulated for asking Dr Maria Bargh:
“I have a dream that one day my daughter will grow up to be judged on her merits, not on the colour of her skin. If the electoral racial preference becomes entrenched, how will I explain to her when she grows up that she is a second class citizen, and how will I explain to her that I let it happen?”
Bargh gave an oily, wriggly, incoherent answer that amounted to: “I couldn’t care less.”
Maria Bargh is a tribal one-eyed racist and a danger to New Zealand.
Another 80%+ rejection of Maori privilege — this time by readers of the Bay of Plenty Times to the provision of race-based housing.
One of the gutsier Nats, the man who drove Winston Peters out of Tauranga, Bob Clarkson, champions the unfashionable view:
The money will be used to build 12 large family homes and the infrastructure for eight more. It has come from Putea Maori, a $13 million capital grant fund available to Maori for the purpose of increasing affordable rental housing.
Putea Maori is part of the Social Housing Unit, which has set aside $104 million during three years (2012-15) to help people get good quality homes through community housing.
Housing project trustee Victoria Kingi said Maori tended to be worse off and in desperate need of affordable homes.
But Mr Clarkson said it was not fair for one section of the community to be eligible for funds when many in the wider population also suffered.
The city council last year “shot down” his plan to provide 1000 affordable homes for $280,000 each. Everyone should be able to access affordable housing, no matter what colour their skin was, he said.
Helicopter gravely offending Mt Cook — according to racist judge Joanna Maze.
Add the name of Judge Joanna Maze to New Zealand’s lengthening list of racist jurists.
Judge Maze actually thought she was being generous in fining a chopper pilot only $3750 for gravely offending Ngai Tahu’s ‘ancestor’ Aoraki (AKA Mt Cook) by hovering over it.
(Sorry, him.)
Maze thought this totally victimless crime so appalling that her “starting point for sentencing had to be the maximum penalty available, a fine of $5000.”
(She eventually let him off with $3750 in recognition of his early guilty plea.)
In passing sentence, Judge Joanna Maze said the offence was “seen as one of sacrilege to those to whom Aoraki/Mt Cook is of central cultural importance”.
“The fact that you did it in the interests of trade … is a double offence,” she said.
Tut-tut, you evil money-grubbing capitalist pilot pig. Don’t you know that only Maori are allowed to profit from showing our visitors the wondrous views of our highest mountain?
You will be unsurprised to learn that your Department of Conservation has been complicit in the judicial indulgence of the now-official Maori state religion.
In the summary of facts read to the court, the Department of Conservation (DOC) said the 3754-metre peak represented, to Ngai Tahu, “the most sacred of ancestors, from whom Ngai Tahu descend and who provide the iwi with its sense of communal identity, solidarity and purpose”.
It may be a fact that the more deranged Maori think they’re descended from a mountain. But that’s no reason for state officials to indulge their fantasy and pretend they’re correct. (Or even sane.)
And yet DOC’s website, without any hint of irony, presents such childish superstition as the God-honest truth.
In the increasingly-irrelevant world of the 21st century grown-up, the only people who descend from mountains do so on foot.
And since — correct me if I’m wrong — Maori had yet to invent the shoe by 1840, I doubt whether their ancestors did a lot of ascending or descending above the snowline, let alone to and from the pinnacle of our pre-eminent peak.
Their inability to get anywhere near the summit of Mt Cook may explain why they held it in such high esteem.
(Though what possessed them to imagine the frozen mass to be a blood relative is unclear. Perhaps the old fern root has more hallucinogenic properties than I thought.)
Just because the white man is able to float above their make-believe ancestor in a one-winged steel bird, doesn’t mean these primitive party-poopers should be able to deprive others of the chance to get up close and personal with it.
(Sorry, him.)
My next meeting is this coming Monday 22 April at Parklands Social Centre, Parkwood Retirement Village, Waikanae.
(Not Parkwood Lodge, as I mistakenly told you before — that’s the hospital!)
Coming in the Sylvan Avenue entrance, the Social Centre is in front of you on the right.
On this occasion, I’ve been asked to address the Kapiti U3A (University of the 3rd Age), a group I’ve entertained twice before with my Dances With Words talk about the crazy English language.
This time they’re welcoming me in my new more serious incarnation, and the public are welcome.
I’m the second speaker of the morning. The first finishes at 10.30am, then they break for a cuppa, then it’s me from 11.00 — 12.00.
My Whangarei and Hamilton meetings will NOT now be on the 1st and 2nd of May as I previously advertised. My brave Maori colleague-in-arms Tim Wikiriwhi is putting his all into arranging the Hamilton meeting, but the Hamilton City Council are dragging the chain confirming his preferred venue.
So we may hold it on the 9th or later. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile Hastings and District Grey Power have invited me to talk about constitutional matters on Friday 7 June at 2pm at the Hastings Baptist Church.
You and your friends are welcome.
By then I will have attended all five of the New Zealand Centre for Public Law’s Constitutional Debates, so should be reasonably clued-up.
(At the first two of these, I got to ask the first question, and the first of these questions made the only radio broadcast so far. I will soon post my detailed account of the first ‘debate’.)
Curmudgeons like Matthew Hooton say a single-issue ‘One Law For All’ party would have no show of breaking 5%.
Meanwhile, 53% of NBR subscribers say they would consider voting for such a party.
Over 90% of the people who come to my meetings say the same.
If only 5-10% of voters went into a polling booth in November next year and gave us their party vote, we could hold the balance of power and force the government to dismantle the Apartheid Aotearoa apparatus within six months.
It might surprise you that my preference would not be to abolish the Waitangi Tribunal, the Maori seats, etc. straight away. That would be unfair on Maori, despite being perfectly democratic.
Such a ‘tail wagging the dog’ result would not only cause our opponents to blame us for stripping them of their perks. It would also give a future government an excuse to reinstate the perks.
So that’s not the way to go. A binding referendum is.
My single policy plank would be to force the government to hold a binding referendum on the colourblind state issue within three months of the election (Waitangi Day 2015?), and fully implement the result of that referendum within another three months.
Therefore, assuming we get the usual 80% ‘No’ vote common to all poll questions to do with racial separatism, by the end of May 2015 we should have sent the Treaty gravy train on a one-way trip from Waitangi to Tangiwai.
Congratulations to NBR for being the only medium to respond to my challenge to poll the public. If the other media don’t believe the result, let them now conduct their own polls!
Since I’m proposing a binding referendum to dismantle racial separatism, I’m also thinking we might as well adopt binding referenda as a second policy plank.
I’m open to either the Swiss system or citizens’-initiated. Your thoughts?
Willie Jackson is still hiding from me in Truth, though I see he has plenty of time to write a column abusing Danish MP Marie Krarup as racist (5 times), stupid (4), ignorant, arrogant, and a nut who attracts rednecks (2).
(His whole argument is that Krarup is racist because Maori welcomes are popular with tourists. Of course they’re popular. All freak shows are popular. People on holiday always enjoy a good laugh. But that doesn’t mean they respect the people who perform them.)
As promised, it’s now time to up the ante on Willie and reveal his true colours.
Last week he got a free run on Seven Sharp and said some typically scary things in defence of a Maaori demand to take possession of a non-Maaori cemetery.
The scariest was his impression of Mad Bob Mugabe when he said farmers should walk off their land and give the farms back to Maaori.
If we did things Willie’s way, this is what we’d become.
His exact quote.
This is a staggering indictment on Willie and all those Treatygaters who would blithely set aside democracy for their own ends.
Willie using the old Griever trick of using the improved value of assets — improved by the Pakeha, with little help from Maaori.
Why should they get the value of hydro dams they had no hand in designing?
Here he goes again. Why is the South Island worth $18 billion? Because the settlers applied their brains, blood, sweat and tears to make it so.
Their knowledge of grassland farming. Their animals. Their wheat. Their labour.
Is there any gratitude to Pakeha for that? Is there ever any gratitude to Pakeha for allowing Maaori to bypass 3000 years of evolution and join the modern world?
When Willie’s Maaori ancestors sold the South Island, they sold it fair and square at the going rate — willing seller, willing buyer. They were pleased to get what they got, and if they wasted it that’s no one’s fault but their own.
All those trees they sold were worthless to them, because they had no clue how to turn a profit from them. They knew nothing of sheep, or wool, or foresty or wheat.
The settlers did. But before they could realise their profit, they had to work incredibly hard. No sitting around smoking dope and collecting rents from inherited land for our brave pioneers.
And the land the Maaori retained soon became as valuable afterwards as the whole lot was before. Win/win.
Willie and I agree on this one.
And because there are two radically different views of history, I say: teach both.
Come on Willie, time to reply to my questions.
At the Havelock North Community Centre, suggesting that Maori
are overdue for a leader with the unifying message of Sir Peter Buck.
About 90 hardy Havelock Northerners braved an unusually wet Hawkes Bay night to hear about Treatygate and Together New Zealand on Tuesday.
Once again, over 90% said they’d vote for a single-issue party dedicated to excising the cancer of racial separatism. Only 3 people said they’d vote for their normal party.
Thanks to Tom Johnson and his enthusiastic team. I’ll be back in Hawkes Bay to talk about the Constitutional Review to Hastings Grey Power on June 7. By then I’ll have attended five meetings dedicated to the subject at Victoria University.
I went to the first of those meetings on Monday, and will blog on it soon. Suffice it to say I took up my customary position in the front row, opposite Dame Claudia Orange, Dr Matthew Palmer and the supposedly Maori Dr Carwyn Jones, and asked the first question.
I hope they broadcast it. 🙂
Just about to drive to Hawkes Bay for tonight’s meeting.
Here’s the latest schedule:
Tuesday 9 April — 7.00 pm, Havelock North Community Centre, 30 Te Mata Road.
Monday 22 April — 11.00 am, Parklands Social Centre, 99 Belvedere Avenue, Waikanae.
Wednesday 1 May — Whangarei (date, time and place to be confirmed).
Thursday 2 May — 7.00 pm, Hamilton (date, time and place to be confirmed).
The last two dates may change, so keep in touch for announcements.
A big thanks to Tom Johnson and team in Hawkes Bay, John McLean who’s coordinating meetings, and Tim Wikiriwhi in Hamilton.
C’mon the Bay! See you tonight. Tell your friends. And your enemies!
How dare visiting Danish MP Marie Krarup have the temerity to be upset by being greeted at Devonport Naval Base by a “half-naked man… shouting and screaming in Maori, and poking his tongue out” at her.
Doesn’t she realise, as “Maori culture expert” Dr Ranginui Walker reminds us in the Herald, that such boorish behaviour is the pinnacle of Maori culture?
Did no one tell her that only Maori are allowed to take cultural offence in New Zealand?
(Which begs the question: what do they do when they don’t like you?)
Marie Krarup, Danish People’s Party MP
Ranginui Walker says Maori customs obviously had not been explained to Ms Krarup before her visit.
Actually they were explained very well — by the Danish ambassador, no less. (He even helpfully warned the MPs not to laugh at the powhiri.)
She just found the customs offensive, that’s all. As is her right.
“Very often politicians are not as well educated as they ought to be, perhaps haven’t studied history.”
Or perhaps they have. Perhaps the Danish visitors were very well educated in the violent ways of our pre-colonial stone age cannibals.
It’s just that, unlike Ranginui Walker, most educated people are repelled by violence.
More significant than the MP’s comments themselves were the high number of net positive comments supporting Marie Krarup on the stuff website.
Here’s a selection:
I left the following comment on the Copenhagen Post site congratulating Krarup on behalf of the 80% of New Zealanders who agree with her.
Dr Ranginui Walker is a Maori radical, beloved of our Marxist academic elite. If he believes that the petulant powhiri and cannibal-inspired haka are the pinnacle of Maori culture, then the sooner that culture addresses its obsession with violence, the better.
While other New Zealanders have led the world down into the smallest thing (Ernest Rutherford – the atom) and up into the biggest thing (William Pickering – space), conquered the world’s highest mountain (Hillary) and generally punched above their weight in many fields of human endeavour, Maori achievements remain linked to violence, from pioneering guerrilla warfare to excelling at rugby (a Danish word, I believe!).
All tribal peoples, including we former British and you former Vikings, have had violent pasts. The problem in New Zealand is that too many Maori remain tribal and disproportionately violent.
Aided by cringing white appeasers, they are in the habit of blaming the Pakeha (Europeans) for all their ills, when in fact no native race has come so far so fast as the Maori after British colonisation.
But be assured that most Maori, and New Zealanders in general, are a lot more welcoming than Marie Krarup’s experience would suggest.
Well done to Marie for saying what 80% of Kiwis think, but are too timid to say.
Just as the raping and pillaging Vikings evolved into today’s Danes, and the bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxons mellowed into the powder-puff Poms, so too can Maori choose to set aside their obsession with violence and join the modern world.
In the 21st century, greeting visitors by threatening to kill and eat them is not OK.
My favourite conviction politician has died.
From time to time, the financial and confrontational pressures of this campaign threaten to overwhelm me.
In these moments, the historical figure I think of, and whose courage inspires me to keep going, is Margaret Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter who stood up to militant miners, Argentinian generals and IRA bombers.
The Marxist-pessimist losers hated Maggie’s guts. That’s because she had guts — the guts to do what’s right.
If our snivelling excuses for leaders had an ounce of Maggie’s guts, we wouldn’t be surrending our country to Griever thugs and extortionists.
Like that other great Briton who scorned the appeasement of bullies, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher is being given the rare honour of a state funeral — the first for a prime minister since Sir Winston’s in 1965.
Her enemies will sneer, but I will cheer — grateful, along with millions of her countrymen, for her mediocrity-defying example of honesty, optimism and spine.
My favourite Thatcher quote:
“To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say:
You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”
Margaret Thatcher: thank you for showing us how to stand up.
Last week
This week
Next week?
The week after?
If you’re wondering why my page 2 stoush with Willie Jackson in Truth has ground to a halt, so am I.
Hopefully posts like this will gee Willie back into action, and that his emailed vow to “resume our contest” is genuine.
JT’s sour response on Willie’s behalf.
As Willie is learning, when someone publicly calls me a liar, I don’t let go until I’ve proved them wrong — publicly.
But I should say that Willie is remarkably civil to me in person, as the above exchange shows. He gave me a pretty fair hearing on Radio Live too.
His mate Tamihere, however, is still sore at me for exposing (on their Waitangi Day show) his habit of leaving out parts of the history that don’t suit his Griever agenda.
As a result, he was less than keen to have me as a guest on the show, and is even less keen for Willie to keep engaging with me now.
To give two examples, he’d been saying that the British executed over 100 surrendered prisoners in Poverty Bay. I had to ring up to remind him that it was a loyalist Maori, Rapata Wahawaha who did the shooting (as utu for a tribal feud) — in defiance of British policy.
He also tried rather pathetically to minimise the Taranaki genocide of the Moriori by saying it was a Pakeha captain that took them to the Chathams.
I had to remind him of three tiny details:
Anyway Willie, if you’re reading this, don’t get angry, get even — with facts this time, not insults.
Do get writing soon, because my next post won’t be this namby-pamby.
Top: Professor Margaret Wilson, Moana Jackson,
Bottom: Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Dame Claudia Orange.
For the next five Monday evenings, the NZ Centre for Public Law will be hosting a series of Constitutional Review ‘Debates’.
Some of the most notorious Treatygaters will be ‘debating’ (read ‘agreeing’) with each other in the Hunter Council Chamber of the VUW Kelburn campus.
The interesting difference between these and Dame Claudia Orange’s Te Papa Treaty ‘Debates’ is that these ones will be broadcast live on Radio New Zealand National.
Hmmm.
I do hope the debates reflect public opinion. It would certainly be a shame if it was left to frustrated audience members to provide the necessary balance. 🙂
_________________________
Venue:
Hunter Council Chamber
VUW Kelburn campus, Wellington
Dates:
Every Monday 8 April — 6 May, 2013
Time:
6.30 pm
_________________________
Moderator:
Steven Price, barrister
Speakers:
Professor Bruce Harris
Moana Jackson
Dame Claudia Orange
Dr Matthew Palmer
An examination of the origins of the constitutional review, and the process set up to support it.
_________________________
Moderator:
Steven Price, barrister
Speakers:
Dr Maria Bargh
Colin James
Professor Elizabeth McLeay
Sir Geoffrey Palmer QC
The constitutional review’s terms of reference include:
The debatees will cover these issues and others that they consider important to the quality and effectiveness of our democratic system.
_________________________
Moderator:
Steven Price, barrister
Speakers:
Tai Ahu
Dr Rawinia Higgins
Veronica Tawhai
Valmaine Toki
Four newer voices from the Māori community discuss the nature of Māori aspirations for constitutional change, broadly conceived.
The discussion will move well beyond the status of the Treaty of Waitangi, and include:
_________________________
Moderator:
Steven Price, barrister
Speakers:
Professor Andrew Geddis
Jack Hodder QC
Stephen Whittington
Professor Margaret Wilson
New Zealand has no formal written constitution, and its bill of rights is an ordinary law that cannot be used to strike down other laws.
_________________________
Moderator:
Steven Price, barrister
Speakers:
Jim Bolger
Professor Janet McLean
Michael Mabbitt
Is it time to replace the Queen as our head of state and become a republic?
_________________________
Wellingtonians: see you Monday at Vic at 6.30 pm.
(Hawkes Bayites: see you Tuesday at the Havelock North Community Centre at 7.oo pm.)
My Grey Power meeting in the River City made the front page of Saturday’s Wanganui Chronicle. I appreciate the largely favourable coverage, but not all of it was accurate.
Political activist John Ansell railed against Treaty of Waitangi settlements when his caravan swung through Wanganui yesterday.
He was guest speaker at a meeting organised by Grey Power Wanganui and for the best part of two hours he held an audience of about 150 in his thrall as he criticised Treaty of Waitangi settlements, the racial divide, elitism that promoted it and the settlement gravy train that continued to roll on.
Not a biggie, but the venue’s count was 170-180.
At the nub of his debate was whether or not New Zealanders should have rights decided on race or colour.
“I’m not anti-Maori, and I can say that until I’m blue in the face but you’ll never read about that in the newspaper,” he said.
Well that worked! — a cheeky dare in the grand tradition of Monty Python’s “I Bet You They Won’t Play This Song On the Radio”.
He is soon to constitute a party called Together NZ which will have as its mantra “one land, one law”.
Er, no. I said the organisation could become a party.
He told the audience about legal aid costs racked up by those acting for Treaty claimants, saying that since 2006 $79 million had been paid in legal aid.
“Those claimants have won $1.6 billion in the courts but haven’t been required to repay a bit of that legal aid,” he said.
I also told them that, according to a friend who used to work at the Legal Services Board, there are only three classes of legal aid applicant who don’t have to repay one cent of their aid…
Now I don’t have any issue with victims of domestic violence not having to repay their legal aid — though I’m not sure why that doesn’t extend to victims of all violence.
I’m less sure about accused criminals, though I suppose if they’re found guilty they get punished in other ways.
But do we really think it’s fair that Treaty claimants — who have collectively become billionaires thanks to court judgements in only seven years (if you can call the Waitangi Tribunal a court) — don’t even have to refund us taxpayers as little as five percent of their winnings?
Of all the injustices connected with the Treaty gravy train, this legal aid rort is surely one of the most sickening.
Mr Ansell said Maori willingly sold land to Pakeha and that most claims had been settled by 1947.
Yet several tribes continued to have settlements “finalised”. He said Ngai Tahu had had five “final” settlements, Tainui four and Taranaki five.
Not correct about Taranaki. What I said was that the British paid for the province five times, because different chiefs tricked them into believing that they owned the land when they didn’t.
Thus the British bent over backwards to do the right thing, even when the Maori were hell-bent on deceiving them.
He said those claims had been settled around the wrong Treaty because the final document was one that was inclusive of all races.
That’s right. Both Hobson’s final English draft and the Maori Tiriti into which it was translated guaranteed private property rights to “the chiefs and tribes and all the people of New Zealand.”
He also argued only a handful of chiefs signed the document…
…and that the signature of Governor Hobson appearing on the Treaty was a forgery.
No, I was talking here about the Treaty display at Te Papa.
I said it’s bad enough that our national museum pretends, like the rest of the Treatygaters, that the pompous Freeman ‘Royal Style’ document is the ‘official Treaty in English’.
But what’s worse, they’ve even doctored the signature on their display to make it look as though Hobson was in full control of his faculties when he was induced by his incompetent secretary to sign that false (now ‘official’) document.
The signature on the Te Papa display below is not the real one. (You can see that a bit further down.)
This signature you’re about to see was lifted by Te Papa from the only document that Hobson said was the legitimate Treaty — the Maori Tiriti o Waitangi, signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840.
That’s a pretty robust signature, I’m sure you’ll agree. The only trouble is, it never appeared with those words. It’s a Te Papaganda fake.
Below is what their display should look like.
This is my version, where I’ve changed Te Papa’s doctored version back to what it should have been.
Yes, this wonky, cack-handed, childlike scrawl was how our governor signed what the Treatygaters say was the ‘official Treaty in English’.
And why was his handwriting so spidery?
Because he’d just suffered a stroke.
Hobson had been induced to sign this flowery document in his sickbed by his pompous secretary James Freeman — the document’s author.
Why? Because Freeman was trying to make a name for himself by getting his own composition accepted as the real Treaty.
And he had a little luck. The version he sent to Rev Maunsell at the Church Mission Society station at Kawhia got used as overflow paper when the Maori Tiriti didn’t arrive for a major signing at Waikato Heads.
That accident of fate is what enables the Treatygaters to point to an English document containing Maori signatures and say: “Aha! The official English Treaty!”
(Even though Hobson had made it clear that there was no official English Treaty — only the Maori one.)
That is why this bogus document is now enshrined in the Treaty of Waitangi Act, and why the Waitangi Tribunal can make all sorts of absurd claims about its false contents.
But of course this false Freeman document bears little resemblance to the Maori Tiriti from which the Treatygaters say it was translated.
This anomaly puzzled genuine historians for 149 years — until Hobson’s missing final English draft was discovered by the descendants of Treaty-era lawyer Henry Littlewood in 1989. Then the pieces fell into place.
That Littlewood draft was a perfect match for the Maori Tiriti.
It had been written before it — on 4 February, 1840 — the day when everyone agrees the final draft was written.
It was written in the hand of James Busby, the man everyone agrees had penned the final draft for Hobson.
In other words, the Maori Tiriti was a translation of the final draft. (And the Freeman document was just another of many rejected drafts.)
The only thing the Treatygaters like Dame Claudia Orange have ever been able to do to discredit this draft was claim that Busby — a seasoned British administrator — must have got the date wrong!
But back to Te Papa’s forged display of Freeman’s so-called ‘official Treaty in English’.
Naturally, that bastion of historical revisionism, disgracefully masquerading as ‘Our Place’, doesn’t want us to know that Hobson signed Dame Claudia’s favourite document under duress.
So they doctored their depiction of it.
If that’s not corrupt, I don’t know what is.
Not content with ignoring 80% of the residents of Wanganui, the New Zealand Geographic Board Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa is now planning to ignore over 80% of all New Zealanders and rename the North and South Islands.
Feel free to vote on the stuff poll attached to the story, which a few minutes ago was predictably running 81-19 against the proposal.
This time the racist bureaucracy is using as its excuse the ‘shock discovery that “the English names for both islands had never been formalised”‘.
What bollocks. How many centuries of maps constitute ‘official’?
NZGBNPToA chairman Don Grant says:
“The board will open the decision to the public on whether the English name or the Maori name, or both names together should be used as official names.”
Sure they will.
And when the public tells the Board by a margin of four to one that they want to keep things the same — just as they did over the Whanganui ‘h’ — the Board will close the discussion to the public.
And then the Board will arrogantly declare that the North Island is henceforth to be referred to as Te Ika a Maui and the South Island as Te Waipounamu.
And the Treatifarian minority will cheer. And the vast majority will howl.
And John Key will toss the linguistic grenade to a minister he doesn’t like.
And that limp-wristed minister will pretend to agonise over the dilemma (which should be no dilemma at all) for months.
And then he will announce the inevitable predetermined compromise.
(A compromise between democracy and dictatorship. A compromise, like most National Party compromises, between right and wrong. Why do you National Party supporters tolerate continual compromises between right and wrong?)
Thus, in a few months, our two main islands will be known as North Island/Te Ika a Maui and South Island/Te Waipounamu.
After that totalitarian triumph, the NZGBNPToA’s will feel emboldened to mount its inevitable assault on the linguistic summit — the great socialist goal of the Helen Clarxists now set to be realised under John Key: the renaming of our country as Aotearoa New Zealand.
And the minute they try that, I confidently predict, the whole racial tinderbox will explode.
The current stuff poll is just the latest in a string of polls (formal and informal) that support my view that 80% of New Zealanders would vote Yes to the following proposition:
I am in the process of planning a professional poll on the above question — and on whether those who answer Yes would vote for a single issue party dedicated to achieving a racially unbiased state.
