MEDIA WATCH: Morgan’s crusade: Mau is less

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Was listening to Gareth Morgan, all trademark nasal/lisp, make his way through a discussion on the Treaty of Waitangi on Radio Live on Tuesday. He’s pushing his conventional interpretation without interruption so far – a pleasant change.

Pleasant change that is to the usual supercillious banter at that hour and Willie Jackson’s infuriating ADD proclivities in particular. The usual stuff you know: changing subjects every two seconds, his dismissal of anything he can’t comprehend and his digressions into the minutae of rugby are all eerily, pleasantly, absent. Pleasant change. He’s not breaking out in his usual style of hysterical machinegun radio laughter to break the tension every 15-20 secs. No, it’s very silent. Pleasantly silent.

Even Ali Mau’s  routine of ill-timed and illogical interruptions, prejudicial pronouncements and rhetorical questions based on her wanton misunderstandings are so far suppressed. Very pleasant. No moron interjections, yet. This is the total opposite of the average Willie and Ali show. They have said almost nothing and it is a vast improvement.

Morgan makes the case for his version of the situation: a conventional understanding of the New Zealand government’s post-1992 Treaty settlements policy along with accepting the ‘principles’ of the Treaty.

Morgan’s legalistic view is common enough; it holds that because the NZ courts have recognised ‘principles’ of the Treaty and that because the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 established a legal tribunal that this is the appropriate template of recognition for the NZ government. Like most commonly held Pakeha views it is something of a mythology conveniently constructed and reconstructed from decade to decade to justify the status quo and whatever the prevailing Pakeha sentiment happens to be at the time. What this shallow view rests upon however are a series of positions that undermine the Treaty provisions and are subject to the whim of a Pakeha judiciary. For example this view is often used to support the foreshore and seabed ownership by Tangata Whenua; but should the Pakeha judiciary have ruled the other way then these Pakeha would have happily and confidently gone along with that assertion too. There is a great deal of presumption attached to Morgan’s views: that Pakeha and their government have acted adequately since 1975, and that they ought to continue to dictate the relationship on their own terms.

Morgan has made all the usual mistakes. Pakeha diluting everything as they do for ownership purposes. Pretending the Treaty is principles instead of what it actually says is the obvious problem with Morgan. His conventional view is that of the settler who can rely on internal acquiescence in arbitrarily and unilaterally determining native policy within the colony without fear of external contradiction. And as long as they have no Maori High Court judges on cases that matter – or no Maori High Court Judges at all – then all it ever will be is the manufactured ‘partnership’ judgment of Cook and their cohorts who think it is their duty to make the Treaty fit rather than make the government fit. So far so familiar.

Morgan didn’t appear in cognisance of the critique exactly (or he just dismissed it), but at least he put his case simply and clearly for what he said was a Pakeha audience. He wasn’t trying to win Maori over, his objective is winning over – he would say ‘educating’ – the sort of reactionary Maoriphobics that jumped on Don Brash’s Orewa bandwagon in 2004. He hopes there will be a bit less of these people around now – ten years after – and that this will make the difference in advancing his version of the Treaty. He could be correct, but this is a colonial situation where a quarter of the whole population are immigrants and the Maori population has been consequently suppressed by the half a million plus foreigners the government have conducted into the country since 1990 and which undermine tennets of a democratic resolution. In the past 25 years the government have piled in more than the entire Maori population and yet no Pakeha commentator – including Morgan – seems to think this is a much of a problem or even an issue at all.

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The New Caledonia accord with the French makes immigration and voting rights and a timeline essential features of decolonisation – New Zealand by comparison is severely retarded. Since the Pakeha elite rely upon this influx of warm bodies every year (of varying quality and of dubious necessity – they don’t really care as long as there are a lot of them) to maintain their own house values, create aggregate demand and keep their businesses’ labour costs down then it is doubtful this group that controls policy will concede the problem. This also suppresses the Maori vote proportion and is the only reason why there was not another Maori seat added at the last election: the Maori population can never increase at the NZ government’s rate of immigration and therefore even though the total number of Maori is increasing and those choosing to go onto the Maori roll may increase it will never be enough to offset the immigrant numbers so that perversely Maori seats might be lost despite Maori enrolment growth. The effect if not the design of the NZ government policy therefore is to suppress the Maori vote. The elephant in the room isn’t the Treaty – it’s the 50,000 foreigners coming in every year. Immigration is the basis of the colony and the prerequisite for the economics of the Pakeha lifestyle. I never heard Morgan mention it.

One of the difficulties in listening for any extended time to Radio Live talkback – apart from some of their hosts – is the regular caller. The regular caller can – and some do – ring up each show so that we hear them three or four times a day. Over and over again the same people talking; and invariably talking the same shit – usually heavily partisan or ideological shit, but it is all shit when you’ve heard it a dozen times in the past week and three times today. They should really knock this on the head.

An old Scot was one such high-rotate caller to get through. He was trying to explain some history to Willie in the previous, grievous, hour before Morgan came on. He did a grand job considering his ‘One NZ Foundation’ bigotry. He just recited the order: first there was a flag in 1834, then a Declaration of Independence in 1835 then a Treaty of February 6 1840 at which point NZ was administered by the UK as part of NSW, and then a Colony was erected by the UK in late 1840 that became operative in 1841 at which point it became New Zealand with its own separate Governor, Executive and Legislative Councils, Colonial officials etc. Willie at first didn’t react. It was all sinking in… or was it? A moment of silence, and then I think he called him an idiot. It was something like idiot. And then he said what the guy had said didn’t make sense. And then he switched the subject without attempting to acknowledge it.

Classic action Jackson. I don’t think Jackson got the man’s demonstration of the presumption by which the NZ government and the colonised masses operate. It’s all about believing in the government’s plan of paying a pittance and keeping the land and it is not about recognising the significance of the long and winding trail of extremely inconvenient and incontrovertible paperwork that leads to full decolonisation.

Fact is the ‘Dominion of New Zealand’ still exists – it was never abolished. Fact is Maori are British Subjects – the Anglo-Maori Treaty is as clear on that as the Anglo-Irish Treaty must have been on the rights that confirm British Subject status that the British still accept in their current law. The Crown is the United Kingdom, not ‘New Zealand’ in the Treaty. The word ‘colony’ doesn’t appear even once in the Treaty. The Treaty established a protectorate not a colony. Morgan’s pied piper through the provinces selling a conventional, convenient Pakeha version of the Treaty relies on a series of fictions that enshrines Pakeha mythology, not challenges it. This is probably why many Pakeha will find Morgan’s ideas compatible with their own prejudices, and they will sincerely believe that they are at the vanguard of modernity. It is a type of practised unreality – these internal conversations of the settler population – that an outsider would find absurd, or even fascist. Like the proud Rhodesian optimistic at having side-stepped the UK and fiddled up a new republic: it’s days are already numbered.

And then Mau ruins the tone soon enough by starting to blithely read out the racist hate texts as if they had validity. They were invective and racial supremacist slogans, the calibre of scrawled obscenities from inside a public toilet. Why would you read that out? Oh dear, it was worth listening to up until this point. She doesn’t have to read these out at all, but she does. Just like how she doesn’t have to say ‘that was a joke’, but she does. She is so painful.

One of her worst habits is to sum up a caller’s point as being the opposite to what they actually said. She even misrepresented what Morgan had said in an interview the week before. Morgan had just been at Ratana Pa. He said he was the first non-politician to address that hui. As soon as he’s rung off she then said he was the first ‘non-Maori’ to address Ratana! Such ignorance on display: firstly in not listening properly and secondly in forcing everything through her sieve of Australian prejudice (where she assumes only Maori have ever said anything there obviously). Just so wrong. She was on after the news – and others must have picked up on it – because she then tried to say that she said he was the first ‘non-politician’ and the first ‘white’. Just so completely wrong and she just made it worse. When someone is so many multiple dimensions of wrong, where do you start? As she talks you can see people’s IQ points drain from their eyeballs. Not worth listening to; but flicking channels over to National Radio to the sopping drip that is Simon Mercep is an even worse prospect.

More calls. The ‘Littlewood treaty’ is brought up. Oh dear. What nonsense – as if an unsigned draft of any document could ever be considered above the final signed version. This is the level at which these people have to grasp to contort the Treaty back into the unassailed white privilege they wish it was. A pathetic wish unsupported by fact. More calls. ‘I think I can answer that…’ says Mau. Oh please don’t. But she does. So wrong. I’ve tuned out.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Tim the difference between you and Morgan are just a matter of numbers.
    He thinks that things are moving towards wider acceptance of the Treaty “settlement” process, you think even this won’t happen because of the waves of racists migrating to NZ.

    So Treaty politics is still driven by a racist horde clashing with well meaning liberals over how to administer the ongoing settlement ‘going forward’.

    Morgan’s money plus the MP representing the tribal elites eating crumbs under the cabinet table will make sure the settlement process timeline is extended…

    The Tribunal lawyers claiming continuous sovereignty may mean a few more crumbs falling off the Cabinet Table into the iwi capitalists profits, nothing more.

    Meanwhile, the naked settler capitalist colonisation of Aotearoa continues with the 1% refugees fleeing the mess they are making of their own countries, and working class Maori remain exploited and oppressed in their own country.

    The solution to this is to recognise that Maori are not the only oppressed minority in NZ. Many migrants are as badly off as many Maori. There are also poor whites at the arse end of colonisation.

    They are all thrown into the working class by capitalist globalisation. They can be united by uniting to fight against the common enemy the international corporates that are re-colonising Aotearoa to rip, drill, shit and bust the economy and destroy nature.

    This united class has one common class interest – throwing out the corrupt ruling class that serves only the interests of their 1% mates and their masters in the US and China.

    When NZ is a socialist republic then it will be time for Maori to stop begging the settler state for handouts and realise their right to self-determination to reclaim control over land and culture and realise finally what Te Whiti was trying to do against rampant settler colonialism under impossible odds all that time ago.

  2. Tim, I dont see how you can get the solution you want unless we ban all citizenship for all immigrants after the first generation of settlers.
    The problem is that the total Maori blood stock can shrink but never increase. Since they have been in NZ for about 700 years there is no way of increasing the blood stock from outside. Increasing the number of Maori can only be done by reducing the portion of Maori blood in each Maori person ie by inter-marriage.
    The level of immigration is not going to drop, bearing in mind that world population is growing and we are one of the few nations not overpopulated, so Maori must always diminish as a portion of NZ citizens. It is therefore proper that its political representation must drop. That argument also applies to Pakeha of European descent. That is the way of history and always has been

  3. I agree with much in the article and also with much in Dave’s comment above. Is Morgan attempting to sideline the rights of Maori? He should concentrate on the immigration problem that will envelope us in years to come as northern Hemisphere “refugees” having raped and pillaged their own countries come here to live in safety and security. Sure they bring money but they also bring entrenched undesirable attitudes and distortion to the property market.

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