Half the country didn’t even know what the Treaty Principles – ACT want a referendum of ignorance and bigotry!

Poll: Half of NZers say they don’t understand Treaty principles

A new 1News Verian poll shows a slim majority of people, around 52%, are not confident in their understanding of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

The poll, which ran from February 10 to 14, asked 1002 eligible voters: “How well do you understand the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi?”

Of the respondents, 40% said “not that well”, 10% said “not at all well” and 2% did not know or refused to answer.

Meanwhile, just 12% responded “very well”, but 36% said “well”.

Those groups of eligible voters who are more likely than average to say they didn’t understand the principles well were Canterbury residents, National Party supporters and non-university graduates.

Those groups of eligible voters who are more likely than average to say they understand the principles well were Green Party supporters, Māori, Pacific peoples, university graduates, people aged 30 to 39 years, and those with a household income of $150,000 and over.

It comes as the Government faces a divisive debate over ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill, which seeks to redefine the principles.

ACT wants a binding referendum against the interests of the minority over an issue the majority don’t even understand!

ACT’s Treaty Referendum Bill is dangerous and disingenuous…

1. All citizens of New Zealand have the same political rights and duties

2. All political authority comes from the people by democratic means including universal suffrage, regular and free elections with a secret ballot

3. New Zealand is a multi-ethnic liberal democracy where discrimination based on ethnicity is illegal

…The Bill sounds good until you realise what it actually means…

Lord Cooke’s ruling in 1987 was an attempt to create a framework that gave the Treaty meaning. He ruled, “the Treaty created an enduring relationship of a fiduciary nature akin to a partnership, each party accepting a positive duty to act in good faith, fairly, reasonably and honourably towards the other”, and this has been the framework for co-operation for almost 4 decades.

…passing ACT’s Bill would remove that obligation to work with Māori making the Treaty meaningless.

This is a direct attack on the Treaty and the very value of our Democracy

This whole argument that “we the people didn’t have a say in Lord Cooke’s 1987 ruling” utterly misunderstands the nature of our democracy and is the intellectual equivalent of being a book burner demanding to run the library!

We have a representative democracy, not a participatory democracy.

We elect people and pay them well and resource them with the best advice to make the best decisions, if you don’t like them you kick them out of office once every 3 years.

Demanding a say in issues requiring deep wisdom, experience and technical skill like Constitutional Law and vaccines is like letting children design airplanes FFS!

You are all honestly smarter than Lord fucking Cooke and the vast majority of medical experts promoting the vaccine are you?

The arrogance of so many of you is just jaw dropping in its level of self delusion!

I want a fucking expert making decisions as important as this, not slack jawed yokels who are frightened every time there’s an eclipse that the moon dragon is eating the Sun God!

In fields that demand intelligence, why the Christ would you ask morons for their fucking opinion?

It’s like getting them in to have a say over brain surgery FFS!

Why would you listen to a fucking redneck on advice for brain surgery, or vaccine science, or building a legislative constructional framework that allows indigenous people to access promises made by a Treaty the conquering culture never wants to acknowledge?

This hate of the expert because apparently the experts advice hurts your fucking feelings is woke snowflake trigger level pathetic.

Right wing feelings from the Anitvaxx perma-grievance movement and the anti-Māori settler klan are what is deciding fucking policy here, not expert analysis!

Ill informed, stupid, ignorant, right wing ‘feelings’.

Fuck your feelings.

Let’s be very clear, what the right are arguing for here with this Treaty Principles Referendum Bill is not Democracy, but Majoritarianism.

The benchmark for morality under Majoritarianism is that 51% can vote to kill the other 49%.

Great if you are in the 51%, not so great if you are in the 49%.

A democracy worth its name understands the power structures within society and provides a democracy that actually represents the wider interests of everyone.

What ACT are doing here is stripping away Māori political rights by strangling off any obligation to work with Māori. It makes the Treaty redundant so attempts to pretend this doesn’t impact the Treaty is just a deception.

Majoritarianism is not democracy, it’s authoritarian.

Democracy uses the State to build people up, Majoritarianism demands the State punish those the Majority despise.

We need to fight for our Democracy and not the empty legitimacy of Majoritarianism.

Just because you have the numbers to do it, doesn’t make it right or just or clever or worthy of us.

It’s counter productive culture war revenge fantasies implemented for nothing more than political plunder.

David’s argument that ACT stand for tino rangatiratanga is so misplaced I wonder if David has ever met any Māori…

The Treaty: We don’t believe Treaty of Waitangi is a partnership between races – David Seymour

Over the past decade, no party has shown more courage in standing up for the freedoms of New Zealanders than Act.

There’s been the freedom of parents to choose a school that suits their children, charter schools. Our party has stood for the legal rights of licensed firearm owners, freedom of speech, the freedom of vulnerable people suffering at the end of their life to choose assisted dying, and the freedom of people to go about their business in the face of heavy-handed Covid measures.

Now in Government, we continue to stand up for New Zealanders’ rights. We are reintroducing choice in education, beating back the thickets of red tape and regulation so deadly to innovation and development, and ensuring Oranga Tamariki has the rights of each vulnerable child as its unconditional focus, among other initiatives.

In these and other examples, Act stands for the mana of the individual, the right to live life as you choose so long as you are not harming others. Put another way, Act has championed tino rangatiratanga, or self-determination.

…at a time when the Mining Industry and Trans National Corporations want to buy up NZ land and the privatisation thugs are looking to rob us blind, we need more safeguards to our sovereignty than David Seymour’s limp and brittle definition of tino rangatiratanga.

All he is doing here is reducing the concept of tino rangatiratanga into the shallow individualism of the Western tradition.

Individualism über alles is a petty trade in for what Māori already have.

David wants to downgrade Māori from citizens to consumers.

Māori communalism is as close to Kiwi socialism as we are going to get! David’s attempt to reduce tino rangatiratanga into individualism misses the Māori values where sharing and communalism is central.

All David is doing is forcing a Western Philosophical definition of the self onto Māori and then telling them to accept it!

How does replacing Māori communalism for a shallow western definition of the individual, justify dumping the Treaty Principles?

If anything, wouldn’t further atomisation of Māori culture help fray the unity and allow ACT to legislate it away?

Māori tino rangatiratanga is the sovereignty of the people, not the self interest of the individual, if this is all ACT is rolling up to Waitangi with as a justification for their race baiting referendum, good luck.

ACT’s Treaty Referendum Bill is dangerous and disingenuous.

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