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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The problem with racially segregated government is that it leaves all political debate stranded in the 19th century, and tries to wind back the clock to the time when socialist theories, the welfare state and even trade unions didn’t exist.
A classless society with equal treatment before the law makes special racial privileges redundant — the society works to organise itself in a way to best meet the needs of all citizens. Oh, but any mention of class so terrifies the ruling oligarchs on Wall Street! Thus dividing the workers along racial lines, and attempting to channel all discontent into the dead-end of racialistic nationalism, is the “solution” to prevent the labour movement from ever striking back.
What a stupid 1 News Verian poll. Abolutely meaningless questions. Someone in the science fraternaty suggested that tehre shoud be a journal of no results. That’s where this poll belongs..
“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.”
Quite so. That’s what just happened.
Interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi is a task of statutory interpretation which is best conducted by those who are skilled in the field. That would normally be a matter for lawyers and judges, but lay people often have an interest, and may be able to contribute something of value to the process.
In addition, whether we like it or not, the “principles of the treaty” have become political and we would be best advised to confront the ACT party head on over the issue rather than insisting fruitlessly that it should be left to the rulings of the courts.
Martyn thinks that “The Bill sounds good..”. I would deny that. The “three principles” posing as statements of fact are in fact all untrue.
“1. All citizens of New Zealand have the same political rights and duties”
Not true. The Governor-General, members of cabinet, members of the House of Representatives all have political rights and duties different from those of ordinary citizens. ACT is trying to pretend that the Realm of New Zealand is a simple, primitive and natural democracy. In reality it is a structured system with highly differentiated roles, rights and duties. This representation of the political system mirrors ACT’s simplistic and false depiction of the economic system as one where every citizen stands in the market with equal rights and opportunities.
“2. All political authority comes from the people by democratic means including universal suffrage, regular and free elections with a secret ballot”. That is constitutionally incorrect. King Charles is sovereign. He appoints the government of New Zealand, and he is not constitutionally bound to respect the will of the people.
“3. New Zealand is a multi-ethnic liberal democracy where discrimination based on ethnicity is illegal”. Except that King Charles as the unelected Head of State continues to represent British racial supremacy in New Zealand.
If the ACT bill causes us to ask some fundamental questions such as “Why should we have elections only once every three or four years?”, “Why should we continue to tolerate the secret ballot?”, “Why should we allow a Head of State who owes his position solely to his whakapapa?” then some good will have come from it.
The good news is that regardless of whether the bill with its three principles is enacted by Parliament and regardless of whether it is confirmed by a popular referendum, rangatiratanga will continue unimpeded as the single guiding principle of social organisation for Maori and the working class.
Indeed.
Hopefully your lot will be kicked out in 2026. Getting over racist, homophobic and aporophobic fucks like you.
Even explaining the democratic process trigger you
You are the one who wants to strip away half the social safety net, lock brown people up en masse, hand schools over to church groups and Americanise healthcare.
Sometimes free speech and democracy should be suspended, especially it means the welfare state is going to be hacked away. I note that there was no homelessness in the USSR.
OMG you are OTT
Your alternative democratic process jack lol.
That would be a fair assumption if all parties spent the same amount amount of money on advertising. When one group has eight time the budget then there is no democracy.
Kiwis are not equal and will never be under this rabble .
If I get a job on wellington I have to find my own accomadation and cant claim 1k a week .
Law has just been past that prevents Maori from getting health care .
The well off will be getting tax cuts while the poor get fleeced to pay for it
1 million people live in poverty while a few thousand own 80% of the wealth in NZ
Benificeries get jail for 5k fraud and white collar workers get comunity service and are never expected to pay back what they have stolen .
This is absolutely spot on. Anyone who’s done Pols, or even had an interest in politics, knows it about the division of resources in a given area of territory. Stripped down from all the BS, that’s what politics is.
How that happens is the nub. Theories and convoluted economic hypothesis work to fudge this basic issue.
Control of the media, and with it, control of the message, work to manipulate the uneducated and not so uneducated, to voting against their own welfare. That’s why so many middle class idiots vote national or act.
Manipulation, deceit, and spin are the propaganda of the right. They desire the rule of the few wealthy over the rest of the “peasantry”. So they lie, cheat, manipulate and deceive to get it. This process began in the 18th century and has not stopped. It continues in most western democracies today. NZ is no different. We just have had three generations of poorly educated suckers, who don’t know their history, nor their politics. That’s why they’re called shepple.
Seymour tapped into this giant lake of ignorance, successfully, and this is the result.
The only way to counter it, is to grow your knowledge base. That means waiting till the chickens come home to roost, THEN strike. Not before or you’ll get crushed.
To try and make up for my appalling lack of NZ/Aotearoa history and try to balance my years of being subjected to a colonial view of it I am just finishing reading Ranginui Walker’s book ‘Struggle Without End.’ I encourage everyone to read it.
TRICK OR TREATY BY DOUGLAS GRAHAM IS ALSO AN INTERSING READ .He must be gutted by the current national parties racist attitude
Thanks Gordon, I’ve just ordered it from the library.
There are no principles in/of the Treaty. But there are three articles which are pretty simple. I stop listening when I hear the word principles.
Labour never really believed in democracy, it’s too inconvenient.
They actually believe in honouring the Treaty, just like previous National governments. A treaty is a contract and not open to determination by majority rule. The conditions surrounding a Treaty (contract) is for the Courts to determine, not the democratic process. We ignore these values at our peril.
Why did the maori steal the cookie?
ACT… because he hates freedom, democracy, and equality under law! I have liberated these cookies for the good of the people of NZ.
National… this question is unnecessarily divisive. Everyone knows it is jobseekers who eat the most cookies. I am entiled to 50,000 of your cookies, even though I own a cookie factory. No crumbs for me, fools, haha suck it.
Labour… the UN has declared Cookies an oppressive concept under section 4756.9b of the American Hate Foods Schedule. It is right and just that an oppressed freedom-eater should eat the blah blah blah blah…
The Greens… he’s suffering from stress, leave him to eat the cookie. He’s done great work tending the globally-warmed hungry chickens suffering from jet fuel inhalation.
NZ hard hat wearer… this is a biscuit. Cookies generally have soft centres. I remember when we had cake.
Bomber… you don’t understand cookie time! A chef I know says cookies are whatever he wants them to be!! Are you a chef?! No! So shut up!! This is as close to socialism as we can get!
Cookies give me heartburn.
TRICK OR TREATY BY DOUGLAS GRAHAM IS ALSO AN INTERSING READ .He must be gutted by the current national parties racist attitude