But the Treaty DOES guarantee sovereignty to all Kiwis – stop the woke academics killing our Treaty!
The woke academics are up to it again folks, this time killing off everyones sovereignty with the Treaty…
The National Party leader continues to have confidence in one of his MPs who claimed “every single person in New Zealand” is guaranteed tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) under the Treaty of Waitangi.
One academic described the comments by Southland MP Joseph Mooney, who’s also the National Party’s Treaty Negotiations spokesperson, as “an utterly incomprehensible interpretation of Te Tiriti”.
Mooney at the weekend, posting on Twitter, commented on a news article about Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty justifying keeping co-governance in its reset version of Three Waters.
“I would suggest @Kieran_McAnulty has a read of Ko te tuarua (Article 2) of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the guarantee of tino rangatiratanga to ‘ki nga tangata katoa o Nu Tirani’ – every single person in New Zealand,” Mooney said.
His comments were blasted by Luke Fitzmaurice-Brown, a faculty of law lecturer from Victoria University.
“Joseph this is an utterly incomprehensible interpretation of Te Tiriti. Whatever you take the extent and limits of the Art 2 guarantee of tino rangatiratanga to be, there’s no doubt at all (and never has been) about who it applies to,” Dr Fitzmaurice-Brown wrote. “It’s a guarantee to Māori – pure and simple.”
…these woke academics want to kill the Treaty for Pakeha and we shouldn’t allow them to.
The First
The chiefs of the Confederation and all the chiefs who have not joined that Confederation give absolutely to the Queen of England for ever the complete government over their land.
The Second
The Queen of England agrees to protect the chiefs, the subtribes and all the people of New Zealand in the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures. But on the other hand the chiefs of the Confederation and all the chiefs will sell land to the Queen at a price agreed to by the person owning it and by the person buying it (the latter being) appointed by the Queen as her purchase agent.
The Third
For this agreed arrangement therefore concerning the government of the Queen, the Queen of England will protect all the ordinary people of New Zealand and will give them the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England.
Personally I am tired of Waitangi Day.
I’m tired because no matter how much Māori try, Pakeha in this country still don’t get the reason why many Māori protest at Waitangi Day. It’s like living in an abusive home where dad spends most of the year beating his children and then complains when no one wants to celebrate Christmas dinner.
In less than 1 century, Māori lost 95% of their land and their population was decimated to almost extinction levels. That reality of colonialism is at odds with the idea of a ‘treaty’ between two peoples and is the reason why Māori are over represented in every single negative social statistic. Rob a people of 95% of their economic base and then ignore that impact on their current position in society is adding insult to injury.
We should be thankful in this country that Māori have been so generous in their forgiveness of this atrocity. Watch the fury of pakeha having to mow their berms to appreciate how one sided our preciousness of ownership is in this country.
This country’s wealth has been built upon one simple concept, steal as much indigenous land as possible and NEVER pay it back!
For me, I love the Treaty because of the relationship of responsibility it immediately sets up between the Crown and its people. I believe the Treaty needs to be expanded to all NZers and not just Maori because it sets out the obligations of the Crown to protect the rights of its people. We deserve as a nation to entrench the Treaty as the basis of our constitution so we can force Governments to protect our rights rather than strip us of them.
Pakeha want to gloss over the theft and confiscation of indigenous lands because it’s a shameful denial of the promise of a Treaty between two peoples and when you consider the paltry compensation that has been paid back to Maori via the Waitangi Tribunal, it’s a mere $2Billion.
$2 Billion for confiscating the majority of NZ??? What is most egregious is that some Pakeha have the audacity to claim that pathetic reparation is a ‘gravy train’.
It’s not the Treaty of Waitangi – it’s the Cheaty of Waitangi and until Māori get their fair share it’s a national day of embarrassment, not celebration and Māori have every right to use the day to voice their anger at being cheated.
The beauty of the Treaty is that it spells out the power dynamic between the State and all the peoples of New Zealand.
It is the State’s obligation to protect the rights, agency and self sovereignty of all people and seen within that lens, the State has not only failed Māori appallingly, it has failed us all.
Intergenerational poverty, widening inequality, skyrocketing suicide rates, domestic violence rates that never stop, racist justice systems.
The State has failed in its obligations to us all!
Rather than pointlessly demand everyone speaks Māori, why not demand no child is hungry and in poverty?
The enormity of the number of vulnerable children abused by the State in NZ must force reflection…
Royal Commission into Abuse in Care: Estimated 250,000 victims
The numbers are astounding – figures out this morning from the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care estimate there are up to 250,000 victims over 70 years.
They are children, young people and vulnerable adults who suffered beatings, sexual assault and other cruelty while in state or religious care between 1950 and 2019.
The cost to society of the physical and mental injuries, criminal behaviour, homelessness, lack of education and unemployment is calculated at $217 billion.
…at least quarter of a million NZ children abused, costing over $200billion and causing immeasurable social carnage.
200 000 kids in poverty, another 800 000 adults in poverty and entire generations locked out of home ownership, that’s the legacy of NZ, that is the legacy of the State failing to protect our collective rights under the Treaty.
The neoliberal welfare state is an underfunded punitive stick with which to beat the Christ out of the weakest members of society.
We must all hang out heads in collective shame.
This is what happens when a punitive culture of mini tyrants are left in charge of an underfunded process designed to punish the poor.
Once upon a time in New Zealand, the agencies of state welfare were constructed as an instrumental and direct means to ensure our egalitarian values.
Social welfare was seen as a way to redistribute back to the most vulnerable amongst us and these agencies were critical in carrying out that redistribution.
There was a pride involved in this public service, our compassion made us unique and it built the values from which we as New Zealanders have benefitted from.
That simply is no longer the case.
Between the 1950s-1980s, a perverse mix of ignorance, zero oversight and the darker side of our nature dominated large insinuations that acted more like an abusers paradise than a socially progressive democratic welfare system.
For the last 30+ years, the neoliberal experiment has turned our once egalitarian welfare state into a neoliberal welfare state. The branches of social welfare, the MoD, CYFS, Corrections, Parole Services, Housing NZ, WINZ and Mental health have all been warped and mutated into weapons to punish the poor for being vulnerable.
In a culture of me first and gimme, gimmies where success is private and failure is personal , we see the poor as victims of their own circumstance rather than as a result of the hegemonic structures of power.
The poor, the vulnerable, the weak, the sick and the disabled do everything in their power not to be needing assistance from these Government agencies, because these Government agencies don’t help, they only punish.
We have a MoD who put homeless people into illegal housing.
We have a WINZ service who break people each day and force them to grovel on their belly to make ends meet. Who perform mass surveillance spying on beneficiaries to catch them out in ‘relationships’ despite WINZ not telling anyone what the actual relationship equation is and we have 60% of beneficiaries oweing WINZ money because WINZ claims they’ve defrauded the system by having a ‘relationship’.
We have a Corrections department that is more interested in hiding prisoner suicide stats than actually looking after their prisoners.
We have a Paroles Service that almost every NGO despises having to work with because it’s staffed by people who enjoy the power they have over prisoners lives and are concerned with only throwing them back into prison.
We have an agency that sexually molests, abuses and assaults the children they are supposed to look after while continuing to remove children from families.
We have a mental health system that still sees skyrocketing suicide rates.
22000 are on social housing waiting lists, 1 in 5 children live in poverty and speculators are pricing home ownership out of reach for every generation who isn’t a boomer.
For me, nothing sums up the horror of our neoliberal welfare state more than what happened in 2016 with the Auckland Action Against Poverty beneficiary clinic they held for 3 days outside a South Auckland WINZ office. Over a 1000 people lined up to beg for help from activists to gain some type of assistance from WINZ.
Just comprehend that.
WINZ are so evil to these people that a 1000 of them lined up to gain assistance from AAAP. Some had walked since before dawn to arrive in time to get help. Many were in tears and emotionally distraught by the way WINZ had treated them.
What kind of an indictment is that?
Right now we have Oranga Tamariki, a neoliberal welfare experiment that argues early intervention will save the State downstream costs and we are seeing the exact same types of State abuses occur again!
Which demands questions of us on the Left.
Is this abuse because of grotesque underfunding of a welfare system that is about punishing the vulnerable or is there something innate about the State that means its lack of oversight and accountability will always be reduced to an abusers paradise?
The older I get, the more convinced I am that the biggest abuser of rights in NZ is the State.
Every passing year I become more of an anarchist at a time when the State will be essential for surviving the climate crisis.
Elections change Governments.
Revolutions change the State.
We need a revolution at the ballot box to seriously reform the State or we are simply enabling it to continue to damage our fellow citizens.
Our forefathers died and bled on foreign shores to prevent Governments from damaging their own people like this, perhaps the real fight was always here.
Allowing woke academics to write Pakeha out of the Treaty is step backwards, not forwards.
We need a Treaty that works for everyone and resets the obligations of the Crown to ensure all our agency and sovereignty.
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It does not say “ordinary people” it states MAORI have the same rights as the english..
This is a good site for treaty info.
https://nwo.org.nz/?
“Williams in his Dictionary of the Maori Language records a number of meanings for the word Maori, the common one being normal, usual, ordinary, which is applied when talking of birds, trees, dogs, or men. Originally, therefore, maori tangata meant an ordinary man or a man native to the place in which he was living. ~Te Ara
Etymology. Maori māori, literally, normal, ordinary. ~ Mirriam-Webster
Most ordinary people in this country if they weren’t born here can tell you the name of the waka, diesel waka or waka rererangi they or their ancestors arrived on. There are ordinary people here whose ancestors arrived on waka 1 generation ago, 8 generations ago, 16 generations ago. From the viewpoint of someone living 100 generations in the future we will be just be some people in the mists of time.
The truly amazing thing about the Treaty of Waitangi is that after over 180 years of British/Crown rule, it is still regarded as relevant to our diverse, multi-cultural 21st Century society.
Did you not comprehend that the diverse part that you obviously regard as a good thing has entrenched many Maori in poverty while a prosperous settler class developed from the use of all the stolen land? While no side is ever perfect the injustice is plain to see for anyone with full use of their senses, while you would like to regard contracts as irrelevant after ignoring them for 180 years that is not the way to achieve the fair society that we need.
Traditionally most “contracts” with indigenous people by Eurooean colonizing powers were completely disregarded by the colonizing power within 20 years of signing, if not much sooner. They were usually just a ploy to establish a bridgehead. Is it justice? Of course not, it’s just the standard seizure of resources by a dominant power.
This is the never-ending struggle for resources, and it continues today, who controls the resources of New Zealand today? Follow the money, because it isn’t staying in New Zealand. Wake up, look around, most of the people around you are just slaves working on someone else’s plantation in the Pacific.
Read Countryboys comments if you can, because he’s often right. Your “fairer society” has been sold off long ago & you’re as likely to get it back, as the Maori are likely to receive full & fair recompense for the injustices of the past.
So what about all the rich Maori in NZ?
And all the poor non-Maori?
Martyn has said it here before, there are actually more poor white kids than Maori kids in NZ.
Tow is not a contract.
There is no way it would even be accepted as a binding agreement nowadays.
But you could check that with a contract lawyer.
Being multicultural does not excuse us from honoring a document signed in 1840 when the country was bicultural.
Yes, your right but many NZers including some of our newly minted ones do not want to hear the truth.
Instead, they prefer to say ‘we are one people ‘and democracy is one vote for everyone, we are all equal and we all have equal opportunities, yeah right. Then there is the line ‘if you work hard, you will succeed because I did.’ They ignore the tainted history of our country yet many NZers are quick to put the boot into other countries to toe the line.
Nationals Treaty spokesperson shows they are not fit to govern, poor choice and still making the same poor selections and decisions. National have obviously not learnt, by continuing to do the old shit and then making excuses but then again this could this be a ploy to get back the red neck vote, the ones Act have captured.
Winston and NZF also chasing the Red Neck Vote.
A simple message would be to take the race out of the social contract between government and all the people it is supposed to protect. The divide is worse now than it was 5 years ago and we are all the poorer for it . How can the country progress if some are looking backwards .China has progressed because they have a 100 year plan not a 3 year one .
State Oppression in China is worse than ever, don’t kid yourself that China is bed of roses these days and everything is hunky dory.
Tangata whenua are the only ones that care about the country and the health of the environment and the county’s waterways.
Nah.
nah.
People born of this land, made up every race and creed under the sun, care about the country and the health of the environment and the country’s waterways.
Rubbish some do some do not just the same as Pakeha or Chinese people or any other nationality. Being Maori does not mean you know how to look after the land .It was Maori who burnt much of the forest pre Colonial rule took over .It was Maori that exterminated the Moa and other animals and introduced the rat .
Not judging by the KFC and Maccers rubbish strewn all over south Auckland!
Haha stupid joke which makes everyone think you’re an idiot.
Increasingly academics are activists first and academics second.
Good article Martyn and the start of examining what the Treaty means for all of us. Yes includes all of us, but current discourse is being blown of course into a dead end by identity politics. Convo should be in the context of providing suitable redress. protecting the rights of all NZers and targetting help by economic class.
The academics simply stated the facts – article 2 refers to the taonga of the iwi.
Mooney talks about all, as an apologist of the theft.
He’s confusing the one New Zealand of article 3 with article 2 – he makes Brash seem moderate.
That said the issue here is who owns the water, Labour and Greens say no one owns the water, and NACT say New Zealanders do, and John Tamihere leads with his jaw and says Maori do.
The maori king claims maori own the water rather than everyone or no one owning water. There is an argument that maori have a wai property right under the treaty. If one economic group own the rain and sell water or water rights what liability do they have in times of drought or flood? Do they have to provide flood banks to stop “their water” from flooding other people’s property? Do they have to pay compensation to farmers and city dwellers in times when they have not supplied enough rainwater?
Stupid comment IMHO.
Under the treaty infrastructure (settlements with the waitangi courts on top) water would have “personhood.”
A person is a rational, intelligent being that can be given rights and responsibilities, but also held accountable for its actions. A tsunami doesn’t go to jail when it destroys cities, but they don’t get to vote either, because they aren’t persons.
NACT will be selling off what’s left of our clean water supply once they are re-elected probably already organised a buyer ie Nestle, or Coca Cola.
If they did rate payers would slaughter them and lose the tag “sound economic management.”
Could you imagine water rates being the same as your electricity bill?
I hate to think what a National Party in decline would do to New Zealand.
Any evidence or links for that?
Brilliant! The most important bit of Te Reo for all non-Maori to learn is Tena koa ka taea e au te nama tetahi wahi o to whenua mo nga tau 90 neke atu ranei.
New Zealand is a country where penniless migrants can build a future. One generation after Asian immigrants arrive they’re professionals: doctors, lawyers & engineers.
Maybe Maori should take note of their hard work and family culture then emulate it, rather than whinging about the past.
Yeah that’d be great. Positively looking forward to the future, and making the best possible present of the situation we find ourselves in.
Is that why we have a British King as our head of state Andrew
Protection and Keeping Citizens Safe – the promise of protection in return for governance and loyalty.
What we see in the family courts of NZ are lawyers exploiting the vulnerable for money while protecting the criminal abusers of the most vulnerable and inciting and inflaming conflict for money – this is not protection – they are not protecting the most vulnerable in NZ – the police will not prosecute those committing Psychological abuse on a child or elder abuse on our most vulnerable and they certainly will not prosecute lawyers caught engaging in these practices. Lawyers protecting lawyers as we have seen in the abuse in state care enquiry – who then actively engage in reputation attacks and blame shifting on victims and witnesses to avoid liability and damages payouts.
We consent to be governed on the basis that the law abiding citizen will be protected – this is not happening in NZ. Criminals are being protected as the state hunts people down for victimless crimes and revenue – civil law enforcement rather than criminal law enforcement – a direct result of the police and traffic merger of the late 1990’s.
This failure is A direct breach of the both the treaty and social contract between citizen and government.
Yes, Ngungukai and National are also trying to claw back some of their red neckers including our precious farmers.
Winston NZF, NACT both chasing the same demographics.
Harete Hipango has said her standing in the Te Tai Hauauru seat shows her party, National have respect for Maori voters, now if they do as she claims then why is she not the TOW spokesperson and why do they have that twit in there who doesn’t know what he is talking about.