The horror of the new Marine and Coastal rights law change cements into place 19th Century White Settler Privilege

Protesters begin burning copies of Marine and Coastal Area Bill on beaches across New Zealand

Social media users began livestreaming protesters feeding wood and paper into a large fire pit on a beach while the crowd gathers and listens to speeches and singing.

Northland elder Reuben Taipari last week delivered a petition, signed by more than 20,000 people, to Parliament opposing the Government’s reforms of the act.

Kiwis around the country are being urged to participate in the #BurnTheBill protest at their local beach, which Deputy Prime Minister and Act leader David Seymour likened to book-burning.

Everyone with a shred of decency should be outraged by this new Confiscation and everyone should burn a copy of the law.

Luxon’s total inability to show leadership and reign in the more redneck divisive dog whistles of Seymour and Winston are beyond this version of the National Party and National voters should be deeply ashamed.

National was the Party of contract law, property rights and an independent judiciary, here we see Goldsmith (after bragging with Shane Jones to the Fishing Industry that donates to them that they would reduce Māori Fishing rights to 5% of the coastline…

Treaty Negotiations Minister defends 5% of coastline comment

…relitigating the Foreshore and Seabed to favour the very Industry they were last year bragging to!

TDBs Tim Selwyn, (who is a MACA application on behalf of his Hapu to a protected customary right and also a customary marine title application on behalf of the Hapu owners of a coastal block in the Eastern Bay of Plenty) has been scathing in how cruel and evil this move by Goldsmith is on those māori forced to engage with a process that keeps changing because the independent Courts keep ruling in their favour…

The scale is why they are fighting so hard – the coastal area of the whole country and one of the largest coastlines in the world. And these three parties of the government are fighting for Pakeha commercial interests.  Whenever they invoke the public they are essentially lying. It is a smaller subset – white private enterprise – that they are enabling; this is the underlying fact. The white private enterprise cannot obtain that Maori land and displace Maori interests and override Maori usages without using the government to do it. They couldn’t use the law to do it so they get the government to change the law. The sacred rule of law. Sacred to – and more importantly for – the white settler community.  The rule of law is just arbitrary repression imposed on the natives – it has no credibility. Would the MACA Act ever be amended to assist Maori and bar Pakeha rights, you know, if it was reversed? Reverse those resource consents the Act lets them keep. It would never happen would it. Pakeha get all their things grandfathered over and Maori get everything retrospectively terminated because New Zealand is still, very evidently, a colony. Walks like a colony, quacks like a colony, confiscates like a colony.

…let’s be crystal clear, this new racist attack on Māori Seabed and Foreshore interests will spark more divisive race baiting – is that really what you want NZ?

All this redneck culture war aggrandising, is that really where you think NZ, a country that was once proud of its race relations, you want to go down the redneck, banjo twanging, cross burning jamboree path do you?

You all know this malice and spite whipped up by ACT and NZF is corrosive to our nation, and the price for enabling it isn’t just the damage that racism does to our country, but the fact the Right are using that bigotry to eclipse and distract from how they are strangling the common good for their donors interests.

Your bigotry is being manipulated for corporate interests.

This law change cements into place 19th Century White Settler Privilege.

We should all be ashamed.

 

 

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