Waitangi 2021 – We’ve all been failed by the Treaty
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.
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.
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.
THAT is the legacy of NZ welfare, 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.
We have a Housing NZ more focused on throwing people out of their homes based on flawed meth testing than providing shelter to the poorest amongst us.
22000 are on social housing waiting lists, 1 in 5 children live in poverty and speculators are pricing home ownership to 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.
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“The older I get, the more convinced I am that the biggest abuser of rights in NZ is the State.”
And unfortunately the generic managerialists within – often parachuted in from the empires, are quite happy with that
And the older I get, the more I realise just what conservatives JA and one or two of her teacher’s pets are. Unwilling to make any meaningful or fundamental sort of change to the status quo.
We have government agencies- again, often designed by Labour’s right wing predecessors where everything they touch turns to shit, and which have an investment in maintaining the status quo. And we have a government that despite the promises of kindness and transformation are unwilling to address the problem, That’s even if they recognise what the problem is – that would be the charitable explanation.
The older I get, the more I realise that the best thing the government are good at are excuses and spin.
And you’ve got to wonder whatever happened to the promises of transparency too.
I guess they’re really busy “balancing a number of competing factors” in this space going forward in order to preserve that status quo, which means things like a housing emergency, exploitation and trafficking, the climate emergency, child poverty and abuse, etc. will just have to take a back seat
Perhaps the only hope is a powerful and radical Maori Caucus within the Labour government. As they fight to improve the lot of Maori most affected by the Great Experiment any victory they achieve will be a victory for all of Ao/NZ.
Sorry Ada, I don’t believe being compassionate brings stress – working with your heart can be a two way operation. It is when you are practicing negativity that the stress moves in, and antagonism takes over leading to burn out. But you are 100% right with “the State does not do compassion” that is never the goal.
The Treaty was a fraud. A cynical move to coopt Maori, presenting equality only in terms of British law which is that of private ownership of property and the state institutions (the “crown”) designed to protect it.
“Protection” pre-supposed Maori acceptance of this capitalist hegemony. Maori were unprepared for the private ownership of land, and after their military resistance was defeated, recompense has been made only in the token terms of ‘honouring the Treaty’. Still a fraud.
Our history of continuous colonial domination by Britain proves that this injustice cannot be undone short of a national revolution to break all ties with Britain, and its current big imperialist brothers the US and China, that leads to a post-capitalist society of real social and environmental welfare.
The world is waking up to the hypocritical fraudster we call our leader.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-myth-of-saint-jacinda
Better late than never, I suppose.
Good to see the Covid near miss told for what it was: largely a product of geography, with bit of fumbling in the dark that nearly ended in tragedy.
By the way, I don’t caller her leader. I call her fake; fraudster; con artist; opportunist, acolyte of Tony B Liar etc.
Christ! You place credibility in Oliver Hartwitch. I guess a clock is accurate 2 times in a day – or so says yet another boffin parachuted in from the empire.
If I had to ride on Ollie’s pontifications, I’d have fucking starved to death.
Thankfully I don’t, and nor would I ever place myself in a position that I’d have to. But, agreed – he does seem to have earned himself a degree of credibility in this dying space of neoliberalism (going forward).
Perhaps JA might even commission him to undertake “a piece of work”
That’s your opinion and you’re welcome to it.
“The world”, in this instance, is no more than one person’s opinion in one newspaper.
The PM of NZ did not ask to be lauded by any media – it just happens to be the perceived job of such media to make whatever comment about whomever they wish.
You need to get some perspective, Jeff.
Jeff
Are you another one of these old right-wing Jacinda/woman hating men. Jacinda is a good leader who listened to expert advice instead of the un-educated media and National party conspirators and commentators. If she followed their advice we wouldnt have had a summer like we are having. Who would listen to another fool like that nobody harwitch and the discredited right-wing publication the spectator – they can both wallow in the covid hell hole that is the UK.
These moaning old men should feel better now that their man hero Trump has been tossed out and the USA will be great again. I say to you sad old kiwi men out there – rejoice, look at whats happening around the world. NZ is one of the most democratic countries in the world and also our economy is booming and employment improving. If kiwis don’t like it here, they can go and live overseas.
Quadrophenia,what a bus stop, destination.
.
Waitangi, eh! ana wai, waiti,truth about that flow.
Bommer,no right wing giggles,anymore way them .
Te Maori have been shafted big time since the TOW and nothing really seems to improve under a Labour Government, the left wing and the right wing appear to be connected to the same bird ???
That’s nonsense unless you believe Greta is teaming up with Trump. This idea that it’s simply analytical vs tradition combined with the treaty infrastructure ends up with a confused approach. The trends are moving towards this thing as if kiwi spirits are riding a bird towards glory. Yes, there is ideology but it contains things we know and things we don’t know. We have to leave behind these empathetic terms because you describe it as things but nothing concrete. There’s no contingent mould or spiritual guide guiding the bird then we would be able to predict when the bird hits hunger. Y’know did we take care of the environment it’s also clear that without the internet Covid19 would not have been contained within a few regions and this is the double-edged sword of materialism. I’m not in total opposition to the appearance of the concept of the bird but it’s too simple lacks nuance. while I consider the left vs right to be a contradiction. Government is not hidden behind a veil and the relationships are clear to see.
“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.”
I am not sure about the “self sovereignty” part, as Dave Brown pointed out the Crown as protector of individual property rights (and also civil liberties/due process) – since the Magna Carta is well known. Though the Crown has periodically been in breach (Henry V11 and Henry V111 corrupt practices for example) and of course with collectively titled Maori land (the theft and the constraints on Maori land use/inheritance of claim).
In the sense that the state has failed us, the Crown just adheres to the will of the elected government and on occasion it is the popular will of the people (majority) that led to the state’s betrayal of individuals and the minority’s rights.
Bullshit. The working class get up and fight for individual rights all the time only to be betrayed by leaders and charlatan educators with lots to say about fuck all.
Truth,how you,eh,you.
Joy Division.
Compulsory Unionism.