So you read this headline and you ask yourself what is the missing link and what is it about?
I will tell you; the missing link is the part that is missing from our government that would allow common sense to show up.
It is the connection between ideology and reality.
I read a letter yesterday that had been written and published, about how the policies of this Labour government are creating division in our nation of New Zealand. The letter stated that the writer believed that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s legacy, in many minds, will be seen as the division of a nation.
The writer went on to say that we are witnessing disunion of our citizens in a way we’ve never seen before. It wasn’t so many years ago that there was still a semblance of respect for each other’s views but that has well and truly gone out the window in Ardern’s New Zealand.
The writer went on to say that the venom and hatred currently on display is not only shocking, but extremely sad. We used to think in trying times New Zealanders would come together and forget minor irritations about left and right notions. But now, that concept is gone.
Where does this come from, and why is it so strong right now, you may ask?
Because of one thing: politicisation.
The Ardern government has deliberately politicised every aspect of our lives. How we live, how we work, who is allowed an opinion, who isn’t, what you can and can’t do, when you can do it. Who pays, who benefits, who controls our water and land, and even who can have a say in our supposed democratic system.
The government has done nothing but stoke the flames of identity politics and New Zealand.
By politicising every space New Zealanders occupy, the government ends up controlling that space. And that is what it’s all about.
Division leads to control, and that is where we are at, a country where citizens are at each other’s throats. A terribly sad and possibly the worst, consequence of this increasingly authoritarian government which is hell-bent on destroying what most of us remember as a fair, friendly, and united country.
The current Labour government seems to have been captured by the Maori caucus and they are rushing along at a frenetic pace using urgency in the house of parliament to introduce a raft of new rules that are based on the false idea that the Treaty of Waitangi created a partnership with Maori that should allow Iwi to have a co-governance rule in New Zealand.
This government has many times claimed that they are just complying with the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous peoples rights which the National Government signed up to back in 2010.
This claim is not backed up by the true facts of the matter in any shape or form.
First the UN Declaration was a non-binding declaration:
UN Declarations are generally not legally binding; however, they represent the dynamic development of international legal norms and reflect the commitment of states to move in certain directions, abiding by certain principles. The Declaration, however, is widely viewed as not creating new rights. Rather, it provides a detailing or interpretation of the human rights enshrined in other international human rights instruments of universal resonance –as these apply to indigenous peoples and indigenous individuals.
Second the Declaration as seen in the explanation above applies to indigenous peoples and indigenous individuals and in relation to New Zealand Maori are not indigenous peoples (as defined by the Cambridge dictionary) by their own admissions. See the definition below:
Indigenous
Adjective
used to refer to, or relating to, the people who originally lived in a place, rather than people who moved there from somewhere else :
used to refer to plants and animals that grow or live naturally in a place, and have not been brought there from somewhere else:
not foreign or from outside an area:
Given that Maori have been very explicit about their origins as coming to New Zealand by canoe from Hawaii, under this definition they are not indigenous but just prior immigrants to the European settlers who came after them. The true indigenous peoples of New Zealand were in fact those that inhabited the country prior to the arrival of the Maori.
A document – titled He Puapua: The Report of the Working Group on a Plan to Realise the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand – was commissioned by Cabinet in 2019 and produced by Te Puni Kōkiri, it set out a 20-year plan to bring the UN declaration into effect.
It envisages that by 2040 – the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi – the nation will be ruled under an equal power-sharing arrangement between Māori and non-Māori leaders.
This report was only released (in a highly redacted form – being 34 out of a total of 123 pages) by the government in October 2020. The report had been complete almost a year before the highly redacted version was released last October.
This report had been highly censored by the government with only 32 pages of the whole 123 page report being released initially. A leaked full version was published in March 2021 and at that time the full list of recommendations became known. This degree of censorship and the fact that it had been kept out of public circulation until after the last election lends weight to suspicions about the intentions of the government in relation to this report.
This report calls for a Treaty based constitution for New Zealand and the government’s critics are busy publicising aspects of the report they say have already been implemented by stealth.
He Puapua recommended making it easier to set up Māori wards – and in February the government did just that by overturning the law that meant voters could petition for a referendum to veto a council decision to introduce them.
Labour made no mention of such a law change in its election manifesto, but Ardern pushed the Māori wards legislation through Parliament under urgency, allowing less than 48 hours for public submissions.
He Puapua calls for a Māori-centric version of New Zealand’s history in schools, and there is currently a move to rewrite the history curriculum in line with this recommendation.
He Puapua calls for public education programmes, including conscious and subconscious bias training to deal with structural racism, and this is already being promoted by the Public Service Commission.
He Puapua recommends exempting some Māori land from rates, a notion reflected in the Local Government (Rating of Whenua Māori) Amendment Act 2021 passed in April
Government critics say these moves are confirmation He Puapua is functioning as an undeclared separatist agenda they believe the government has secretly endorsed.
The Ihumātao settlement last December, when protesters forced Fletcher Building to sell 33 hectares to the government for $30 million, is cited as an example of the same agenda, particularly since the deal was made explicitly outside the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process.
Overall, the impression that the Government is intent on subverting the nation’s institutions and constitutional arrangements by stealth risks severely damaging the government’s long trumpeted virtues of openness and transparency.
He Puapua has never been publicly announced, but a number of recommendations, such as the Māori Health Authority and Māori council wards, have been implemented already without any acknowledgement from government that they are part of a wider plan.
The Labour government needs to explain why they have been implementing He Puapua’s recommendations one by one, without sharing any such wider plan with New Zealanders.
The implementation of the He Puapua recommendations by stealth will only create two systems based on racial division and this will be nothing short of disastrous for New Zealand and its population.
Attempts to racialise New Zealand, is bound to provoke significant public complaint. Government has a duty to uphold the Rule of Law and protect the democratic rights of all New Zealanders.
The implementation of parts of the He Puapua report raises vital issues about what inferences the Crown is allowing and/or encouraging Māori to draw from its recommendations.
Any failure to uphold the equal application of the laws, on the grounds that a separate Māori Health or Justice system will soon replace the long-established principle of “one law for all”, will be taken as proof that this government intends to change profoundly the constitutional arrangements of the New Zealand stat
Such a fundamental change to the manner in which New Zealand is administered, especially one predicated on ethnic and cultural considerations, could have no legitimacy without having first secured the endorsement, by way of referendum, of a majority of New Zealand citizens.
To suggest that the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi in some way obviate the Crown’s need to obtain the consent of the New Zealand electorate before changing the way our country is administered, and by whom, is tantamount to suggesting that the Treaty legally entitles the Crown to extinguish democracy in the Realm of New Zealand without reference to its citizens and in defiance of its laws.
This He Puapua report and the parts of it that have already been implemented are a further demonstration of the “Missing Link”, the failure to temper the ideology with a connection to reality.
Government critics say these moves are confirmation He Puapua is functioning as an undeclared separatist agenda that they believe the government has secretly endorsed and they are firm in their beliefs that this will result in a return to a race based system of tribal rule that will be akin to the Apartheid system of government in South Africa which Kiwis successfully fought so hard against in the nineteen eighties.
Overall, the impression that the Government is intent on subverting the nation’s institutions and constitutional arrangements by stealth risks severely damaging the government’s long trumpeted virtues of openness and transparency.
The foundation of our democracy is the law applied equally to us “ALL” to ensure justice and fairness in a just and fair society as granted to all the subjects of Her Majesty the Queen.
The Labour Government’s silence on these matters is indefensible. A clear statement of its determination to uphold the Principle of One Law for all is long overdue.
Andy Loader