It is a well-documented fact that if something is repeated often enough, wide enough and from believable sources, over time with that repetition, it becomes seen as being true in the eyes of the general public.
Even though the public perception may be that a statement is true, this perception still does not alter the fact that the statement may not in actual fact be true or even resemble anything close to the truth.
A very important example of this occurring is the current government’s obsession with the so-called partnership provisions in the Treaty of Waitangi.
In a recent article by Anthony Willy (A Barrister and Solicitor, who served as a Judge on four Courts: District, Environment, Tax and Valuation. He is a former Lecturer in Law at Canterbury University. He presently acts as an Arbitrator, a Commercial mediator, a Resource Management Act Commissioner, and is a Director of several companies.) He sets out the following in relation to the so-called Treaty Partnership provisions:
The Treaty Partnership
There is illiterate clamour mostly from the academic community but of course egged on by the Maori tribal elites for the implementation of a “Treaty Partnership” in which current tribal chiefs supported by attention seeking academics claim that those chiefs who signed the Treaty on 6th February 1840 somehow entered into a partnership with the British Crown. As a matter of law and constitutional practice there is not and cannot be such partnership and that is plain to anybody capable of reading the terms of the document (always a good start in deciding what were the intentions of the parties were on signing a document.) The simple historical fact is that for the British the alternatives were either securing an agreement or sailing away and leaving the natives to the tender mercies of any of other the nineteenth century colonising nations; the French, Dutch, Portuguese, or the Belgians with their collective appalling records of abuse of the indigenous peoples. Faced with this reality a small group of wiser heads among the chiefs, by a narrow majority decided to become subjects of the British Queen in Parliament and to enjoy her protection from the other would-be colonists. It proved to be a very wise decision and was followed on the 16th of November 1840 by the Royal Charter which superseded the Treaty and confirmed the rights and responsibilities of the native inhabitants and the Crown and established a legislative framework supported by the common law. The incontrovertible consequence of all New Zealanders becoming subjects of the Crown is that successors of those people claiming some Maori antecedents in the main occupy a standard of living available to all citizens achievable by hard work and a bit of luck, unimaginable to those who signed the document. These dishonest attempts to ignore the Royal Charter and reinterpret the Treaty based on some inessential observations by some of the judges in the 1987 State Owned Enterprises Act case ignore the evidence of Sir Henare Ngata in that case expressly referred to in the Judgment of Sir Robin Cook:
“A contentious matter such as the Treaty will yield to those who study it whatever they seek if they look for difficulties and obstacles, they will find them. If they are prepared to regard it as an obligation of honour, they will find that the Treaty is well capable of implementation”
To which the Judge added:
“The basis of the compact requires each party to act reasonably and in good faith”
This has been and is the basis of the historical relationship between Māori and non-Māori but is now being supplanted by greedy rent seekers devoid of any notion of good faith and such is the basis of their claims to “partnership.” If some elements in the present government get their way the local body experiment will become a template for elections to Parliament.
There are only two ways of governing a society, one is by the diktat of the few to the many; Dictatorship, and the other is with the willing participation and consent of the many; Democracy.
Democracy is eloquently expressed in the 1776 American Declaration of Independence: ‘Government of the people by the people for the people’, which Winston Churchill described as ‘the worst of all systems of government but better than all the others.’ Dictatorship of the few over the many cannot co-exist with democracy.”
New Zealand has, up until the election of the current Labour Government, had one of the oldest democracies in the world both national and local in which central government and local bodies were answerable to the ballot of one person one vote. All government policies were shaped against the certain knowledge that democracy was sacrosanct.
With the re-election in 2020 of the current Labour government with a simple majority, we have seen democracy replaced with race based decisions allowing a tribal elite of Maori to gain an unprecedented, undemocratic position in government on the basis of a perceived partnership provision under the Treaty of Waitangi that in actual fact has never existed in law.
There is 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 which was commissioned by Cabinet in 2019 and produced by Te Puni Kōkiri, that sets 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 calls for a Treaty based constitution for New Zealand.
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 in local councils- and in February 2021 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 Jacinda Ardern’s government 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 process.
Overall, the impression that the Government is intent on subverting the nation’s institutions and constitutional arrangements by stealth severely damages 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.
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 state.
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.
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.
As evidenced by the above, a Governance Partnership between the Crown and Maori under the Treaty of Waitangi is nothing more than a dangerous Illusion.
Andy Loader