The Maori Development Minister; Willie Jackson, recently described as an influential “power broker” in a NZ Herald article, is telling New Zealanders that we have nothing to fear from the He Puapua report and its recommendations for co-governance.
He stated; “This is a unique partnership and Maori get the extras in terms of Maori seats and management and governance because of their unique position as the Treaty partner. It is nothing for New Zealanders to be scared of…”
I believe that the truth of the matter is the total opposite from that statement; i.e. Now is the time for us all to be very afraid of where this government and its so-called Maori Caucus is taking New Zealand.
Maori make up 12.3% of the population that is of voting age yet they now have 23% of the Labour government’s MP’s and make up 25% of the Labour government’s cabinet.
The 1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System report: Towards a Better Democracy recommended;
They warned that if New Zealand adopted MMP without removing the reserved Maori seats, Maori would be over-represented in Parliament and would have a disproportionate and dangerous influence on the running of the country.
This situation has now come to pass and the current government has done much to conceal this outcome from the New Zealand Public.
The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, have taken every opportunity to hide their support for He Puapua which recommends Maori be given a co-governance role in line with the Treaty of Waitangi partnership agreement.
The problem they have and one of the main reasons they do not want to discuss this is that there is no partnership agreement in the Treaty of Waitangi documents and as has been stated many times by experts both European and Maori there cannot legally be such an agreement between the Crown and its subjects.
He Puapua, if fully implemented, would give a 50-50 co-governance role to Maori which will actually result in a formal system of Apartheid where we have a Tribal Elite having a right of veto over the rest of the population by race no matter what percentage of their heritage is Maori.
Jacinda Ardern and her Labour government took every opportunity to conceal the He Puapua Report for 12 months prior to the 2020 general election – including keeping it secret from the Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First political party.
Jacinda Ardern knew that revealing this agenda for Maori supremacy before the election would cost votes.
After New Zealand had voted for her part to remain in power with a significant majority, she almost immediately removed the democratic right of communities to hold a binding referendum to decide whether they would allow the introduction of mandatory local body Maori wards.
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.
This was something that she failed to mention to the voting public prior to the election as it may have cost her party a large number of votes.
She also failed to mention the abolition of the District Health Boards, yet again this was done almost immediately after the election and they have been replaced with an apartheid system controlled by the tribal elite with a power of veto that will effectively determine health care on the basis of race instead of clinical urgency.
Jacinda Ardern also did not mention to voters, that once elected she would introduce ‘Three Waters’ reforms to confiscate more than $100 billion of water infrastructure and services from the country’s local councils, and pass control to the tribal elite under a co-governance arrangement that gives them the power of veto.
Even though the Three Waters Reform Project is well underway the Prime Minister has still not answered the question of whether Kiwis will be forced to pay a royalty to iwi for water use.
Jacinda Ardern also failed to mention to voters, that if elected, five percent of the Government’s $42 billion annual procurement budget would be allocated to Maori businesses, or that they would receive 20 percent of the new multi-million dollar commercial broadcast spectrum allocation free of charge – along with $75 million in taxpayer funding to establish a new Maori spectrum authority to control future policy decision-making.
She did not mention to voters that her Labour government was considering giving the Conservation Estate to Maori business development corporations.
But maybe that was because she was afraid that we might find out how Tuhoe’s co-governance of our former world class Urewera National Park has worked out. In short the co-governance agreement with DOC has proved a disaster with entry gates locked, cabins ransacked, and walkways in disrepair and all of that being blamed on a failure to adequately fund them (even though Tuhoe has been receiving $2.2 million a year as a “base amount” to maintain the Park with additional funding available for special projects).
He Puapua also 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 also 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 also 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.
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 state.
How can Jacinda Ardern and her Labour colleagues claim to have a legitimate mandate to make these fundamental changes to our democracy when they concealed their intention from voters at the election?
We would normally expect the media to investigate these types of issues but when Jacinda Ardern set up the Public Interest Journalism Fund with $55million of our money, one of the requirements of being able to access that funding was that the applicants had to promote the so-called Treaty Partnership which is the basis of the recommendations from He Puapua.
The so-called treaty partnership comes from a 1987 decision in the Appeal Court related to the Lands case. This concept of a partnership between Maori and the Crown has been used by governments since, even though it is an erroneous interpretation of the court’s decision.
Retired Judge and former Canterbury University Law Lecturer Anthony Willy has given the following explanation:
“On any careful reading of the Maori Council case the Court did not decide as has become commonly supposed that Maori and the Crown were in partnership with each other, a partnership created by the Treaty, merely that the Crown and Maori owe each other duties which are akin to those owed by partners to a commercial transaction. In the result Maori and the Crown are not partners in any sense of the word. Indeed, it is constitutionally impossible for the Crown to enter into a partnership with any of its subjects. The true position is that the Crown is sovereign but owes duties of justice and good faith to the Maori descendants of those who signed the treaty.”
In other words, “There is not, and never has been a constitutional partnership between the Crown and Maori people. The judgment in the Maori Council case has been misinterpreted. The point which all of their Honours were making in that case was that the Crown has ongoing duties to act justly and in good faith towards Maori people…”
In a recent interview, Anthony Willy went further, calling those extremists pushing for Maori supremacy “greedy rent seekers”. It was a remarkable comment, because it was not so long ago that no one dared to refer to Maori radicals so plainly. Those inhibitions have fallen away dramatically since the He Puapua agenda for Maori supremacy has become plain to see.
David Round, another former Canterbury University Law Lecturer, has also given an explanation of the ‘partnership’ interpretation as shown below:
“The idea of ‘partnership’ only appeared in 1987, when five judges of the Court of Appeal, called upon to interpret the brand-new concept of ‘Treaty principles’, which Parliament had just inserted in the State-Owned Enterprises Act 1986, spoke in several places of partners and partnership. It is absolutely clear, however, that the judges did not intend the words to have the weight of the politically-charged and even seditious meaning which is now loaded onto it. A ‘partnership’ between Maori and the Crown is constitutionally-impossible nonsense. It would have to mean that Maori are not the Queen’s subjects (as the Treaty says they are) but the Queen’s equals, and therefore not subject to her government.”
Round also spoke about the consequences of such an interpretation:
“This partnership is a fundamental subversion of democracy. Maori are claiming now that their involvement in decision making should not be on the basis of one person one vote, but instead they are demanding in their new proposals for ‘co-governance 50:50 representation.
That is the reality of the situation New Zealand now faces.
The co-governance agenda that Willie Jackson is promoting as ‘nothing to be scared of’, represents totalitarian control by an unaccountable race-based tribal elite.
Labour has no mandate to introduce these extremist measures to undermine our democracy, and we should collectively be demanding a halt to the tribal rule agenda that Jacinda Ardern and her Maori Caucus are imposing onto the country, which will inevitably become a race-based disaster.
The media seems to be now just a paid propaganda arm of the Labour government and unwilling to investigate and give a balanced report on the outcomes from the implementation of the He Puapua recommendations.
The problem New Zealand faces is that the Ardern Government is now funding the media through a $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund, and one of the main eligibility requirements for applicants to this funding, is that they must promote the fiction that Maori are in “partnership” with the Crown – a fundamental premise of He Puapua.
So given all of the above we should be very fearful about the threat He Puapua poses to our society – and demand a halt to all attempts to replace our democracy with tribal rule.
Andy Loader