Treaty Principles Bill

One of the best writers around imo.

breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/10/graham-adams-collapse-of-maori.html?m=1

Graham Adams: The collapse of Maori nationalism





As with unionism, overreach will end iwi power push.



One of former Labour Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s most singular achievements during her tenure as premier was to push a majority of voters to the point of revulsion regarding race-based policy. Now the coalition government is orchestrating a swift counter-revolution, with the support of the disaffected constituency Ardern helped create.



What alarms the Maori nationalists and their allies among our political and cultural elites, including the mainstream media, is that they know the backlash is not going to stop at unpicking laws and policy around co-governance, which Ardern stealthily instituted in everything from health and resource management to educational policy and local government.



The reaction to the Labour government’s overreach could result in the seven Maori seats eventually being abolished (as the Royal Commission into the Electoral System recommended in 1986), the Treaty being neutralised as a vehicle for grievances, and a widespread indifference, if not hostility, to Maori culture and language among the general population.



Such a scenario will seem improbable, if not fantastical, to many but we’ve been here before of course in New Zealand when what looked like an unassailable part of our political and social fabric collapsed surprisingly quickly. The fall of unionism in the early 90s would have seemed just as improbable 10 years earlier as dismantling the notion of New Zealand as a bi-cultural state would have when the radical He Puapua report came into public view in 2021. 



Unionists dominated the nation’s economic activity for decades, until suddenly they didn’t. The mouthy big beasts of the union movement became relics in a surprisingly short time after the Employment Contracts Act was introduced by Jim Bolger’s government in 1991. It removed much of the legislative backing for unions and, by deregulating the labour market, crippled the union movement.



Like the cocksure Maori nationalists in Labour’s Cabinet throwing their weight around under the indulgent Jacinda Ardern (particularly in her second term from 2020), the union leaders badly overplayed their hand for years, securing influence and financial benefits through extensive strike action, or the threat of it.



When I worked as a “seagull” on Auckland’s wharves in the late 70s, the union ran a system of “ups and downs”. That meant I worked a morning shift but had the afternoon off on full pay. It was clear to me then that society would not tolerate being held to ransom by the unions so outrageously for ever. The featherbedding in union-dominated industries was a tax on everyone who bought those enterprises’ products. And most products came into the country via our ports.



Voters increasingly see the demands by iwi for compensation and control over a broad swathe of New Zealand life and business in the same way. Auckland’s Watercare being obliged, for example, to pay a $2m annual fee to Waikato-Tainui for 20 years for water taken from the Waikato River not far from where it enters the sea is widely viewed as unjustified indirect taxation extracted by what amounts in many people’s minds to a ransom — or perhaps standover — payment.



OIA documents have revealed Manurewa Marae was paid “koha” of $10,000 by Statistics NZ last year for simply accepting a Census collection contract. A number of other Maori-centric organisations were also paid substantial amounts simply for their co-operation.



Voters might object less, of course, if they had seen the billions of dollars that disappeared into “Maori initiatives” in the 2021/2022 budgets had lifted the living conditions, education and health statistics of some of our poorest citizens, but those improvements seem as far away as ever.



So far, the government has fulfilled many of the promises its constituent parties made to the electorate before October 14, including repealing the Maori Health Authority and Three Waters. Although the repeals have been loudly opposed, including predictably by the Waitangi Tribunal, they have not caused the widespread disruption that was initially expected — mostly for the simple reason the coalition parties all campaigned on them, and they are reversible. A future Labour/Greens/Te Pāti Māori coalition could reinstate these examples of co-governance easily enough if they wanted.



Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, however, is a different sort of threat altogether. It represents an existential challenge to the Treaty Project that has been running for the past 50 years under the aegis of the professional managerial class, with the complicity of the judiciary. As a result, barely a day goes by without another journalist, academic, translator or religious leader publicly denouncing Seymour and his bill — and, weirdly, Luxon too for not reneging on his coalition agreement and killing the bill before it gets anywhere near Parliament.



Seymour has proposed a solution that should be unremarkable in a democracy but is seen as subversive and revolutionary — he wants voters to be given the chance to decide their own constitutional future. Such a proposal is a complete anathema to our ruling classes, who appear to believe that even allowing voters to discuss the matter of the Treaty’s place in New Zealand’s life is unacceptably risky.



Unfortunately for them, Seymour has secured a full six-month public consultation for the select committee stage, which will give a cross-party group of MPs the chance to assess what will no doubt be an avalanche of written and oral submissions from the public.



And this is not exactly Seymour’s first rodeo. He took on the might of the Catholic church and religious fundamentalists over assisted dying and by tirelessly prosecuting his case up and down the country persuaded nearly two-thirds of the population to support him in a referendum in 2020.



He is backing himself to repeat the exercise, aiming to bring down big game in the Treaty debate while his coalition partners content themselves with shooting rabbits.



Last August, he said — to the outrage of his opponents — that he thought “the debate will be fun”. The reason he thinks this is because he knows his pitch to voters’ sense of fairness is both extremely popular and unimpeachable. His assessment is that even if the Treaty is the nation’s founding document, it is no longer seen by many as relevant to the New Zealand of the 21st century. It is, in fact, the founding document for a bi-cultural New Zealand that no longer exists. As David Lange said in 2000: “The Treaty itself contains no principles which can usefully guide government or courts. It is a bald agreement, anchored in its time and place”.



Seymour’s ultimate fallback argument is that no matter what the Treaty says, or what scholars declare its articles actually mean, New Zealand has no future as a modern and prosperous nation if detecting a smidgen of Maori ancestral blood can grant different political rights to that person.



The panicked, almost hysterical reaction from our ruling classes to the prospect of a national debate — let alone a referendum — on the Treaty principles is a clear sign that Seymour understands the national mood, while his critics’ overblown response confirms they fear he is correct even as they deny it.



And there is a delicious irony that opponents to his principles bill, who were always ready to ask solicitously when Ardern was Prime Minister, “What exactly scares you about co-governance?” are now being asked, “What scares you about a national debate or referendum on the Treaty principles?”



The answer the Establishment and its supporters in the mainstream media don’t want to face is that the jig is up for Maori nationalism — just as it was for unionism more than 30 years ago. In both cases it is mostly because of gross overreach.



Last week, the Māori Working Group on Aerospace declared itself “shocked” that the Minister for Space and Science, Innovation and Technology, Judith Collins, hadn’t included consultation with iwi as part of its Aerospace and Advanced Aviation Strategy — as if a neolithic culture which never got around to inventing the wheel deserves a share of the benefits of space technology on account of an imagined “partnership” with the Crown.



The group, set up “to advocate for Māori rights and interests in aerospace”, was appalled that, unlike in 2023 under the Labour government, the strategy “makes no reference whatsoever to Māori, the Crown’s partner under Te Tiriti o Waitangi” — thus losing the opportunity “to build and strengthen relationships with tangata whenua in the protection and appropriate use of aerospace resources”.



The group wants the nation’s burgeoning aerospace industry to develop policy “centred on tikanga” to enable “ethical and responsible exploration, caring for our environment, and unlocking economic and social benefits”.



Part of the justification for Maori involvement turns on the mystical notion that space is a “taonga” because it is the realm that Ranginui — the “sky god” — inhabits. The irony of religious dogma having been the biggest impediment to the work of astronomers like Galileo, who was declared a heretic for asserting that the Earth orbits the Sun, is apparently lost on the activists.



The extent of race-based favouritism — including among councils and universities — is far more widespread than most guess. Last week, Act obtained a copy of AUT’s policy for funding researchers’ travel, which allocates 30 per cent more points to travel applications for researchers who identify as Māori, and 20 per cent more for Pasifika.



As Act noted: “The AUT points system for travel funding prioritises applications based on a number of criteria, before an ‘equity multiplier’ of up to 1.3x is applied to advantage selected groups. This means that while a Māori-identifying researcher can earn up to 37.7 points, a researcher not eligible for an equity multiplier may only accumulate 29 points. In effect, an Asian academic seeking to attend a conference to which they are contributing a paper could lose funding to a Māori-identifying researcher who is merely visiting the conference, solely on the basis of race.”



AUT management justifies such a discriminatory practice by reference to its adherence to te Tiriti.



In Auckland, some developers end up paying iwi what is known as a “taniwha tax” on developments or alterations to a building or property if they fall within a large circle around a “culturally significant” site. And there are hundreds of such sites across Auckland affecting thousands of properties.



These examples are just the tip of an iceberg and the extent of them will shock the public when they are more widely publicised, as they will be once Seymour’s bill is tabled in Parliament.



Meanwhile, the Act party and its leader are already happily shooting fish in a barrel — and the six-month select committee stage has not yet begun.



Graham Adams is an Auckland-based freelance editor, journalist and columnist. This article was originally published by ThePlatform.kiwi and is published here with kind permission.

Peter Williams has done a nice little writeup of the debate, and Bradbury's slightly unhinged rant.


breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/10/peter-williams-at-last-treaty-debate.html?m=1



Peter Williams: At last - a Treaty Debate





We need more of this



It was a really good show, deserving of a wider audience.



It was “The Working Group” live debate on David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill. It was a show that either TV 1 or TV 3 should have shown live.



But they lack the courage to do so.



Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury is not everyone’s cup of tea. He was once even banned from RNZ’s “The Panel” for being too radical!



He operates a ranting left-wing blog called “The Daily Blog” and in recent years has broadened his portfolio to a weekly podcast which is now broadcast live through various outlets, including Face TV where I watched it from the comfort of my couch.



Kudos then to Bradbury for arranging Seymour – who is never shy of boxing his corner even among the most radical excesses of the New Zealand media – to be in the same studio with Ngati Toa iwi CEO Helmut Modlik, who told us he has a German father and consequently holds dual citizenship.



Libertarian columnist Damian Grant was also present as a moderator.



The debate was civilized and reasoned. Modlik even seemed to agree with Seymour’s second and third principles, namely that everybody has rights over their property and that all New Zealanders are equal before the law.



Where there was disagreement was over the first principle – that the government has the right to govern New Zealand.



Modlik came clutching Ned Fletcher’s weighty tome “The English Version of the Treaty of Waitangi” which lays out the case for the Māori chiefs of 1840 not ceding sovereignty to the British Crown.



Therefore, he seemed to ascertain that because sovereignty was not ceded, the government of New Zealand does not have the right to govern all New Zealanders.



Which obviously creates a slight problem or two.



I was disappointed Seymour didn’t have some historical evidence to counter Modlik on this point.



There is plenty about. In more recent times Waitangi Tribunal member Sir Hugh Kawharu’s 1989 back translation of the Treaty from te reo to English, still posted on the Tribunal’s website, says unequivocally:



“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.”



What could be clearer? Sure, the English version used the word “sovereignty” but any student of history and politics will know that “complete government over their land” means the same thing.



There’s plenty more evidence too such as the speeches given by the likes of Tamati Waka Nene at Waitangi the day before the Treaty was signed.



To his credit Seymour remained reasoned throughout. Modlik consistently maintained the “kawanatanga” or governorship from the Treaty’s First Article only applied to the British residents here at the time, and not Maori.



“My point being” he said “to think the Rangatira would surrender their mana to a couple of blokes and some missionaries is preposterous, culturally and psychologically impossible.”



He asked Seymour for evidence that the chiefs ceded mana motuhake.



“It didn’t happen, David.”



That was Seymour’s weakest moment of the night. A couple of quotes from Hugh Kawharu’s translation and Tamati Waka Nene’s speech at Waitangi on February 5th 1840 would have provided the evidence that Modlik believes doesn’t exist.



Nevertheless, as a debater I thought Seymour was by far the more polished. He had a wonderful dig at 1 News telling the story of being asked by a reporter for his reaction to a poll which showed 46 percent of voters said racial tensions have worsened due to the coalition government’s policies.



He said last year’s poll on the topic showed the number was 47 percent. Therefore racial tensions were improving!



“It’s not hard to get one over a 1 News reporter these days” he quipped. “Maybe that’s why this debate is on this channel.”



Modlik was capable but failed to mount any convincing arguments against the bill, apart from saying Article One of the Treaty does not include cession by Maori chiefs to the Crown. He often read from a prepared script and seemed unable to debate logically with the smoothness of Seymour.



Remember Seymour’s bill is not re-writing the Treaty. It is to define these things called principles which have been written into legislation for fifty years, but never defined.



What thinking New Zealander could possibly disagree with any of the broad principles being laid out in Seymour’s legislation?



Bradbury, as the host of the show and owner of the podcast/broadcast was entitled to the last word and he took it, although I struggled to see his point.



He told the story of his fully pakeha daughter attending a total immersion Maori language school (just as my own fully pakeha grandchildren do in Christchurch) and how he went to a kapa haka performance that his daughter was part of.



The crowd at the concert cheered when the Maori sovereignty flag was raised and there was “fury and outrage” when images of Luxon, Peters or Seymour were flashed up.



That, he said, was a sign “the next generation of kiwis will not accept Maori being treated as second-class citizens in their own country.”



“The future is younger and browner and it doesn’t matter what stunt you pull with the Treaty Principles Bill, David, you’ve already lost.”



It was an extraordinary conflation of emotion and reality by Bradbury. If there is such a negative reaction to images of our political leaders at a kapa haka concert, one wonders just what level of indoctrination is taking place during school hours.



Bradbury has his demographics somewhat askew as well. The future is not actually younger.



Before the end of the decade there will be more people aged 65 and over than children 14 and under. By 2038 twenty percent of us will be on the pension and by 2060 that number will be up to 26 percent.



That’s not necessarily a prediction of political persuasions but don’t we need a few guarantees in life no matter our age and ethnicity?



Like - we need a government with a right to govern, we need to have rights over our own property and we must all have the same rights and duties as everyone else.



That’s what the Treaty Principles Bill is about.



It’s very simple really. But the German Maori Helmut Modlik and many of his ilk just don’t seem to get it.

Just back from lunch and discussed the debate with friends.

The point was made that bomber did very well to keep his raging socialist mouth mostly shut while others were speaking.  

I'm sure it must have very nearly given him a brain aneurism to do so.

But overall everyone in attendance was very respectful while someone else was talking. 

Having said that, if you do watch it, turn it off when bomber starts closing it out, he resorts back to his hard coded socialist waffle.  (which you can read in what Peter Williams wrote)

My 2p, it's worth watching if you've got a spare hour.

This.

The question I want answered is - if Helmut Modlik and co are correct that sovereignty was ceded, what happens next, and how are you going to go about it.


breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com/2024/10/professor-robert-macculloch-well-never.html?m=1


Professor Robert MacCulloch: We'll never know whether "sovereignty" was ceded....





Race activists in NZ should get over themselves & accept we'll never know whether "sovereignty" was ceded in the Treaty of Waitangi. What even is it?



What does the Treaty Debate, especially regarding the question of whether Sovereignty was ceded or not, have in common with the OJ Simpson Murder Trial in America? A lot. An incredible feature of OJ's trial was that surveys reported up to 75% of white Americans were convinced he committed the murders, whereas 75% of Black Americans were equally convinced he had not. None of those surveyed had attended the trial.



If you were a black American who'd been beaten up by a police officer and whose father had been stitched up for a murder he didn't commit, then you would be convinced OJ was innocent. But if you were a white American who'd been robbed by a black American then you would be convinced he was guilty.



The battles raging in the world today are largely battles of beliefs. Many economic models are now being built that assume no-one knows the value of crucial parameters that determine the workings of the economy, but instead we just have beliefs about them, like the relationship between effort and reward, based on our own experiences that we're constantly changing. Statisticians call the process "Bayesian Updating". It was the name given to the Super Yacht that recently sank off Sicily. Artificial Intelligence applications of this process were how the ship's owner, Mike Lynch, became a billionaire.



Along similar lines to the OJ Simpson trial, a recent poll conducted by David Farrar of 1,000 people revealed that 35% of New Zealanders believe Maori chiefs ceded sovereignty in 1840, whereas 27% believe they did not, and the balance are undecided. Its getting close to the point where a third of the population believe sovereignty was ceded, a third believe it was not, and a third are undecided. Like OJ's trial, none of those 1,000 people have likely looked into the matter in any detail, and even if they did, would be no better off.



I bet if you asked the 1,000 people exactly what is "sovereignty" they couldn't tell you. I'm not sure on the definition either. In political science & economics, the sovereign authority is sometimes defined as the one who has a monopoly on the use of the force. That force mainly comes in the form of the power to tax and to use violence. Only the State can levy charges on you, and bust into your house and throw you into prison for something it claims you did wrong. Others can accuse you of wronging them, but they have no right to punish you with violence.



So its become ludicrous that we now have two sides to the Treaty debate, each convinced they know the truth as to what was in the minds of British Administrators & Māori Chieftains 150 years ago. Both sides to the Sovereignty debate only have beliefs about what they think is the truth - neither will ever know with any certainty what really happened.



So its always amusing to read folks like Dr Brash and Dr Basset, both very knowledgeable people, make argument after argument, based on good reason, about how sovereignty was ceded in 1840. And its equally amusing hearing from politicians, academics, lawyers, sociologists and historians make equally sound arguments, also based on good reason, on how sovereignty was not ceded. Both sides are convinced they know the truth.



But they've become like a Jewish person arguing with a Muslim, arguing with a Christian, arguing with a Hindu, about who is closer to the one-and-only-truth. They may have devout beliefs - and good on them - but that's it. An historian friend of mine became so exasperated with the subject that they quit, telling me their frustration was how many of the most interesting historical questions turn on finding out what was in the mind of a leading player at the time - which almost never can be worked out with much certainty.



The challenge for New Zealanders is to come to grips with the fact that the answer to the question, "Was sovereignty ceded in the Treaty of Waitangi?" will never be known. Our most pressing need is to instead answer the truly relevant question, "Where does that leave us?".



Yes it was a monumentally important document. Its just a shame no one knows what the parties were agreeing to. Maybe they didn't know themselves. Most of us who sign a contract aren't particularly clear what we're signing up to. Ambiguity abounds in every deal. That may be hard to swallow, but isn't it the truth?



In this sense, ACT may have made a mistake with its proposed "Treaty Principles Bill". By naming it as such, with "Treaty" in the title, ACT may have made the (empty) debate about what the Treaty means an even more intense argument about nothing. The debate is not rational: it has become a religious-style disagreement based on faith, with followers joining different camps - each comprising born-again believers - each trying to convert disbelievers to their cause.



ACT's bill should instead probably be called something like, "The Constitutional Principles Bill". It should simply map out the fundamental values all Kiwis hold dear, avoiding the futile Treaty-interpretation and mind reading game. Mind reading's hard enough to do even with your own family right now, let alone with people you never knew who lived nearly 200 years ago.



Its not too late to re-purpose ACT's bill to ensure that it gets the support it needs to become law.



Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.

I think I'm seeing more and more calls for the referendum and from all manner of places.

Anyone else seeing/thinking that or is that just like when you get a new car suddenly you see the same one everywhere