Thursday 6 February 2014

A Precise Moment In History: Pondering The Legacy Of Waitangi

Mixed Historical Motives: The simple clauses of the Treaty of Waitangi masterfully embraced the complex agendas of both its British and Maori signatories.
 
IT’S JANUARY 1840, two sailing vessels are fast approaching the North Island of New Zealand. His Majesty’s Ship Rattlesnake carries Captain William Hobson bearing instructions from the Colonial Office to organise the voluntary cession of the islands of New Zealand to the British Crown. The other ship, Aurora, carries settlers to the newly established settlement of Port Nicolson. It has been chartered by the privately owned and organised New Zealand Company.
 
Captain Hobson’s instructions are not unrelated to the purposes for which the Aurora and her passengers set sail. The islands of New Zealand, conveniently located in the temperate zone of the southern hemisphere, are large but sparsely populated (the indigenous Maori population numbers approximately 125,000). Not surprisingly, therefore, they have begun to loom large in the sights of European entrepreneurs, missionaries and imperialists.
 
Under pressure from the aristocratic backers of the New Zealand Company, and wary of the pretensions of competing powers – particularly the French – the Colonial Office in London is determined to regularise the confused situation then prevailing in Australasia. If the land titles being sold to settlers by the New Zealand Company are to be legally enforceable, the question of sovereignty must be settled – and quickly. By fair means or by foul, New Zealand is to be annexed to the British Crown.
 
The cheapest, the most politically expedient, and (in the face of the Missionary Society’s strenuous submissions) the most morally defensible means of securing possession of New Zealand is to persuade the indigenous Maori tribes to cede sovereignty to her Britannic majesty, Victoria, voluntarily.  Indeed, British agents and missionaries in New Zealand have been assiduously laying the groundwork for just such a solution since the mid-1830s. The British Resident, James Busby, has even secured a “Declaration of Independence” from his purpose-built “Confederation of Chiefs” so the Crown has something to sit down with when the time to negotiate a plausible treaty of cession finally arrives.
 
As HMS Rattlesnake drops anchor in the Bay of Islands in February 1840, this is exactly what Hobson and his confreres, Busby and Freeman, are preparing to do.
 

THE MAORI LEADERS gathered at Waitangi to korero with Captain Hobson have come with an equally clear set of priorities.
 
First and foremost, they are seeking protection.
 
From the early 1830s a rough “balance of terror” has prevailed among the indigenous people as more and more of them acquired firearms. Even so, the slaughter and dislocation of the so-called “Musket Wars” are still a very recent memory, and nobody’s ready to wager the lives of their whanau and hapu on the blood-letting never breaking out again. Information gleaned from Maori who’ve travelled to Australia – and further afield – suggests that the British Empire holds out the best hope of keeping the peace between the tribes.
 
They’re also keen for the British to keep the roughly 2,000 unruly Europeans who’ve settled amongst them to trade, hunt whales and seals, or simply to outrun the writ of whoever’s justice system is after them, under some semblance of control. There’s a lot of wealth to be had from these folk, but only if the tribes can enlist the aid of an entity with sufficient power to make sure they keep their side of any bargain – and pay up.
 
Having learned the hard way how skittish the Pakeha become when Maori exercise their own robust forms of tribal justice, they reckon it will make things a lot easier if their “guests” are forced to live under their own laws.
 
Among the shrewder Maori – including the wily Hone Heke – there is also a nagging fear that the ever-increasing inward flow of European settlers will not stop. They’ve learned that these new arrivals are different – not the usual traders, whoremasters, grog-sellers, whalers, sealers and fugitives that the tribes have grown used to accommodating.
 
More than anything else, the settlers arriving on the New Zealand Company ships desire land – Maori land. And as more and more of them arrive, that hunger for Maori land can only increase. That’s why the better educated and more travelled Maori are determined to secure their tribal possessions against settler pressure by placing them under the protection of the world’s most powerful nation – Great Britain.
 
Also at Waitangi are the Christian Maori – the products of more than twenty years of missionary effort. To these men and women the Pakeha have vouchsafed an entirely different understanding of the human condition. Christianity has conferred upon its native converts a new kind of power: a new mana.
 
They understand that the Pakeha’s morality, knowledge and technology offer their people a way-in to a world their ancestors could never have imagined. For them the future lies in a voluntary melding of their own and the newcomers’ cultures – and that melding cannot happen soon enough.
 

THE SIMPLE CLAUSES of the Treaty of Waitangi masterfully embraced the complex agendas of both its British and Maori signatories. It is, however, naïve in the extreme to characterise the document as a contract.
 
Treaties are not contracts: at least not in the sense that a mortgage or hire-purchase agreement is a contract. What a treaty actually amounts to is a description of the power relations existing between two peoples at a precise moment in history.
 
Almost always (and the Treaty of Waitangi is no exception) the relationship between the signatories is an unequal one (usually reflecting the stronger party’s military victory over the weaker). What makes the Treaty of Waitangi so interesting is that it was signed in anticipation of – and as a way of avoiding – the military clash which would have become inevitable if a voluntary cession of sovereignty to the British Crown had been refused.
 
But Maori did not emerge from the negotiations of February 1840 empty-handed. The quid pro quo, in return for making things easy for the Colonial Office, was the guarantee of what they had been seeking all along – the protection of the Crown. Protection against any return to the slaughter of the Musket Wars; protection against social disorder and commercial trickery; and protection against the Pakeha they were most afraid of: the ones who were coming to stay.
 
This was the real partnership enshrined in the Treaty: the partnership between the Maori tribes and the Colonial Office, or, to put it more precisely, with the executive arm of the British Government in London. This was the power the chiefs had aligned themselves with: a power which, in the person of the Governor, would stand between them and the predatory approach to land acquisition represented by the New Zealand Company and its growing body of imitators.
 
And there’s no question that the chiefs’ fears in regard to the settlers were entirely justified. Here, for example, is how one of the Governors of the New Zealand Company viewed the Treaty:
 
“We have always had very serious doubts whether the Treaty of Waitangi, made with naked savages by a consul invested with no plenipotentiary powers, without ratification by the Crown, could be treated by lawyers as anything but a praiseworthy devise for amusing and pacifying savages for the moment.”
 

THAT OMINOUS “for the moment” offers us a chilling reminder of just how historically contingent all treaties are. Certainly the Treaty of Waitangi – as a means of protecting the things Maori treasured – did not long survive the moment when the settler population reached a size sufficient to persuade London to grant it a measure of self-government (1852).
 
It was at that point that the Crown effectively ceased to be the protector of New Zealand’s indigenous inhabitants, and became, instead, the protector of the new settler state. In vain did the chiefs appeal to the Governor to uphold the Crown pre-emption clause of the Treaty. And when, in growing desperation, they crowned their own king and attempted to defend what remained of their tribal lands, the Settler Government promptly declared them rebels and traitors, and the British Government in London dispatched a vast army to crush the resistance of the nascent Maori state.
 
It is difficult to envisage any other outcome. The moment London acquiesced in the formation of a New Zealand State, they set in place an entity which could only grow and prosper at the expense of the country’s original inhabitants. Because, as the chiefs rightly apprehended back in February 1840, if the new breed of settlers came to stay – it could only be on Maori land.
 
 
TO SAY that the Treaty of Waitangi was breached is, therefore, an accurate but ultimately trivial historical observation. Had it not been breached, New Zealand – as a colonial society inextricably enmeshed in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the British Empire – wouldn’t have existed. For the Settler State to become real, the Treaty had to become, in Chief Justice Prendergast’s brutal phrase: “a simple nullity”.
 
Was that wrong? Should the undertakings given by Captain Hobson on 6 February 1840 have been honoured? Removed from its historical context, the question is easily answered in the affirmative. Except that those who go in search of such unencumbered moral judgements, do so without understanding that such questions can never be extracted from history.
 
To judge the dead may give some comfort to the living, but no matter how fervently the misdeeds of previous generations are condemned, they cannot be undone. Therefore, whatever justice we seek to do here and now, let it be to right the wrongs of the present – not the past.
 
We fair-skinned Polynesians are not – and can never be – “Europeans”. Just as contemporary Maori are not – and can never be again – the Maori who inhabited these islands before colonisation. Both of us are the victims of historical forces too vast for blame, to permanent for guilt.
 
And both of us have nowhere else to go.
 
This essay was originally published on the Bowalley Road blogsite on 12 May 2011.

25 comments:

  1. Generally in agreement with what you write here. Most New Zealanders have a very poor appreciation of the 'musket wars' and the misery and death that came from them and therefor the wish to have peace.
    I can't agree with your huge leap to the 'partnership' that you say was forged. The words don't appear and no one at the time or in the immediate aftermath used those words as they are simply untrue. Maori at the time got the protection(such as it was!) of the British Crown and also British citizenship-no mean prize at the time. Even later the words used in the legal sense were'in the manner of a partnership' and that was the reworking of the Treaty in the 1980's that has given us so much of a problem. Geoffrey Palmer has much to answer for! You are quite right to point out the sheer stupidity of saying that New Zealanders of Maori decent-perhaps one of their great-grandparents were Maori- are no heir to half the country and that the sooner we start to REALLY think of ourselves as new Zealanders of mixed race(as we all are) the better off we all will be.

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  2. So British citizenship was "no mean prize". Interesting then that British citizenship didn't stop the government from depriving Maori of their land as expeditiously as possible. Sometimes using the laws that they had created, sometimes ignoring them. And all the arguments about 'we are all mixed race New Zealanders' can't alter that. As if ethnicity can be judged by genetics.
    It is true that the omelette cannot be unmade, but restitution can and should be made, for the simple reason that without it resentment will grow to the point where it is impossible for us all to be merely New Zealanders.
    These so-called 'reworking' of the Treaty in the 1980s was as nothing compared to the 'reworking' of the treaty post 1865. Not to mention the 20th century land grabs, which to some extent continue today.

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  3. Good stuff Mr Trotter. I think you mean partnership differently from the destructive Palmer idea of partnership between today's Crown and some of its people with more or less Maori ancestors. That is a modern error, fatally connected to the daft idea that this document is living still. No it is not. We are a democracy now, whereas the two parties to the treaty were not democrates at all. They were both pretty much warlords, thousands of years apart in cultural evolution, but still basically the men with guns. The power differences were huge and both parties knew it so a real politic deal was done. It was a semi-civilised takeover, much better than the genocide going on, and to continue in Australia & America.
    So here we are today with so called Maori activists and acedemics propounding racist nonsence about 'their people' having rights due to their blood when most of them have more colonial ancestors than the average Pakeha today. They should have more respect for their fine ancestors who built this nation, in the bedroom as much as outside it! We are the New Zealanders, one people, as Hobson and the Chiefs said in 1840.It was only legally true then, but now it is actually a fact, and one to celebrate. We are not two armed gangs any more, thank heavens, and the stars on our flag. Well actually we thank those wise colonisers and Maori, and sex & marriage.

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  4. Interesting perspective I enjoyed reading it, and the observations.
    I also agree with Jigsaw's comment that Geoffrey Palmer has a considerable number of aspects to answer for.
    It is much of his thinking that continues to permeate detrimentally today.

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  5. "Both of us are the victims of historical forces too vast for blame, to permanent for guilt."

    True, but what we can do to some extent is squarely face the duplicitous legacy of the treaty, which has left New Zealand with a diminished capacity for properly considering justice in universal terms.

    To a large extent our institutions exist to protect and defend the settlers (now the propertied middle class)while managing the rest of the population. Even during times of relative equality, New Zealanders preferred to call themselves "caring" than "just", maintaining a perspective in which a privilege was bestowed rather than a right honoured.

    This attitude poses a danger to the settler class themselves, since it leads them to buddy up with the empire (whether London or Washington) for their own protection, even if it turns out to be at the expense of the whole country, which includes themselves. It also allows them to turn a blind eye to such things as the devastation that is currently happening in Glen Innes and elsewhere.

    Above all, it allows them to set standards for others without having standards to live up to themselves that extend beyond their own circle.

    Only when this nettle is grasped will we get past blame and guilt and start acting like a real country.


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  6. An excellent article, Chris.

    History certainly isn't bunk and its study is essential to understanding how we got to where we're now placed, why emotions might be as they are and what our options might now be.

    However, history cannot be an unalloyed source of prescription for the future.

    May I add a further thought on the contingent nature of the Treaty's English text. It was, amongst other things, a product of high minded, mid-nineteenth century British liberal reformism.

    I suspect that so apparently enlightened a document would have been inconceivable a few decades earlier, when the Empire was viewed in Whitehall and Westminster as simply a series of economic and strategic assets, available for plundering, exploiting and use in facing down the French.

    Similarly, I think it would have been inconceivable three or four decades later, as "scientific racism" and Imperial Mission came into vogue.

    As you imply, contingency is all in such matters.

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  7. Carbon guilty - if the treaty is not living, or at least extant, surely we return to the status quo ante and all Pakeha and their descendants have to return home :-)? I knew this column would bring out the Colonel blimps and there eternal meaningless crap about "blood", and "we are one people" (which is manifestly untrue by the way) God! I bet the next one will be about how "they was all wearing grass skirts and eating each other and we civilised them." Sigh.
    This is the mean underbelly of parking our racism disguised as democracy. The idea that whenever Maori get compensation, they're getting something for nothing. Actually, they're getting something for the fact that their whole economic base, language, and culture was pretty much destroyed. Under the guise of "civilising them."

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  8. Almost always (and the Treaty of Waitangi is no exception) the relationship between the signatories is an unequal one (usually reflecting the stronger party’s military victory over the weaker). What makes the Treaty of Waitangi so interesting is that it was signed in anticipation of – and as a way of avoiding – the military clash which would have become inevitable if a voluntary cession of sovereignty to the British Crown had been refused.
    Do you have any evidence the Maori felt threatened by the British power?

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  9. Guerilla Surgeon-as usual you pick just a few facts from history and discard the rest. The history is much more complicated and interesting. Ngati Tahu 'sold' Banks Peninsula at least three times-but obviously you think that was ok. The same tribe have now had 5 settlements and yet still are not satisfied and want more-obviously you think that is ok as well. If you did some research you will find that the TOW tribunal has been 'air-brushing' history to alter some unpalatable facts that don't suit the current settlements. How often and how many times do you suggest 'restitution' be made to people who are now only distant descendants of the original claimants? Ok for the descendants of Te Rauparaha to get $10 million for the 'loss of Cook Strait'? I wonder just how ill informed you really are.

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  10. Jigsaw, have you actually looked at the reply I made in another thread about the book(s) you so obviously rely on. You really need a more nuanced approach :-). To be honest, I don't care how many times a piece of land were sold, although probably a better word would be bought, because as you should know ownership of Maori land was nothing like Pakeha title. There were far more shady dealings on the European side. For instance in the Wairarapa the government actually "lost" 30,000 acres that should have been a "native" reserve. And even if you assume they have, you can hardly blame Maori for adopting the same greedy philosophy that you capitalists espouse. Why is it that only Maori are held up to these high standards? I thought greed was good. Anyway, I doubt I am the ill informed one.

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  11. Carbon Guilty, just maybe its the men with guns who still decide it all. Putin seems extraordinarily reconstructed, many regard the current, Russian Navy, as a still capable submarine force with about ten cruisers and 9000 ton destroyers and with an air defence ability , equivalent to about 24-F18s. There anti ship firepower is a range of Mach 3 to Mach 7 missiles. Running at NZ, to stop them might require 20 10 kilton free fall bomb off a B-52.
    In 1982 a cousin was a junior officers on the Sheffield in the period immediately before the Falklands war. An another relation was married to a strongly intelligence and diplomat connected professor at Chapel Hill, and she knew the probability on the US War Games and RAF assessment was the RN fleet would be sunk.(They told me after the war ended) I had worked it out for myself and often discussed the likelihood probability of the destruction of the RN feet at teabreaks at the Waimate CC. The Sheffield was lost because of an exhausted crew and incompetence by Salt. When Salt steps onto the Hermes, there is no attempt at news media censorship, when Woodward greets him, 'with someone's stuffed up big time, Sam' The ship had all the wrong ammo and didn't use radar, EW or fire decoys. Beatty scuttled one High Seas fleet( the Russian and Japanese ones still exist) while the main fleet Churchill sunk in 1954 was the RN and got Dulles to begin the permanent destruction of democracy in Iran, Iraq and Egypt as Thatchers favourite Alan Clark said,'I always thought the aim was to encourage Iran and Iraq to do as much damage to each as other possible', .
    Surely the Maoris are the core of the NZDF force and infantry. I remember in early 1984 being reluctantly being interviewed for a job as an advisory officer with the NZDF HQ by a tall slim Vietnam era Maori colonel and Chris Rosanowski, (son of a Timaru Tech) English teacher who probably joined the staff about the same time as Elvis exploded in NZ and M P Miles taught for the first time at school).Rosanowsi said, 'the plan is you'll start in the mailroom and if we judge you can be trusted, we've got entirely other things in mind'. I was never interested- because I was jaded, applied for jobs in the NZDF only because of pressure from my father in 80, friends of the family and editors. However I had impressed some in the NZDF because my arguments against the Collins subs , made in apparently insig articles in the Timaru Herald were the most effectively argued oppostion to the useless subs-made. Even people like Bradley and Martin could not angle the argument as effectively as I could and the number one aim of the USA in Australasia over the last 30 years has been to end the Beazley Collins sub projects which wastes all Australia's best defence resources ( read the Rand Corp Report into the Collin subs (Santa Monica 2011)-yes they still exist-50 years after Dr Strangelove. In my opinion it was General Le May who decided to use the bomb on Nagasaki not Truman and really Le May also decided not to bomb Cuba, even though the Kennedy or McNamara will never admit that. The Fog of War is absolutely essential as a very partial and rather dishonest concession by McNamara.
    Guerilla I've reread Beevor who is adamant that area bombing was one of the decisive factors in winning WW2. The war was largely lost for Germany with the three quarter of million troops Hitler lost on the way to Moscow and the best German armies were destroyed 5-7 Dec 1941 when hit by the full power of the Soviet Army which was back from the far East were it smashed the Japanese army. That's why Japan hit south and why Hitler declared war on the US. Guderain army had been decimated.ie Adolf knew he was going to lose, so he fought defensively to give him time to kill those he hated.
    The moral and point of the story is maoris can fight and fuck unlike a lot of poor white kiwis. And maybe the Maoris are the important people.

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  12. I agree with Guerilla Surgeon, Chris. Your thoughtful article is rather sophisticated stuff for what he calls 'the Colonial blimps', and they've wasted no time in reworking your arguments to their own, rather creepy, advantage.
    You can bet your life they're the same ones who carry on about the ruination of Britain by the invasion of 'foreigners' - its expansionist policies coming back to bite it in the bum, of course.

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  13. Jesus Christ Robert – if only you could aspire to some clarity I'm sure you'd be running the country :-).

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  14. Funny how the Greens think the Treaty somehow has a central role (Cult status):

    "One of jh’s themes has been dis-satisfaction with the Green Party for not being specific about the outcomes of our policy in relation to the Treaty. “What, specifically, will this country be like if we go down this course?”. It’s a question I have heard many times over the years, and it usually speaks from a position of fear and insecurity for Pakeha: what if I’ll be worse off? or even what if there’s no place for me?
    I want to acknowledge that actually we are asking people to do something (and we are doing it too) quite different from what we usually ask with our policy. Normally we have a very clear idea of the outcome we are seeking, and establish a policy to reflect how we will get there.
    But the Treaty is different. The words all have the potential to sound pretty hammy, but fundamentally the outcome being sought is a process: the process of absolute good faith negotiation, in which we Pakeha engage from a position of honour – acting ethically and morally.
    That process involves courage because we don’t know the outcome (and because we know we have it pretty sweet just how things are, let’s be honest). It is pretty scary, but it’s also pretty damn exciting!
    http://blog.greens.org.nz/2010/05/03/my-speech-at-blackball-2010/

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  15. I think you spin the British part a little negatively Chris. My understanding is that humanitarians were on a role having set the slaves free in the British Empire etc, etc.
    Also Professor Paul Moon says (on Treaty Myths):
    3. The Treaty was an attempt to conquer New Zealand

    The last thing Britain wanted to do in the 1820s and 1830s was to conquer New Zealand. Since Cook arrived in the country in 1769, Britain had every opportunity to assert sovereignty over New Zealand but repeatedly refused to do so. The costs were prohibitive, the advantages unclear, and British government policy was firmly against the idea. It was largely the wilful actions of the New Zealand Company in 1839 that finally forced the British government's hand reluctantly to initiate a treaty.
    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10861947

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  16. Intellectual guerrilla fighter says:
    It is true that the omelette cannot be unmade, but restitution can and should be made, for the simple reason that without it resentment will grow to the point where it is impossible for us all to be merely New Zealanders.
    .......
    that premise is partly true, however it isn't events that affect us it is how we choose to react to them. In addition motivation is a function of the value of a goal and the probability of achieving it. Maori issues have been spurred on by the institutionalization of grievance ("Maori studies" departments in universities etc).
    The fact is Maori were here first (all 125,000 of them). That allows them to believe they can claim aboriginal title to it all. How do you satisfy such broad expectations? It is good fodder for holier than thou liberals and haters and wreckers.

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  17. JH are you kidding? Maori don't claim aboriginal title to everything. They've been pretty reasonable in their negotiations on treaty matters. (And I know people on both sides of the negotiations.) There's been bugger all violence and settlements have been accepted with a reasonable grace. You should try to remember that the very basis of their society was taken away. Pretty much all of it – to satisfy the land hunger of European settlers. It's a bit different to having your wallet nicked out of your back pocket.
    Maori studies departments in universities have resulted in institutionalisation of the grievances? Don't you know that only left-wing people are allowed to use the word institutionalise :-)? Actually, given that there are English departments in every university in the country I see why we can't have Maori studies departments too. People these days study a lot more than reading, writing, and arithmetic.
    The haters and wreckers I fear our more on your side of the fence. As I've said before, whenever Maori make gains, the blimps crawl out of the woodwork and complain, never having complained when Maori were discriminated against mind you. And when Maori are angry about something it "sets race relations in this country back 100 years" but Pakeha spew their bile with impunity, because obviously race relations doesn't rely on them being angry.
    I suggest you try reading some proper history, by real historians, possibly even Maori ones. And get off all those stupid, racist, right-wing websites you hang round on.

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  18. Guerilla Surgeon-I am sure that you do doubt that you are the one who is ill informed -more probably you regard yourself as the only one who IS well informed. Of course there were wrongs on both sides but to regard people who today have a smidgen of Maori blood as some how the inheritors of a whole right to the land is simply wrong, however you cut it. The way we are going with increased division based on race is simply no way to construct a country and must end in violence. Resentment is growing even as settlements are made not reducing because of them. The fact that so many people in this country, regardless of their background are reluctant to speak about what is happening is the most worrying sign.

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  19. Jigsaw:

    "people who today have a smidgen of Maori blood"

    Ethnicity is not defined by 'blood'. Please try to bootstrap yourself out of the 19th century.

    " inheritors of a whole right to the land"

    There might be some Maori who believe this, although I would like to see some evidence of it. But even so I suspect most don't. Otherwise there would be no progress on treaty claims.

    "increased division based on race is simply no way to construct a country and must end in violence. "

    You have actual evidence of this?

    " The fact that so many people in this country, regardless of their background are reluctant to speak about what is happening is the most worrying sign."

    Conspiracy theory. Show me the evidence that people are afraid to 'speak up'. You're not. And there are a number of people who frequent this blog site that aren't. And by golly if you look at the right wing racist blogs around there seem to be a shit heap of people who are willing to 'speak up'. So show me the evidence.

    You're working on cliché, 19th-century anthropology, conspiracy theories, and pure supposition.

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  20. Intellectual Guerrilla Fighter:

    "JH are you kidding? Maori don't claim aboriginal title to everything. They've been pretty reasonable in their negotiations on treaty matters. (And I know people on both sides of the negotiations.
    ....
    "But they have worked constructively with our government and they've got about 1.5% of what was taken. TarianaTuria says “no government can expect people settlements to be full and final if justice isn't served.”
    http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/national/ckpt/2008/09/05/waatea_news

    ""All offshore oil exploration permits should be suspended until clear title to the resource has been established beyond the 12 nautical mile limit," David Clendon, the Green Party Maori Affairs Spokesperson said today.

    "I am disturbed to learn that Crown Minerals is aware of aboriginal title issues but that Minister Brownlee is proceeding with permit offers as if it doesn't matter."
    https://www.greens.org.nz/press-releases/brownlee-ignores-aboriginal-title

    As Chris put it:
    " For who can dispute that, at one time, the entire geographical entity we call New Zealand was the property of Maori collectivities?

    And, if they have a customary right to New Zealand's beaches, then why not its rivers, estuaries, swamps, lakes, forests and everything else? "
    http://www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/opinion/258693

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  21. The haters and wreckers I fear our more on your side of the fence. As I've said before, whenever Maori make gains, the blimps crawl out of the woodwork and complain, never having complained when Maori were discriminated against mind you. And when Maori are angry about something it "sets race relations in this country back 100 years" but Pakeha spew their bile with impunity, because obviously race relations doesn't rely on them being angry.
    ...........................
    most "Blimps" grew up in a benign world where (for instance) Queen Victoria had left us a chain length above the high water mark and around the rivers for all the boys and girls (brown or white) to use with very little chance of the Queen bowling along on her horse telling us to shove off.
    What's more progress was progress so when you drive through Kumara you are reminded of Richard John Seddon and the Liberal Government and the fact that not so long ago only men got to vote.
    In advancing the cause of Maori nationalism you are inserting a layer under society as it exists today (a layer of ownership based on blood lines), what's more you are asking people to accept alien ideas of the closed society.
    It is you who are the hater and wrecker.

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  22. Intellectual Guerilla Fighter Says:
    "Conspiracy theory. Show me the evidence that people are afraid to 'speak up'.
    ....
    Advancement in the public service?

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  23. Ethnicity is not defined by 'blood'. Please try to bootstrap yourself out of the 19th century.
    ...............
    we refer here to ancestral rights being diluted by time and mixed parentage.
    Culture is deemed to play a part and give a person rights.
    Race is another matter.
    http://www.uni-potsdam.de/philologie+rassismus/download/SesardicRasse.pdf

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  24. JH I can't make head nor tail of your arguments. Your premises don't seem to support your conclusion. I will say this though, your reference seems to be some sort of nutty undergraduate essay, but I will run it past a biologist to see what they say. As far as blimps go, exactly my point. They grew up in an era of privilege when white people were in charge and Maori stayed out of the way. It was benign for them, but less benign for people who had had all their land taken off them. So of course they're scared that Maori want it all back. Which I might say your Tariana Turia quote does not show.

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  25. The above posts wonderfully exemplify the general Treaty bewilderment.

    Had the Aurora and its attendant baggage and sponsors not been present NZ history would have been very different.

    Good post. Thank you.

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