By MICHAEL SLOVANOS

A BIG protest march into New Zealand’s capital Wellington this week against proposed legislation, prompted this comment from former ACT Party MP and Reality Check Radio host Rodney Hide: “What madness. What a performance. What an embarrassment.”

Hide noted that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has said “rightly or wrongly” that the legislation that is the subject of the protest march, the Waitangi Treaty Principles Bill, will never make it into law and is “a dead duck”.

“Still, Maori activists are up in arms, outraged, that this Bill could be introduced into our parliament and given to a referendum for the people to decide,” said Hide, adding that the principles of the 1840 Treaty proceding from the articles were “cede your sovereignty, everyone equal, own your property. Simple as. I don’t know what the drama is.”

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald totally mispresented the objective of the the Waitangi Treaty Principles Bill, calling it “a proposed law that would redefine New Zealand’s founding treaty between the British Crown and Maori chiefs”. The bill in fact seeks to restate in law, what the Treaty already says.

New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi is widely recognised as the country’s founding document – a treaty between a large majority of the Maori chiefs of the day and the English Crown, represented by the colonial administration of the day.

The first article of the Treaty states: “The Chiefs of the Confederation of the United Tribes of New Zealand and the separate and independent Chiefs who have not become members of the Confederation cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty which the said Confederation or Individual Chiefs respectively exercise or possess, or may be supposed to exercise or to possess over their respective Territories as the sole sovereigns thereof.”

In other words, the chiefs, the-then representatives of the indigenous New Zealand Maori population, ceded to the Crown (Queen Victoria) “absolutely and without reservation the sovereignty they possessed” over “their respective territories”.

Hide noted that “over time judges, politicians and bureaucrats have imbued this Treaty with a significance that it never had, never should have had (and) none of it is any good. Oh it’s a partnership! There’s no partnership in that treaty. Get your head read.

“Now the activists are saying we never ceded sovereignty,” said Hide. “Well, I wish I’d known that 30 years ago, 40 years ago, because didn’t we embark on this great settlement process? Here you go, here’s some money to compensate you for these terrible wrongs that have been done.

“If there was no sovereignty ceded, no need to pay any money, because you don’t recognise the Crown,” said Hide, pointing out the glaringly obvious flaw in the activists’ argument.

Hide asked the question “what does it actually mean to cede sovereignty”? “I never ceded sovereignty at any time in my life, but unfortunately I’ve got a government and if I don’t do what they tell me I get put in jail.”

The treaty was translated into the written Maori-English that had been developed in preceding decades and read to the chiefs. The signing of the Treaty in 1840 followed a series of bloody inter-tribal battles up to that time known as the Musket Wars.

British and American sperm whalers had first used sheltered northern North Island anchorages in the 1790s, and Maori traded water, labour, flax and other produce with them for muskets, which were used with limited effect in the inter-tribal battles through the several decades before 1840.

Contrary to the impression that modern-day indigenous activists give, Maori at that time were willing to adapt to European ways. Some tribes even managed to obtain their own ships and conducted cross-
Tasman trade to Sydney. History of early European-Maori interactions are fascinating reading.

In the two decades following the treaty signing, wars continued, but mainly between the Maori and the colonial administration over land disputes. These became known as the Maori Wars, later renamed the New Zealand Wars. In a number of these confrontations the Maori were on the losing side and retreated into isolated rural communities based around large meeting houses.

Long-standing grievances were eventually addressed by the Waitangi Tribunal, established in 1975, by an Act of Parliament, which provided a legal process by which Māori Treaty claims could be investigated, resolved and compensated.

This was against a background of rising militancy among Maori activists, the most outspoken of whom identified with Maoist faction of Marxist-Leninism. One group actually traveled to China in 1973 to speak with Mao’s communist cadres during the Cultural Revolution.

Years later in 2005, one of this group Tame Iti, was leading a militant rebellion in his rural hometown area of the North Island when members of the Waitangi Tribunal visited. Cars were set alight and Iti fired a shotgun into a colonial flag on the ground while performing a war dance.

Two years later Iti was one of 17 people arrested by an armed anti-terrorism police unit conducting a series of raids under the Terrorism Suppression Act and the Firearms Act, carried out in Te Urewera and around New Zealand.

The authors of Waitangi Tribunal reports had by that time fallen over themselves to appease Maori grievances, leading to numerous initiatives and new institutions, including Māori radio, the Māori Language Commission, the Māori Broadcasting Funding Agency and the Māori Health Authority.

The overarching argument put forth by Maori activists, in particular Te Pati Maori, i.e. the Maori Party, which became in effect a radical indigenist faction of the Labor Party, was a big lie: that the Treaty of Waitangi was actually a “partnership” between Maori and Europeans and that sovereignty was never ceded.

This string of indigenous bureaucracies coupled with millions in government funding should have given some sense of recompense for past wrongs, but the agitation continued. This indigenous bureaucracy was also coupled with Labor’s Resource Management Act, which “guides” all development.

Not only do developers, e.g. home builders, have to consult with the local regional council, but also representatives of the local “iwi” or tribal group. In one recent case, a dissenting iwi representative held up a housing development for four years. Combined with the country’s oppressive environmental laws, New Zealand became a developer’s nightmare.

Australia faces the same indigenous bureaucracy in development applications. The Federal Government’s Environmental Defenders Office, working with the Central West Aboriginal Corporation, recently stopped the $1 billion McPhillamys Gold Mine development

Come the new National-NZ First-ACT Party coalition government, part of the deal put forward by ACT leader David Seymour was legislation to define in law the Waitangi Treaty principles, the basic one being that New Zealanders comprise one people under the Crown.

Seymour and many others were alarmed that the country was being taken down a path of indigenous separatism. Although Seymour did not state it, indigenous separatism was always the objective of Communist Party strategy in both Australia and New Zealand.

This strategy was clearly laid out in publications by the former Australian Communist Party operative Geoff McDonald, most notably his book Red Over Black. This is essentially the “war cry” of the Maori Party, whose members recently jumped around the Parliament floor doing a haka war dance in a deliberate act of defiance of parliamentary conduct.

Meanwhile the insipid PM Christopher Luxon, fulfilling the coalition deal, agreed to introduce a Treaty Principles Bill and support it to the select committee stage. The proposed Bill is based on an ACT Party policy, which is strongly libertarian in outlook.

The Bill was introduced on November 7th and received its first reading on the 14th. It has been referred to Parliament’s Justice Committee for consideration. It will also be an opportunity for the public to give feedback.

In response the Maori Party and supporting organisations organised the major march in the capital Wellington this week. The predictable spectacle was reported on favourably by media but public reaction was often very negative.

Seymour defended the Bill, saying current “interpretations” of the Treaty principles specify that it is “a partnership”, in other words a “co-governance model” where Maori tribes govern NZ in a 50/50 partnership with the Crown.

NZ Taxpayers Union representative said they found out that a taxpayer-funded Parliamentary staffer led the protest march. “This means that taxpayers might have ended up fronting part of the bill. But thanks to Parliament’s secrecy laws, we have no idea what we paid,” he said.