This new, re-energised Maori Party is laying out policies that are intergenerational they are not incrementalist. We can be overt, straight up and honest about our dreams and aspirations. –John Tamihere, co-leader of the Maori Party
A Party with a separatist basis
by Roger Childs
The Maori Party probably wouldn’t exist if there were no separate parliamentary seats for the ethnic group. These seven special electorates are an undemocratic feature of our political system because only people who have some Maori blood can vote for the MPs. For elections, Maori can opt to be on the general roll or the Maori roll – a choice not available to any other ethnic group.
Part-Maori people make up about 16.5% of the country’s population – there are no full-blooded Maori remaining. In the current parliament 28 MPs have some Maori blood — over 20% of the total number. So if it regarded as important to have Maori representation in parliament, why do we need a Maori Party?
The mainstream political parties claim to have the interests of all New Zealanders at heart, but not the separatist Maori Party.
What does the Maori Party stand for?
In John Tamihere’s statement at the top the “our” means people with some Maori blood. The Party is all about “their people”, as stated on their website.
The Maori Party is all about caring for our whanau and future generations. As Maori political movement we are guided by our kupapa, and the interests of our whānau, hapū and iwi in Parliament and Government.
One of the Party’s policies coming up to the October election is that 25% of Covid recovery money be given to businesses led by Maori. But Maori have already have received $56 million immediately before lockdown and then $900 million in the May budget. There is definitely no need for the ethnic group to have a separatist party agitating for them when the government is being more than generous. Furthermore, Maori companies already have huge assets.
Maori trusts and businesses have a massive stake in the New Zealand economy. A 2017 estimate put the value of the Maori economic asset base at over $50 billion. This has been greatly assisted by multi-million dollar claims made by different tribes against the Crown, approved by the Waitangi Tribunal and paid out by successive governments. Many Maori run businesses are also unfairly assisted by having charity status, so pay less taxes than non-Maori enterprises.
Aotearoa and stolen land
Further aspects of Maori Party’s policy include… it has called to officially change the name of the country to Aotearoa and reopen Treaty settlements to cover land that was stolen during colonisation but is now privately-owned. –Marc Daalder, Newsroom, 25 September 2020
The word Aotearoa did not appear in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. The name used for New Zealand in the Treaty was “Nu Tirani’. Aotearoa was not the traditional Maori name for New Zealand – pre-Treaty Maori had no concept of New Zealand as a nation. As British Colonial Secretary, Lord Normanby, in his 1839 instructions to Captain Hobson put it: the natives were… a people composed of numerous, dispersed and petty tribes who possess few political relations to each other… Aotearoa was the invention of English ethnologist, Stephenson Percy Smith in the 1890s to go with his fictional tale about Kupe. It is only in recent decades that the name has been used as a Te Reo word for New Zealand. Most polls on the question of renaming the country Aotearoa have shown less than 30% in favour.
As regards “stolen land” there are no specifics in the Party policy and no mention is made about land annexed from weaker tribes by stronger iwi in the Musket Wars.
No need for a separatist party
Maori as a separate group have been incredibly well looked after by successive governments.
As stated above, the present Coalition government has already allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for Maori to help with the Covid-19 recovery. Most New Zealanders would see this as more than generous. Furthermore Maori have for decades being singled out in legislation enacted in parliament — over 90 laws have special provisions for their interests and culture. And in the area of communications, Maori television and radio stations are all funded by the state.
There is also a separate Maori Affairs Department and all the other ministries have policies related to Maori needs and interests.
Having a Maori Party perpetuates the concept of separatism and the principle that Maori are deserving of special treatment. As it has happened the Party has only ever garnered 2% –3% of the party vote in elections and are currently polling around 1.5%. There is no raison d’être for its continued existence.
Black American political economist, Thomas Sowell – one the most important though largely unsung public intellectuals of the last 100 years – had this to say about leftists:
“Anyone who studies the history of ideas should notice how much more often people on the political left, more so than others, denigrate and demonise those who disagree with them — instead of answering their arguments.”
“One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans– anything except reason.”
When ethnocentric part-Maori wank on about ‘racism’ what they actually mean is placing it under new management.
Theirs.
Have a free definitions lesson 😊
DEFINITIONS LESSON
Racism is often conflated by the ignorant with simple prejudice, which it is not. Principled opposition to unearned racial privilege is not racism. Nor is it typically evidence of prejudice.
There is only one race. The human race. Much of what is commonly referred to as “racism” is actually ethnocentricism.
And the most disgustingly prejudiced, ethnocentric people in this country are part-Maori who have raised up one group of ancestors while trampling down another to identify monoculturally as “Maori,” chopping whole branches out of their family trees in order to do so.
Those who believe in a single standard of citizenship, colourblind government, and the abolition of unearned privileges for part-Maori are the complete opposite of their ethnocentric opponents.
But the actual racists have carried out a clever “bait and switch,” and conned the liberals seeking public virtue-signalling and moral preening opportunities into accepting their redefinition.
As black American political economist, Thomas Sowell, reminds us: “Sixty years ago if you believed everybody should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, you were a radical. Thirty years ago, you were a liberal. Today, you’re a ‘racist.’”
Racism is a different beast altogether. It occurs where a group of prejudiced, ethnocentric individuals get together to colonise or create a system affording them separate, different, or superior rights to everyone else on the basis of group membership.
In a free society all citizens enjoy individual equality in citizenship. This is so whether some of a citizen’s ancestors arrived in a canoe in 1350, a sailing vessel in 1850, an ocean liner in 1950, or more recently by airliner. Even someone who put his hand up 30 seconds ago at a swearing-in ceremony is entitled to all the rights of citizenship. Prior arrival or ancestral longevity in the land is no basis for special privilege.
Group rights are anathema to a free society. They create two classes of citizenship where only one existed before. Group rights require the intervention of an activist government forcibly taking rights from one group to bestow upon another. As Richard Prebble reminds us: “One group’s positive discrimination is another group’s negative discrimination.”
In Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, Thomas Sowell records the downstream effect of government-sponsored identity politics. Touted as promoting inter-group harmony, Sowell found that wherever such policies had been tried, they invariably expanded over time in scale and scope, benefited already advantaged members of the preference group (those with the smarts to work the system), and led to increased rather than decreased inter-group polarisation. In many places they have brought about decades-long civil wars.
Of course, any downstream proposal that the beneficiaries of state-sponsored identity politics revert to being treated the same as everyone else will make such groups squeal like stuck pigs. As Thomas Sowell reminds us: “When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.’
I will leave it to readers to determine whether New Zealand is a racist country, and if so, in whose favour this racism operates.
ENDS
“STOLEN” LAND
In 1840, there was no such thing as a collective “Maori.”
New Zealand was populated by a bunch of tribes all in a Hobbesian state of nature with one another, in which “every man’s hand was against every other man’s,” “no man was secure in his life or in his property” and “life was nasty, brutish and short.”
Some 512 chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, and a substantial minority located in the centre of the North Island (Tainui, Tuwharetoa, Tuhoe, and Arawa) didn’t, meaning there were probably around 600 of these individually insignificant groups.
In the absence of a universally acknowledged civil government and laws to provide for land ownership, in 1840, the various tribes owned NOTHING. They simply used or occupied it until a stronger bunch of bullyboys came along and took it off them. The only universally acknowledged system of land ownership was “te rau o te patu” [the law of the club].
That’s NOT ownership. It is temporary usage based on current occupation and extinguishable in a single stroke of the patu or thrust of the taiaha.
Here today, gone tomorrow.
The TOW purported at Article II to convert this “might makes right” situation into a formal system of ownership. Since nobody actually owned anything, this presented a considerable difficulty for those who had to make the call.
Morally, a tribe could be said to “own” land that it occupied and cultivated. At a most generous assessment, this “ownership” could be extended to include a reasonable hunting and gathering range around a tribe’s settlement(s). Perhaps one day’s travel on foot, since nobody would expend more effort in a search for food than the energy they’d obtain from it
The large tracts of “waste land” between the various tribes actually belonged in a moral sense — acts of “ownership” performed upon it to take it out of its wild state — to nobody.
With the signing of the Treaty, the “waste lands” should have become Crown Lands of the British Crown, to be sold and developed for the benefit of New Zealanders of all races.
The problems were created by mischief-making missionaries, who told Maori the TOW gave the various tribes “ownership” of the entire land area of NZ, meaning if the Crown wanted the waste lands it would have to buy them. Their agenda was to limit the spread of worldly, secular Pakeha into the all-Maori hinterlands they wanted to Christianise.
Naturally, this created a welter of competing “ownership” claims as each of several tribes abutting a tract of waste land claimed to “own” it. Lacking the troops to enforce the correct position, the Crown made a mistaken virtue of necessity, and accepted the missionary-fabricated fiction of universal tribal ownership.
The Native Land Court system was set up, not to rip anyone off, but to determine nominal “ownership” of tracts of waste land so the Crown could pay someone for them, thus ensuring incoming settlers remained unmolested by their Maori neighbours.
For the chiefs, this was “money for jam.” They queued up to sell land they didn’t own in any meaningful sense.
Nor was any land “stolen.”
Only about 4 percent of NZ’s land area was – quite rightly – confiscated from tribes who’d challenged the Queen’s sovereignty. These tribes were warned in advance this would happen if they didn’t pull their heads in.
Here’s Sir Apirana Ngata on this matter:
“Some have said that these confiscations were wrong and that they contravened the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi. The Government placed in the hands of the Queen of England, the sovereignty and the authority to make laws. Some sections of the Maori people violated that authority. War arose from this and blood was spilled. The law came into operation and land was taken in payment. This itself is a Maori custom—revenge, plunder to avenge a wrong. It was their own chiefs who ceded that right to the Queen. The confiscations cannot therefore be objected to in the light of the Treaty.”
The balance 96 percent of New Zealand’s land area was voluntarily “sold” by the chiefs in hundreds of transactions. Maori did not “lose” their lands; they sold them for valuable consideration at a mutually agreed price. Whether they spent the proceeds wisely or not was their own choice. There is a world of difference between “losing” something and selling it.
So the land was not “lost.”
Nor was it “stolen.”
It was sold. And the sales recorded in writing. Those records as compiled by Special Commissioner, Henry Hanson Turton are readily available on the Victoria University of Wellington website for anyone to see.
Here are links to Turton’s Deeds, held electronically by Victoria University of Wellington, and in hard copy at the Hocken Library and others.
Index to Deeds, Receipts, Gifts > http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Tur01Nort.html
It should be noted that these sales also included: “… trees minerals waters rivers lakes streams and all appertaining to the said Land or beneath the surface of the said Land,” which knocks Treaty claims for water right out of the park.
Since these sales involved the sale of all appurtenant rights, if the land abutted the coast, once it was surveyed and passed into the Torrens Title system, all “seabed and foreshore” rights were thus extinguished.
And once something is sold in such a specific manner it’s gone for good, and the seller has no further claim over it or ongoing rights to say what happens with it.
Claims to the contrary can be likened to selling someone a house, then demanding a perpetual say in how it is renovated, decorated and landscaped.
We can see here that present-day assertions of “mana whenua” are nothing but irrelevant cultural waffle.
Arrant nonsense in other words.
ENDS
Where is this “Aotearoa”?
Right next door to Peter Pan and Never-Never Land?
“Aotearoa” is nothing but a bogus political construct.
The proper (and only) name of our country is NEW ZEALAND, as I will prove below.
‘AOTEAROA’ AND THE “CONFEDERATION OF UNITED TRIBES’ DECONSTRUCTED
“In the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King. And he that does not know his own history is at the mercy of every lying windbag.” – outgoing Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe, in his 1935 farewell address
New Zealand is increasingly referred to in the public square as “Aotearoa” or “Aotearoa New Zealand.” This appears on our passports, the letterheads and signage of government departments, our new banknotes, and has even been used on postage stamps in larger print than our country’s real name.
Fellow author, Bruce Moon, describes Aotearoa as “a quite recent upstart with scant justification, if any at all, to be used as our country’s name.’
This fiction deserves to be mercilessly deconstructed.
In pre-European times, there was no such thing as a Maori nation state, meaning Maori had no name for what is now New Zealand as a whole. It was left to European explorers to remedy this deficiency. The first to do so was Abel Tasman, who in 1642, named our country “Staten Landt” in the mistaken belief it was part of a “Great Southern Continent.”
Tasman’s error was soon corrected. The following year, 1643, the Dutch States-General renamed his discovery “Nieuw Zeelandt,” Anglicised to “New Zealand,” this has been our country’s name for the 377 years that have since elapsed.
When the Treaty of Waitangi was drafted in 1840, “New Zealand” was transliterated into Maori as “Nu Tirani” and that is how our country is described for posterity in the Treaty’s Maori language version. Moreover, if documents were to be written in Maori, this continued to be the practice for many decades. For example, when a broadsheet in Maori was posted on the wall of the Karitane Post Office in the early 1940s, “Niu Tirani” had been modified only slightly to “Niu Tireni.” Aotearoa just did not appear.
The agenda of those today promoting Aotearoa as an alternative name for New Zealand is to imply that a pre-existing Maori nation state was rudely subsumed by 19th Century white settler governments and must accordingly be reinstated as “co-equal” to our existing government that governs for all New Zealanders.
Contrary to modern-day misrepresentation, the Treaty of Waitangi was not with a collective “Maori,” but with tribes, most of whom signed it, some of whom didn’t. When the Treaty was entered into in 1840, New Zealand consisted of hundreds of these dispersed and petty tribes, each in a constant state of war with one another, and lacking any concept of nationhood. Some 512 chiefs signed the Treaty, while a substantial minority refused to, meaning there were probably more than 600 of these individually insignificant groups.
Assertions that a Maori nation state existed when the Treaty was signed rest upon formal recognition by England’s King William IV in 1836 of the 1835 Declaration of Independence of the so-called “Confederation of United Tribes” and associated flag.
Any “official” recognition of pre-Treaty collective Maori control of New Zealand must be placed in its proper historical context, which ethnic nationalists conveniently omit to do.
The so-called “Maori Flag” (not the tino rangatiratanga Maori sovereignty flag fudged up in the 1990s) was adopted by Northland chiefs in 1834 at the behest of British Resident James Busby, after a NZ-built ship owned by Europeans was impounded in Sydney for not flying the flag of a recognised nation state.
Busby presented the chiefs with a variety of designs. They eventually chose a flag modelled on that of the Church Missionary Society, with which they were well familiar. This was not a Maori initiative, but a Pakeha-brokered expedient to protect New Zealand’s pre-Treaty commerce.
Nor was the 1835 Declaration of Independence driven by the puny number of Maori chiefs who signed it. This “paper pellet to fire at the French” was fudged together by Busby to head off Colonial Office fears of an impending takeover by French adventurer, Baron De Thierry.
Initially carrying the signatures (or rather the thumbprints) of 35 Northland chiefs, the Declaration was ultimately signed by just 57 chiefs, all residing north of the Firth of Thames. Since these chiefs represented less than 10 percent of all the tribes of New Zealand, the Declaration can hardly be held up as evidence of a national consensus.
The arguments of Maori sovereignty activists are further undermined by the impotence of the handful of chiefs who signed the Declaration to act or even deliberate in concert. Signatories had pledged “to meet in Congress at Waitangi in the autumn of each year, for the purpose of framing laws for the dispensation of justice, the preservation of peace and good order, and the regulation of trade.” Inter-tribal animosities meant this body never met nor passed a single law, despite the common undertaking of notional members to do so.
Even had the Declaration carried any practical weight, its relative handful of 1835 signatories (or their successors) all signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, thereby rendering the Declaration redundant.
At the time of the signing of the Treaty, the North and South Islands had a variety of Maori names, the most popular being Te Ika-a-Māui and Te Waipounamu respectively. However, we must be clear that there was no pre-existing Maori name for what is now New Zealand, because as we have seen, there was no Maori nation state or national consensus to form one.
Had there been a Maori name for New Zealand, the missionaries who drafted both the 1835 Declaration and the Maori Treaty text of 1840 (fluent Maori speakers all) would have known of and used it. Instead, they used the same transliteration of New Zealand (“Niu Tirani”) in both documents to get their point across.
Maori sovereignty activists, who regard the Treaty of Waitangi as written in concrete if it advances their agenda, have smuggled Niu Tirani out of the public discourse, because its use in the Maori Treaty text underscores the total bankruptcy of their claim to nationhood. “Aotearoa” has been smuggled in as a substitute.
Aotearoa was originally an alternative pre-European Maori name for the North Island. In the late 19th Century, European authors, William Pember Reeves and Stephenson Percy Smith began using it in Maori-themed works of fiction as a fanciful name for the entire country. That’s all it ever was. As Muriel Newman notes in a recent article on the New Zealand Geographic Board’s proposed name changes to the North and South Islands, “The Board ruled out Aotearoa for the North Island on the basis that it has been popularised as the name for New Zealand.”
Popularised, indeed!
“Fabricated” is a far better word.
The underlying agenda of the race-hustlers peddling the “Aotearoa” fabrication is to insinuate into the public mind, through as many channels as possible, their “One country, two peoples” mantra. Constant repetition then creates the false impression of widespread popular acceptance of what is really nothing more than a propaganda claim.
We see here deployed a version of Adolf Hitler’s Big Lie technique as outlined in Mein Kampf: repeat a lie over and over until it becomes the ‘truth.’
ENDS
Aokealoa is the original name given by its discoverer Kupe who hailed from Maui (Havaii) around 850.BC. meaning Universal in the ancient Hawaiian Kānaka Maoli dialect. Nz’s te iwi missionaries altered many a Kanaka reo to suit their denationalization program even introducing their own kupe from Rarotonga who chased a giant octopus from the debauchery islands (Tahiti) to Aokealoa (nz). In 1790 Aokealoa Kānaka Maoli rejected the pakeha proposed civilian government & British sovereignty by 1811, 18.000 had been slaughtered by musket bearing maoris on orders to exterminate Aokealoa Kanaka Sovereignty. Muskets were provided by Kendall & Charles de Thierry to whom hongi hika & waikato used them to commit mass murder. The invasion of Aokealoa began from the missionary island of Rarotonga (mataatua) around 1503. Tahiti (Tainui) followed as did Toi from Tokelau, Hotu brothers from Rapanui and many more from Micronesia & Melanesia these are the people who became known as the maori, all thanks to their missionary slave masters.