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15
November 2009
Exposing
the Real Agenda
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It
is not easy to rile New Zealanders, but Hone Harawira’s
abusive email clearly did. By claiming that he was entitled to
rip off taxpayers with his jaunt to Paris because Whities had
been ripping off Maori for centuries, Hone Harawira exposed
the racist thinking that underpins the Maori Party. As
Labour’s former Tai Tokerau MP Dover Samuels said, Mr
Harawira is “advocating what he really believes in. A lot of
people sitting with him in Parliament believe the same
thing”.
In
fact, it could be said that Mr Harawira has done the country a
favour with his outburst by reminding the public about the
Maori Party’s agenda. Although the Maori Party sounds like
it represents Maori it doesn’t. At the 2008 general
election, the Maori Party gained only 56,000 votes, or 2.4
percent of the party vote. The vast majority of Maori voters
chose to support mainstream parties rather than this radical
party with its Maori sovereignty agenda.
The
Maori Party wants Maori to win back control of New Zealand. In
a world where the abolition of privilege is a central tenet of
modern democratic reform, the Maori Party wants to create a
world where the colour of one’s skin determines social and
economic advantage. On its own, the creation of racial
privilege for anyone calling themselves Maori is a
preposterous notion. But with the acquiescence of John Key’s
National Party, it is exceedingly dangerous.
The
leadership of the Maori Party say they are mortified at the
public backlash over their colleague’s behaviour. But what
they are not saying is that they are desperate that this
controversy does not spoil their plan to get their hands on
the jewel in New Zealand’s crown – our foreshore and
seabed – not to mention the $1 billion of “whanau ora”
funding which National is planning to devolve direct to Maori
communities for social services delivery.
Over
the years, the Maori Party leadership has been at great pains
to portray itself as mainstream and reasonable. Co-leaders
Tariana Turia and Peter Sharples have it down to a fine art.
Yet they rely on the public having a short memory, because it
wasn’t too long ago that Ms Turia was being censored by
Prime Minister Helen Clark for her radical views.
In a speech
to the New Zealand Psychological Society Conference in August
2000, Ms Turia, as Labour’s Associate Minister of Maori
Affairs, spoke extensively about the effects of colonisation
on Maori.[1] She called New Zealand’s first British settlers
‘invaders’ and ‘predators’ explaining that they
committed atrocities similar to ‘home invasions’ on their
Maori ‘victims’: “I can see the
connections between 'home invasions' which concern many of us,
to the invasion of the 'home lands' of indigenous people by a
people from another land. What I have difficulty in
reconciling is how 'home invasions' emits such outpourings of
concern for the victims and an intense despising of the
invaders while the invasion of the 'home lands' of Maori does
not engender the same level of emotion and concern for the
Maori victims.”
Tariana
Turia drew comparisons between the European colonisation of
New Zealand and the Nazi holocaust: “Do you consider for
example the effects of the trauma of colonisation? I
understand that much of the research done in this area has
focused on the trauma suffered by the Jewish survivors of the
holocaust of World War Two. What seems to not have received
similar attention is the holocaust suffered by indigenous
people including Maori as a result of colonial contact and
behaviour.”
And
in her speech she reflected on the healing power of money,
wondering how much “compensation” would be needed to
alleviate the “intergenerational damage” done to Maori
people.
This
final point puts the Maori grievance philosophy into
perspective - the perceived wrongs to ancestors who are long
since dead will not be forgotten by their largely non-Maori
relatives (thanks to rapid intermarriage) until each
generation of taxpayers are forced to pay through the nose. A
report prepared for Labour Prime Minister David Lange in 1989
by Richard Hill of the Justice Department documents the
on-going pressure by claimants to settle claims, detailing how
some of them had been settled numerous times.[2] It brings
into question the honesty of today’s claimants who
conveniently forget that their grievances have already been
fully settled years ago.
The 1,835 new claims that were lodged in the final four weeks
before the September 1st cut-off date for historic
claims last year - compared to the total of 1,497 claims that
had been received in the 33 years since the Tribunal was
established - also raises the spectre of opportunistic greed.
This has become a driving force in the Treaty settlement
process as new generations of tribal claimants distort and
embellish their claims in order to win ever greater taxpayer
funded compensation. A good example is the “Treelords”
deal, where at the eleventh hour - when their settlement bill
was in front of Parliament – claimants attempted to include
the ‘airspace’ above Rotorua in order to gain a
controlling interest in a proposed new international
airport.[3]
In
a paper, Ethics and
Values presented in 1999, then Chairman of the Waitangi
Tribunal Chief Justice Edward Durie, expressed his concern
about the veracity of the Treaty settlement process – in
particular that claimants were falsifying the research on
their cases by demanding that unhelpful material was removed
otherwise the researchers would not be paid; that researchers
were being restricted by only being allowed to talk with
people approved by the claimants; and that researchers were
being instructed to change their conclusions. Judge Durie also
warned that the secrecy associated with claims could undermine
public confidence and asked, “Should evidence to the
Waitangi Tribunal be publicly available?”[4]
While
the Treaty settlement process is meant to be open, it is far
from it. Not only are vast sums of taxpayer’s money being
appropriated for settlement purposes, prime taxpayer assets
are being privatised into Maori hands without any consultation
at all. This includes not only prominent buildings, some of
the biggest farms in the country, lakes and rivers, but
National Parks as well.
Just
a few months ago the Department of Conservation warned that
unprecedented quantities of valuable public land is being
handed to Maori as treaty settlements, despite a Cabinet
policy that conservation land was “not readily available for
use in Treaty settlements”.[5] Some 163,000 hectares of
conservation land has been used to settle claims -
three-quarters of it over the last twelve months - and while
most of this land is being retained in public ownership with
iwi management and naming rights, up to 2000ha has been vested into Maori ownership
with no provision for public access at all.
What
is also becoming clear in this whole process whereby public
assets are being transferred into Maori ownership is that assurances
are not worth the paper they are written on. A case in point
relates to Lake Ellesmere - which was included in Ngai
Tahu’s Treaty settlement in 1998 - where assurances were
given by both the iwi and the Government that nothing
would change regarding the public’s right to use the
lake. In spite of that assurance an 8 percent levy on the
earnings of commercial eel fishermen is now being imposed and
while at this stage the permit system does not include
recreational users of the lake, many fear that they too will
soon be required to pay.[6] In fact, locals believe that this
levy is just the start - a forerunner to a nationwide “iwi
tax”. They say that fishermen and boaties in other parts of
the country should prepare for similar taxes being imposed
wherever riverbeds, lakebeds and foreshore areas have been
included in Treaty deals. They say that mooring buoys, jetties
and bridges will soon be fair game for an iwi tax.
With
the Government poised to legislate on the foreshore and
seabed, the developments at Lake Ellesmere should act as a
warning of what’s likely to come if National is foolish
enough to mandate Maori control. For a decade, nothing at Lake
Ellesmere was changed. But eleven years after the settlement,
Maori are not only starting to restrict free public access to
the lake, but they are imposing compulsory taxes on some
users. In spite of the government’s assurances back in 1998
that nothing would change regarding public access to the lake,
the Minister of Fisheries says that there is nothing he can
do, that this is a private matter between the public and the
iwi.
With
the foreshore and seabed playing such a central role in what
it is to be a New Zealander, it is crucial that it remains in
public ownership for all to enjoy. In spite of what the Maori
Party says about customary rights, Maori do
not own the foreshore and seabed. The moment the Treaty was
signed, any customary rights were extinguished and the Crown
became the owner of the foreshore and seabed for the good of
all New Zealanders.[7] It is therefore the responsibility of
the government to ensure that such common good resources stay
in Crown ownership for the benefit of future generations.
When
you strip this whole issue down to its bare bones, as Hone
Harawira has indicated, Maori activism is all about ripping
off the system for as much as they can get. Their interest in
the foreshore and seabed is not really about customary rights,
it’s about title; it has never really been about mana,
it’s about money; and their whole approach to the Treaty is
not really about partnership, it’s about power.
I
have said this before and I will say it again – public
opinion matters. If everyone who reads this newsletter and
shares concerns about the fate of the foreshore and seabed
emailed the Prime Minister to express their views, he would
certainly take notice (click the sidebar link for his address
and that of all other MPs).
This
of course is the purpose of the New Zealand Centre for
Political Research – to research the background of important
public policy issues and outline the facts in order to help
inform public opinion. Those readers who forward these
newsletters on to acquaintances are helping to keep others
informed, so that collectively we can hold the government to
account.
As
President Thomas Jefferson said “I know of no safe
depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the
people themselves; not enlightened enough to exercise their
control with wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take
it from them, but to inform their discretion. Enlighten the
people generally and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind
will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
If
you believe these newsletters contribute to the crucial task
of helping to keep the public better informed then please
support our work by clicking
here>>>.
David
Round, this week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator and law lecturer
at Canterbury University, was deeply offended by Hone
Harawira’s racist remarks. He says, “Harawira
is by his own admission a liar. He considers himself entitled
to cheat the New Zealand taxpayer. He is a foul-mouthed racist
bully.”
He
explains, “His analysis of New Zealand history is wrong.
Compared with many other countries our history has been one of
pretty enlightened and humane attitudes. Some of our policies
~ the undiscriminating generosity of the welfare state, for
example ~ have done at least as much harm as good, but at
least we meant well. Efforts have been made since the late
nineteenth century to redress wrongs done to Maori, and of
course in the last couple of decades we have seen another very
determined attempt to put an end to grievances and put the
past behind us. But as far as Harawira is concerned, we need
not have bothered. He has noticed neither our attempts to be
just nor the spirit in which we have made those attempts.”
To read David's article click here
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FOOTNOTES
1.Tariana Turia, Speech
to the Psychological Society Conference
2.Richard Hill, Settlements
of Major Claims in the 1940s
3.Dominion Post, Maori
claim airspace above Rotorua marae
4. E.T. Durie, Ethics
and Values
5.
Herald, Treaty
land – keep out
6.Dominion Post, Tribe
sets lakebed fishing levy
7. Muriel
Newman, Controversy,
Consultation, and Conservation
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