The crux of this is the treaty interpretations & the whole treaty industry has been based on a draft document that was not the document the maori treaty was translated from.
So all the ambiguity & oh "but this mean this" to maori appears to be bollox (well thats my reading in to it).
The correct document is stored in the Wellington Archives & is being conveniently swept under the table & forgotten about until now it seems ......I noticed the parallels in Brashs speech.
& I wonder if we will see more of this in the news...
(investigate magazine raised the discovery this in, I think, their december issue.)

i have to admit that alot of "maori activists" are actually in reality 3/4 white ken mair for example looks like an italian.

also in regards to radicals on both sides - its been a while since the last neo-nazi skinhead attack occured on a Maori person. yet maoris protesting "greiviances" at waitango day are an annual event.

i personally do agree that land claims have become an "industry" and that issue has to be addressed - The treaty was supposed to bring us together but the exact opposite is happening despite Fmr Maori MP Sir Apirana Ngata quoting in 1940 "Never has any native race anywhere in the world been treated so unusually well like the Maori". New Zealand was in fact the first country in the world to allow its native race to vote and stand for parliament. Australia didnt acheive this status until the 1970s - 110 years after New Zealand pioneered it.

We need to go fwd not back, Pakeha and Maori have lived and fought side-by-side for 164 years despite brief differences in the early days - lets keep our racial unity together and still show New Zealands tradition as a liberal tolerant nation that respects all races and faces.

yes

Yeah, agreed irieman - there's a lot of debate from this speech and a lot of people have been interested enough to really start looking at the issue.

I'm actually being far too negative about our population here, and sorry for intimating you were an idiot - maybe I do hang around with the wrong people - and I can see that Brash is at least promoting discussion. I just have an irrational dislike for the guy and his methods.

Jesus that's just typo babble really

Our proud heritage... still, no-one's asking for sainthood.

If I close my eyes and try really hard, my student loan will go away. I will earn and save a few thousand per year just like people without a student loan. One people.
But really, I have to accept that whatever I make of my life is underpinned/supported by this debt- trickling away at my income stream untill it's paid off. It does not affect the quality of my life, or my rights as a citizen- it IS JUST AN UNDISPUTABLE PART OF my life, and where I am today..

Shouldn't I think the same way about the ground beneath my feet? My people journeyed to this land from Scotland, Ireland, England to make their fortunes here. If there's a chance that they made built their livelihood on land which they were promised but actually had no right to use, what would 'equal rights' or 'one people' have to do with it? It all sounds like a cop-out to avoid or confuse an issue of customary title. OK, gross oversimplification perhaps, but I hope the jist of it got through anyway...

Exactly.

// Like it or not the much disputed queens chain legally abolished
// private ownership below 20m above the high tide line

not true. although I'm slightly confused as to what exactly you mean by 'below 20m above', so might just be misreading your assertion.

anyway, a report commissioned by Rural Affairs Minister Jim Sutton "has found that more than 30 per cent of land adjoining bodies of water is in private ownership...It shows there is no such thing as an uninterrupted Queen's Chain - usually understood to be a 20m strip of public or reserved land - ringing New Zealand waterways. Some private landowners allow people to walk on beaches, but there is no guaranteed access."

So a third of the foreshore is already privately owned - why should the crown continue to deny Maori (at the very least) their customary rights to foreshore they owned before the signing of the Treaty?

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Thanks for the reply Rdor, I think i understand your poisition better now.

im lost rdor. we should not give Maoris or anyone for that matter special rights enshrined in law, yet we should do nothing to make some attempt to redress past illegalitesagainst the indiginous population?clarification needed here please.

ha! I knew you'd be in on this Noizy.

I'm pretty sure Richard Prebble's "I've Been Thinking" talks a lot about the implementaion of the Queens Chain and I can't see him supporting compulsorially acquriring land off people.

i myself am 1/16th Maori (ngai tahu) and don brashs speech i found was arrogant and offensive. Hes only going to create yet encourage a new Generation of Nazi Skinheads who believe themselves to be superior by race. On the Otherside i do feel that alot of Maori Activists are giving Maori - No matter how much maori blood is in them - a bad name. Each group has its minority of Extremists, and this B/S has to end. Teh treaty of Waitangi clearly stated "we are one" lets live up to this article - New Zealanders no matter there skin colour or whatever are New Zealanders.

So is obviouse bias

and the moriori didn't sign the treaty
thats like saying the neanderthal found earth first
they were around when homo spaiens took over
and any there are no moriori left
the last one died 100 years ago in the chatam's

stop trying to be a smart arse sam

Sam, I suggest you read Michael Kings recently published History of NZ. There is a whole section on Pre-History including a chapter on the NZ Myth.

The Moriori did not discover NZ before the Maori. The two cultures shared common ancestors who discovered and settled the Nth, Sth & Chatham Islands but they developed quite separately from one another.

I think the "Moriori myth" would be more convenient, don't you?

ok, I might have a wee spiel on this one now...

for starters, if Dr Brash really believes that kicking the Treaty of Waitangi out the door for being, as he puts it a '...plaything of those who would divide New Zealanders from one another', and that racial harmony will come as a result, then he's living in la la land. Quashing the Treaty and the Tribunal would remove the legal basis for the dozens of cases and billions of dollars of settlements that have been negotiated over the last few decades, opening up an entirely new round of claims (and have lawyers licking their lips at the prospect) - exactly the process that Brash is claiming he will put to an end. It would just move the system away from the Tribunal, and presumably onto the newly formed Supreme Court, which would (like the Tribunal before it), spend 30 years getting its head around the legalities and nuances of Maori claims to the point where it was a relatively smooth and well understood process. Why destroy something that is working smoothly, when the end is (relatively speaking) in sight, for something that is untried and unknown?

Georgina Te Heu Heu's departure from National's Maori Affairs spokesperson role is surely the perfect example of how this will only serve to divide Maori and non-Maori even further - if National's only Maori MP can't agree with her party's Treaty policies then what sort of hope is there that the rest of the maori population (who mostly vote Labour as it is), are going to swing in behind without making a fuss in National take power and end all current and forthcoming Treaty cases? I would hazard a guess: bugger all.

// The crux of this is the treaty interpretations & the whole treaty industry has been
// based on a draft document that was not the document the maori treaty was translated
// from.

That's if you believe the guys who run the celticnz website (who SHOUT TOO MUCH for me to take them SERIOUSLY, intriguing though their conspiracy theories are). The draft they talk about has actually been studied by archivists and historians at the National Archive, and there are two theories as to what it is. One is their 'copy-of-the-final-draft' (that has been covered up conspiracy theory, although National Archive don't mention the cover-up bit, and in fact, it's on display in the Consitution Room, so I don't know how effective a cover-up that is) but they choose to omit an alternate theory...

"...that due to the virtually identical nature of the document to a 'translation' from the published Maori text of the Treaty sent on 20 February by Clendon [US Consul to NZ at the time] to the Secretary of State in Washington (differences being in handwriting, a couple of variations between singular and plural, and the date), it is thought that the Littlewood Treaty is very closely related to that document and is likely to be a translation directly from the Maori copy: the translator having had no access to the English version."

In other words, a translation of a translation.

This is all kinda moot anyway. The Waitangi Tribunal have spent nearly 30 years on this, and they actually work under the principle of 'intent', as opposed to the actual specific wording of the Treaty (for exactly the reasons that are apparent above when dealing with documents that have been translated from one language to another - meanings change. Yes, the UN says 'use the indigenous language' version, but that hasn't been the case in NZ - it would seem, up to now, at least, that NZers are more conciliatory than that and happy to accomodate the other's view - well, everyone except Don, perhaps). It's now pretty well established as to what terms and conditions Maori thought they were signing up to, and likewise the Crown. Finding a way to compromise between what has ultimately transpired to be two quite different viewpoints (seabed and foreshore, anyone?) is (or should be) the job of the Tribunal, aided by legislation that is backed up by the existence of the Treaty.

The foreshore debate is actually a good example of what happens when you remove institutions like the Treaty & Tribunal from the process of settlement, and let the government jump in with their own hastily conceived legislation. It's been a public relations nightmare. Maori are upset. Everyone else is upset. Had things been left to run their course, the issue may well have been resolved without any controversy anywhere. After a couple of years of research at the Tribunal, a bill would have slipped through parliament in 2007 giving Maori 'customary rights' to sections of seabed and foreshore that they would have to proved by application to the Tribunal. As many Maori are pointing out now, no-one - Maori or otherwise - wants to or will deny the wider public access to what are currently public beaches.

No-one for example, seemed to have any issues with the Maori Fisheries Bill (which followed the due process through the Tribunal): a massive bit of legislation that signed over hundreds of millions of dollars of assets and ongoing revenue to Maori. Labour may save the day by fast-tracking legislation that would probably have been the end result of a full Tribunal hearing anyway (big maybe), but with the proper research and consultation, the whole issue might have been dealt with a little more delicately.

Phew. Enough from me. Might pop down to the archives at lunch and check out that Littlewood Treaty.

Well, it was last night actually- so sleeeeeeepy now......... goodnight.

I don't think he's fully explained why he thinks the homogenisation of Maoridom will benefit New Zealand... maybe he's saying that if it's important enough to us, then we wouldn't let it die anyway. National take this point of view with all sorts of social policy, a sort of 'why force charity' stance... thoughts?

//And if so who is disadvantaged by this? The poor? Or Maori? Or both? Where are the figures?

was flicking thru this week's Listener - they had a good article on this, think it was the Economy page ... Noel Easton?

//Bollocks.

Well, simple examples are prone to the kind of holes you've outlined- but if you'd watched the interview then you would have seen the angle she was taking and the response she was trying to get from Brash, which you have to admit was interesting. She was hardly asking him 'don't you think maori people are like endangered flightless birds?'

I saw the interview on TV... so I've got the idea of where she was heading with her line of questioning. Yet, if what you say is correct, I don't see how you can compare Maori to the Kakapo... yet at the same time NOT compare Maori to the Kakapo. There is where I loose ya.... each to their own tho huh?

As for the name.... it's not a race thing. It's due to my owning a white dog (by the name of Whitedog) and being at a loss as to what kinda nickname to use!! It's not some kind of misguided white pride bullshit... rest assured!!