New Zealand; the Benefits of Colonisation

This is a chapter from the Tross Publishing book, New Zealand; the Benefits of Colonisation.

This chapter explains how tikanga was never a system of law and exposes some of the present day judges who are perpetrating this lie in order to undermine our long-held rights.


Chapter 16
INTRODUCTION OF LAW
“That wonderful construction of good sense and good judgement”.
Winston Churchill on English common law.

O ne of the things that Captain Cook noticed about the people of
New Zealand was that they were “without any settled form of
government”. 1

When Samuel Marsden and John Nicholas visited New Zealand in
1814-5 they too noticed the total lack of laws or a system of law. Of the
natives’ superstitions Nicholas wrote, “It serves them in the absence
of laws as the only security for the protection of persons and property,
giving them an awful sacredness which no one dares to violate.” 2

While staying at Kerikeri on his last visit to New Zealand in 1837
Marsden was approached by Wiremu Hau, a young chief who had
succeeded Hongi. Hau presented the missionary with a letter, appealing
for the establishment of some form of law in New Zealand. “Sir, will
you give us a law. This is the purpose of my address to you.

First, if we say ‘let the cultivation be fenced, and a man through
laziness does not fence [and] should pigs get into his plantation, is it
right for him to kill them? Do you give us a law in this matter.

Second, Again, should pigs get into fenced land, is it right to kill or
rather to tie them until the damage they have done is paid for? Will
you give us a law in this.

Third again, should the husband of a woman die and she afterwards
wish[es] to be married to another, should the natives of unchanged
heart bring a fight against us – would it be right for us to stand up to
resist them on account of their wrongful interference? Will you give
us a law in this also.

Fourth, Again, in our wickedness one man has two wives but, after
he has listened to Christ, he puts away one of them and gives her to
another man to wife. Now, should a fight be brought against us, are we
in this case to stand up to fight? Give us a law in this.

Again, should two men strive, one with the other, give me a law in
this. My mode is to collect all the people together and judge them for
their unlawful fighting, and also for wrongfully killing pigs. Therefore
I say that the man who kills pigs for trespassing on his plantation,
having neglected to fence, ought rather to pay for the pigs so killed.
Will you give us a law in this.

Sixth, but there is another. Should a man who is in the Church come
in a fight against us. Give us a law in this. Another thing…..slaves
exalting themselves against their masters. Will you give us a law in
this also.” 3

From this discussion it was obvious that the concept of law was
something that the natives were ignorant of but wanted to learn about.
This fits in with what Rev. J. Buller wrote of them. “Their own rude
law had been one of brute force.” 4

“Without the aid of iron the most trifling tool or utensil could only
be procured by an enormously disproportionate outlay of labour in
its construction and, in consequence, became precious to a degree
scarcely conceivable by people of civilised and wealthy countries.
This great value attached to personal property of all kinds increased
proportionally the temptation to plunder; and, where no law existed or
could exist of sufficient force to repress the inclination, every man as
a natural consequence became a soldier……

Their intelligence causes them theoretically to acknowledge the
benefits of law, which they see established amongst us; but their
hatred of restraint causes them practically to abhor and resist its full
enforcement amongst themselves…..people to whom, for their own
safety and their preservation, we must give new laws and institutions,”
wrote F.E. Maning, who also said, “At the time I am speaking of [pre-
1840] the only restraint on such people [violent ones] was the fear of
retaliation.” 6

“The disunited state of the tribes and their jealousy of each other
render it impossible to enact laws,” wrote Captain Hobson to Governor
Bourke of New South Wales after visiting New Zealand in 1837 on
HMS Rattlesnake. 7

“Pre-February, 1840, with no law and order, New Zealand was
literally in a state of anarchy. Without law there could not be property
rights; property could be taken and you could be killed without
consequence,” wrote Andy Oakley in his book, Once We Were One. 8
And John Robinson in When Two Cultures Meet; the New Zealand
Experience: “In the absence of any codified law or higher authority,
there was no rule of law, no guarantee of safety. The response to a
perceived wrong would be either to attack and thus to revenge that
wrong, or to face one another, starting with warlike challenges, or
following with argumentative dispute.” 9

In 1842 Te Whero Whero, who later became the first Maori “king”,
speaking of the changes brought about by the Treaty of Waitangi, said
to his people at Kaitohe, “And now I bring you this new treasure. We
have brought law, a new law, to save us from killing and robbing each
other. I will take this, my treasure, up Waipa, through every bend in the
river. Friends, do not think little of what I say.” 10

“It was the law of Christianity that put an end to our cannibal
practices,” Tamihana Te Rauparaha told the Kohimarama conference
of chiefs in 1860. 11 Another chief, Hapurona Tohikura of Ngatiapa
told the same conference, “My heart embraced the laws of the
Pakeha….The law put an end to our evils.” 12 And Wiremu Te Whero
of Ngatinaho: “The Governor came, bringing with him the laws”. 13

Himiona (Tuhourangi, Tarawera) told the same conference, “After this
came the law. I saw its benefit and adopted it forthwith. The reason
why I approved of it was a means of correcting all that went wrong.”
Pererika: “Missionaries were sent to us, and then the Law appeared”. 14

In the words of Sir Apirana Ngata, probably the greatest mind that
Maoridom has produced and whose face adorns the current $50 note,
“Many claims were made [pre-1840] by various Europeans for the
one piece of land sold to each of them by various Maori chiefs. Where
was the law in those times to decide what was right?…..The Maori
did not have any government when the European first came to these
islands. There was no unified chiefly authority over man or land……
How could such an organisation as a Government be established under
Maori custom?” 15

There was no government. As Charles Darwin observed in 1835, “It
is, however, incorrect to use the term ‘government’ where absolutely
no such thing exists…Proper laws are, of course, quite unknown.”
16 And Augustus Earle in 1827, “I could not discover that the New
Zealanders had any universal form of government.” 17

“They [the natives] regarded with admiration the peacefulness
established by our habits of law and order, and displayed an almost
unhoped-for degree of good temper in yielding their assent to the new
order of things, which forbade the infliction of summary punishment as
vengeance by the offended party according to their former customs,”
wrote Edward Jerningham Wakefield. 18

It was certainly an improvement on their “former customs”; a dispute
between two chiefs in Northland pre-1840 resulted in a hearing at the
house of one of them. In the words of F.E. Maning, “The arguments
on both sides were very forcible; so much so that in the course of the
arbitration our chief and thirty of his principal witnesses were shot
dead in a heap and sixty others badly wounded, and my friend’s house
and store blown up and burnt to ashes.” 19

In view of these many and largely eye-witness accounts that there was
neither laws nor a system of law in New Zealand prior to the Treaty
of Waitangi it is both astounding and alarming to record that there are
forces in the current Maori sovereignty movement and its supporting
cast that propagate the utterly false statement that there was a system
of law in New Zealand prior to the Treaty.

Among the worst offenders are three judges of the Supreme Court
of New Zealand, Joe Williams, Chief Justice Helen Winkelmann and

Susan Glazebrook who, in the Peter Ellis appeal of 2020, said that
“tikanga was the first law of New Zealand” which, as this chapter
shows, is not true.

Williams is the first part-Maori judge of this, the highest court in
the land since the Labour government of Helen Clark so unwisely
ended our age-old right of appeal to the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council in London – a more objective and competent court
than the gimcrack institution that replaced it. Williams is a former
chairman of the Waitangi Tribunal, where he “distinguished” himself
by enthusiastically pushing the WAI 262 Report, recommending that
ownership of all New Zealand’s native plants and animals be taken
away from the public and handed over to that small group of New
Zealanders who can claim a smidgeon of Maori blood. This Report is
the epitome of racism, vengeance, nastiness and theft.

In a 2013 speech titled Lex Aotearoa, Williams “described tikanga
Maori as Aotearoa’s first law; for 700 years it governed society on our
islands. When English colonisers imported their common law system –
Aotearoa’s second law – tikanga was mostly pushed aside. The Treaty
of Waitangi was supposed to bring the two systems together.” 20

This is completely untrue. Tikanga was not a system of law before

1840. It was merely a word for the customs of various tribes and it
differed from tribe to tribe, from place to place, and from time to time.

Tikanga was more a collection of cultural habits of these Stone Age
people and it was heavily laced with revenge (utu), superstition
(tapu), plunder (muru), violence and bloodshed. In an 1825 meeting
at Kerikeri between missionaries and seven leading Ngapuhi chiefs
Hongi Hika “described how the imperatives of tikanga prevented
them from giving up war as a way of life.” 21 Is this what Williams
wants? A “system of law” tikanga certainly was not. It did not have
courts, cases, precedents, clarity or consistency. Or even writing!!!

“We do not want to share the failure of current law, where key words
such as tikanga shift around, with the meaning chosen according
to the requirements of a Maori litigant. It is poor law when groups

can plunder the public purse behind a smokescreen of ambiguous
language,” wrote Dr. John Robinson in When Two Cultures Meet; the
New Zealand Experience. 22

And as for Wiliams saying that the Treaty of Waitangi was meant to
bring this non-law system of tikanga together with the common law;
that is not only false but utterly preposterous as the whole point of the
Treaty was to bring to New Zealand a system of law that hitherto it
had not had. There is not a single word in the Treaty or its Preamble
that states or even implies that tikanga was to have any place in the
new British colony. Even if tikanga was a “system of law”, it could not
co-exist with English common law since it is not possible to have two
different systems of law operating side by side in the same jurisdiction.

Despite being ruled by the same monarch since 1603 and being the
same nation since the Act of Union of 1707 England and Scotland
have different systems of law – the common law in England and an
amalgam of common law and Roman law in Scotland. Completely
separate jurisdictions. No one has ever tried to run them together as
that would never work. It would work even less were English common
law in New Zealand to run side by side with the non-law system of
tikanga, which is not much more than the primitive practices and
beliefs of pre-1840 tribal witch doctors.

In making the false assertion that tikanga was a system of law Williams
was either woefully ignorant of the law, history and constitution of
New Zealand or he was being deliberately deceitful. In either of these
events it is questionable as to whether Williams is a fit and proper
person to be a lawyer, let alone a judge.

Williams tried to introduce the fiction of tikanga in the Peter Ellis case
in the Supreme Court and was supported in his error by another judge,
Susan Glazebrook. In this case these ignorant and mischievous judges
applied the non-law tikanga instead of our common law – “the greatest
disgrace in our legal history” (Sir Robert Jones) while prominent
lawyer and ex-ACT M.P., Stephen Franks, said, “They [the judges]
have made, without any mandate from the people they now intend to
rule, the right to make law. They are judges who want to be kings.” 23

And, just as cancer spreads, so too does this judicial falsehood that
tikanga was a pre-1840 “system of law”.

In the High Court case of Edwards (claims by tribes for large swathes
of foreshore and seabed in the eastern Bay of Plenty) Judge Peter
Churchman ignored the clearly stated intention of the democratically
elected Parliament of New Zealand by putting the non-law tikanga
above the requirement in the Marine and Coastal Area Act (s. 58) that
a claimant must prove that its members have “exclusively used and
occupied their claimed area from 1840 to the present day”.

“Up until the assertion of sovereignty by Great Britain in 1840 the sole
system of law in New Zealand was tikanga Maori,” he falsely asserted
before waffling on about the “earth mother” and the “sky father”……
“with the earth being created when these two were thrust apart by their
children” and other such juvenile Maori witch-doctory which should
have no place in a modern court of law. By basing his judgement on a
fictional “system of law” that never existed Churchman’s whole rotten
judgement seems to be based on a lie.

Since the claimants could not succeed in accordance with the clearly
stated words of the Act, that should have been the end of it. Instead,
Churchman said, “The task for the court in considering whether the
requirements of s. 58 (1) (a) of the Act have been met is therefore not
to attempt to measure the factual situation against Western property
rights or even the tests at common law for the establishment of
customary land rights. The critical focus must be on tikanga and the
question of whether or not the specified area was held in accordance
with the tikanga that has been established.”

He then passed the whole thing over to a couple of part-Maoris, Hiria
Hape and Doug Hauraki, who are not part of the justice system but
who have spent their careers in advancing Maori culture and Maori
interests, as to whether these applicants, who failed to succeed under
the Act, held their claim “in accordance with tikanga”. So, why do
we have judges on Churchman’s salary of $471,100 plus unbelievable
perks when the case can be more or less decided by two outsiders?

In the words of former judge, Anthony Willy, commenting on this
judgement, “It is simply not tenable to import spiritual beliefs and
ancient codes of conduct into the fabric of the contemporary common
law of New Zealand. The law must be certain.” 24 In the not too
distant past New Zealand had judges – like Judge Willy – who knew,
understood and valued the law. Now we have types like Churchman
who ignore the law and in the process take away the rights of the
people of New Zealand so as to indulge the greedy claims of small,
private groups of iwi. Churchman’s mistake was based on the premise
that tikanga was a system of law when it plainly was not.

Another deeply flawed judge who ties his flag to the non-law system
of tikanga rather than to our tried and tested common law is Grant
Powell who, before he became a judge was deeply involved in acting
for claimants to the Waitangi Tribunal. One has to wonder whether he
was the best choice to be the judge in the case of Reeder and Others,
dated 12th October, 2021, which gave some tribal groups rights of
customary marine title to the coast near Tauranga.

Powell also ignored the Marine and Coastal Area Act and said that
the test of whether the claimants could prove exclusive use and
occupation of the claimed area must be viewed “through a tikanga
lens that reflects the continuity of customary relationship with the
land” and that the nature of tikanga colours the words”, thus allowing
a lower threshold than in the Act. 25

He really gave the game away and seems to have exposed his own
bias when he said that the court must take a protective approach to
customary rights and interpret these liberally in favour of indigenous
groups (and against the rest of us). The Act does not say that. This
judgement is every bit as dodgy as that of Churchman and does
nothing to arrest the rapidly sinking trust in the judiciary by ordinary
New Zealanders who have had their traditional rights shafted in so
many ways by defective, if not biased, judges.

This nonsense and injustice of accepting tribal hearsay stories in
violation of the well-established rules of evidence was even applied
to private property in the case of Raikes v Hastings D.C. et al. (23

November, 2022) by High Court judge Christine Grice. She restricted
the use of land on a private farm on the mere hearsay of a greedy
bunch of 21st century Europeans with a small amount of Maori blood
in them masquerading as a “tribe”.

Without critically evaluating their “evidence” (tribal sayings and
songs, proverbs and carvings), she accepted or did not discard their
uncorroborated stories in support of their claim, including the lie that a
tohunga once threw a stick up to the top of a mountain, which accepted
this “gift” which then caused a proliferation of bird life, which caused
the “tribe” centuries ago to walk across the Raikes’ farm. In taking
the side of these shameless opportunists Grice violated the property
rights of the owners of the farm. Such are the depths of ignorance and
backwardness that our once rational and trusted law have reached on
the watch of types like Christine Grice.

These judges – Winkelmann, Williams, Glazebrook, Grice, Churchman
and Powell – are playing fast and loose with the law so as to advance
the interests of one minority race group at the expense of all other
New Zealanders. The whole basis of law is being overturned by judges
who are effectively carrying out a coup d’etat against both the law and
the constitution. The function of a judge is to apply the laws that are
enacted by the democratically elected Parliament and not to make the
law and certainly not to break the law. They have discarded the very
law which their oaths of office require them to uphold. They need to
be reminded of their proper function very forcefully if they are not to
become the enemies of freedom and democracy.

In choosing to ditch tikanga, utu and other forms of violence, and
embrace for the first time a system of law that provided enforceable
personal and property rights, the chiefs of 1840 were acting wisely; in
fact, they were going for the top prize in exchanging their Stone Age
culture for the legal system of England that was the most advanced
and civilised in the whole world and which placed more importance
on individual rights and humane values than any other. The rigid
Code Napoleon of France was not – and still is not – a better system
than English common law. As Sir Apirana Ngata said in his speech at

Waitangi on the centenary of the Treaty in 1940, “Let me acknowledge
first that, in the whole world I doubt whether any native race has been
so well treated by a European people as the Maori.”

It beggars belief that, after nearly two centuries of living successfully
and prosperously under English common law, a clique of out-of-
control judges like Winkelmann, Churchman, Powell, Williams and
Glazebrook should try to reverse the wisdom of the chiefs of 1840 by
falsely insisting that tikanga was a “pre-1840 system of law.”

In the words of John Robinson, “The Maori were fortunate that it
was the British, at that time when the ideas of equality and universal
humanity were flourishing, who were the dominant new force in the
South Pacific. There were many people who would have used their
superior weapons to kill them and take their land without a second
thought, to conquer and enslave them (Cortez in Mexico, Pizarro in
Peru and the Belgians in the Congo), slaughter them (as Alexander the
Great did to all who opposed him, as Maori did in the Chathams). If
we consider all societies throughout history – like the Spanish in the
seventeenth century – the British were remarkably considerate.” 26

Article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi gave all the people of New Zealand

native and settler – all the rights of British subjects and so liberated
the natives from a state of fear and anarchy – something that Joe
Williams, Grice, Glazebrook, Winkelmann, Churchman and Powell
should be celebrating instead of trying to switch the clock back to a
past that no one except those of ill-will could possibly want.

The rule of law not only guarantees individual rights such as habeas
corpus and free speech but, through the law of contract, etc. has
provided the foundation for the economic growth and improvement in
living standards that have transformed New Zealand into the modern
and comfortable society that we know today. As Apirana Ngata stated,
“British law has been the greatest benefit bestowed by the Queen on
the Maori people”. 27 Not tikanga which, based on the power of the
chief and the emotion of the tribe, does not recognise personal rights,
private property or any civilised standards of behaviour and which,
in its application, crushes the individual. The facts are very simple.

Before 1840 there were no laws or system of law in New Zealand;
since 1840 all New Zealanders have lived under English law, the
finest system of law yet conceived by man. It is a treasure that must
be preserved
.

New Zealand; the Benefits of Colonisation, of which this chapter is a part, is available from Tross Publishing for $30 (incl. postage within NZ). See: www.trosspublishing.com

KEEP YOUR MIND; DITCH THE TV

By Freedom Freak.

Some years ago I was visiting a friend in Canterbury who lived in a large, colonial style house. He was showing me over the place and was justly proud of his extensive library. I thought of Cicero’s words, “So long as you have a library and a garden, that’s all you need”. Then there was a rather dark, inner room that contained various pieces of furniture, including one that had a large, black dust cover over it. “What’s that?” I asked. “That’s my television set,” he explained. “I never watch it except for Election Night and maybe a Test match. So that’s why I store it in here.”

I was impressed and when I got home and looked at my own idiot box, which hadn’t been turned on for several years, I decided to get rid of it. I took it to the tip but they wouldn’t accept it as television sets contain some parts that are likely to pollute the ground. I was then directed to a recycling centre. They said that they would take it but I had to pay $40 for the trouble. Very cheap for ridding myself of such an unwanted item. 

The reason why I stopped watching TV was because the TV1 News, which I used to watch, was becoming indoctrinating rather than informative. In fact, New Zealand must be the only country on earth where the ads are better than the programmes.

To save the hour every day that one would otherwise be exposing one’s mind to the “News”, which is filtered by a bunch of small-minded, intolerant, Woke know-alls until it is more their opinion than what actually happens, is a gift worth having. More time for gardening, reading, socialising or just running on the beach. There are 24 hours in a day, of which around eight are for sleeping, leaving only twelve for us to enjoy. Why would anyone want to waste one twelfth of one’s life having their minds manipulated in such a way? It is not so much what the TV moguls deign to show us but what they keep back. You wouldn’t let them cut off your leg and take it away, so why should they be able to destroy your mind – probably the most important part that we are born with? Television has been in New Zealand only since the 1960s. Before that the country got along very well without it and people had more time for exercise and leisure.

TV1 News, biased, trivial and unprofessional, was the reason why I ceased to be a tele-moron as its smarmy newsreaders tried to talk down to the audience as if we were all children. I had not polluted my mind with this propaganda for some years until I saw an excerpt from it on the Stop Co-Governance blog on 6th August, 2023.

This particular “news item” was not a news item but part of a campaign to denigrate the Stop Co-governance movement and its founder, Julian Batchelor. They featured his 26 page booklet, of which at that time 350,000 had been printed. That must really have frightened the Woke brigade that have been trying to keep the potentially explosive Co-governance project under the radar until such time as it is clamped down on all of us who will quickly realise that it is not “co-governance” at all but the power of the ever greedy tribal elite to have a veto over all government decisions. In other words, tribal power and a reversal of the democracy and equality that were enshrined in Article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi. Suppression of the arguments in Julian Batchelor’s booklet, rather than engagement with them, was clearly what inspired the news item.

They damned this informative booklet as “alarming misinformation” and “dangerous speech” (certainly “dangerous” to the tribal elite) and making “unfounded claims that the Maori elites are trying to take over the country”. That is not an unfounded claim as the He Puapua Report specifically shows that the plan is for “Maori” (code for the tribal elite)  to take full control of New Zealand by 2040 – a goal that is also the aim of the Maori Party.

Not content with these words of condemnation, the item went on to interview a newly arrived immigrant to New Zealand, Sanjana Hattotuwa of the “Disinformation Project”. In broken English he screamed that the booklet was “racist rhetoric” and “colonialism’s long shadow”. Well, those two statements are certainly “disinformation” and so the Project is aptly named.

The one common thread of these broad-brush accusations was that not a single instance of “alarming misinformation” or “dangerous speech” or “racist rhetoric” from the 26 page booklet was cited in the news item for the simple reason that it doesn’t contain any. If there were any lies or “misinformation” in the booklet, it would have been easy to show them. 

Having not watched this awful channel for some years, what really disturbed me was that there are enough people who must still watch TV1 News as it has not yet gone off the air for lack of viewers.

Although the “news item” attacked the booklet, it made no effort to mention what the issues of co-governance are, the most obvious of which is the end of accountable democracy and equality before the law. TV1’s aim was a cynical attempt to silence debate on this fundamentally important issue. People need to know the truth about co-governance, the booklet explains this and so it must be condemned. Full stop. End of story. How dare any citizen want to obtain information from a “non-official” source instead of from TV1 News.

Probably the most important reason for a news channel to fall so far short of honest and objective reporting is the Media Bribe – the $55 million “Public Interest Journalism Fund” which the profligate, manipulating and indoctrinating government of Jacinda Ardern threw to the media on certain conditions. One of these conditions is that they must report “Treaty matters” on the basis that the Treaty of Waitangi was a “partnership” between the Crown and Maori, which is a complete lie as several of Tross Publishing’s books have shown – Twisting the Treaty, One Treaty; One Nation, and The Treaty; Basic Facts”.

A lying media are not only dangerous to the nation, its economy and its future but also to those who expose themselves to it by switching on the TV News each night at 6 p.m. We are all born with a beautiful brain. It needs to think for itself rather than have thoughts pumped into it by a manipulating and mischief-making media.

When a certain well-known Wellington sportsman was going off to the Second World War he decided to give himself a great send-off by having about eight old pianos put on Lyall Bay beach. Then, come darkness, he and his friends had a “piano smashing party”. Surely it is time that we started to work together and have TV smashing parties on the beach, in the parks and in the bush. “Keep Your Mind; Ditch The TV”.