Book Review: ‘Who Really Broke the Treaty?’

The answer to the book’s title question has huge implications for New Zealand

By Roger Childs

Waikanae’s John Robinson is one of the country’s best historians. He has written more than ten books on New Zealand history covering various subjects related to the last 200 years and the present scene. They are all based on extensive research with an emphasis on primary sources and the observations of people writing at the time. He rejects Maori oral history as being unreliable, a conclusion endorsed by the great Maori writer Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck)

Basically, John Robinson says that it was Maori who broke the Treaty and he provides copious evidence to back his conclusions, which begs the question what have we got a Waitangi Tribunal for?

Set up in 1975 the Tribunal has been investigating and ruling on breaches of the Treaty by the Crown and European settlers. Maori breaches are not considered – murdering civilians, robbing goods and stock from farmers and other settlers, burning down homesteads and farm buildings, and rebelling against the government.

Personal experience

The author has first-hand experience of the dishonesty of the Tribunal. As an expert in demography (the study of population) some years ago he was asked to provide evidence linking the population decline of Maori after the signing of the Treaty to the introduction of British control and subsequent colonization. After extensive research, John Robinson could find no evidence of such a correlation, but concluded that the slaughter of thousands of women and girls in the pre-1840 inter-tribal wars meant that after 1840 there was a shortage of potential Maori mothers and a consequent decline in population numbers.

The Waitangi Tribunal would not pay him unless he changed his findings. (This also happened to academic Giselle Byrnes.) This patent dishonesty of the Tribunal set John Robinson on a path of writing books that rejected the falsification of our country’s story and set out to tell the truth about New Zealand’s History.

A dishonest and incompetent organization

In examining the breaches of the Treaty, the author highlights the many shortcomings of the Waitangi Tribunal and how it has steadily grown into a self-perpetuating racist body with the goal of dividing the country and promoting the special rights and status of part-Maori.

Robinson covers how the organization:

  • uses a variation of the unauthorized English “Freeman Treaty” to make decisions instead of relying on the only valid agreement: Te Tiriti o Waitangi which was written in Te Reo;
  • fails to acknowledge the manifold breaches of Te Tiriti by Maori:
  • encourages Maori groups to “find” evidence of the Crown and other authorities disadvantaging Maori:
  • has made judgements based on inaccurate evidence, which have given hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to tribes, and divided the nation in a New Zealand version of apartheid.

He favours the immediate closing down of the Tribunal and an end to the “Treaty industry” gravy train. He laments the fact that mainstream media support the status quo and will not objectively examine current Tribunal issues.

What lies ahead?

The author is not confident that the present National-led Coalition will turn the tide. He likes the idea of David Seymour’s proposals to enshrine three basic principles about New Zealand in our “constitution” – upholding sovereignty, furthering democracy and supporting equality for all. How could anyone not support such fundamental beliefs?

However, he is dismayed that Prime Minister Luxon is lukewarm on the ideas of having a referendum on the principles, and given a positive majority, passing legislation to embed them in our constitution.

John Robinson is concerned that most of the country’s population are complacent about the current situation – New Zealanders lack an understanding of the shared ideas that bind a nation together. The last two sentences of the book spell out what needs to happen. New Zealand must collectively wake up and turn from separatism, racism and apartheid to equality and unity. Until then, the majority will continue to be subordinate, and the possibility of racial conflict will remain.

An important book to read

Who Really Broke the Treaty is right up to date and amongst several useful appendices are the Coalition Agreements which spell out, among many policy goals, ACT’s and New Zealand First’s wishes related to dealing with the present inequality and division. National has agreed, but is currently dragging its feet on taking action.

John Robinson’s timely 158 page book is fluently written and carefully researched with supporting footnotes and a comprehensive set of references. Ask for it at your local bookshop or library and if, because of political bias, they don’t stock Tross publications, tell them it’s time to stop their boycott on the company’s many excellent books. Alternatively, you can order online at https://www.trosspublishing.com/ and purchase the book for $35, postage paid.

THE NATIONAL PARTY AND ITS “PRINCIPLES”

One would have thought that any political party with any pride or integrity would not be averse to publishing its founding principles. Not so the National Party of New Zealand since so many of its current policies are in violation of its founding principles. 

Like the three Articles of the Treaty of Waitangi the founding principles of the National Party are both clear and simple: To promote good citizenship and self-reliance; to combat communism and socialism; to maintain freedom of contract; to encourage private enterprise; to safeguard individual rights and the privilege of ownership; to oppose interference by the State in business and State control of industry”.

However, don’t go looking for these principles on the current National Party website as they are not to be found there. Instead, they have been replaced by a whole lot of wishy-washy phrases that might just as well have come from their fellow socialist party, Labour. Rather than combatting socialism they have embraced it by their policies of high taxation to support rampant welfare.

One of their four “core values” on their current website is “equal opportunity for all” and yet ever since the disastrous premierships of Jim Bolger, John Key and Mr. Key’s shadow, Bill English, they have blatantly violated this “core value” by splashing special rights and privileges on one ethnic section of society, viz. part-Maoris. This expression is used deliberately and in the interests of accuracy since there are no ethnic Maoris in existence. They are extinct since over the generations since colonisation Maoris have preferred to breed with Europeans rather than with each other. The last full-blooded Maori died in the 1950s and to-day there are not even any half-bloods. All those “Maoris” claiming special rights for “Maori” are, in fact, Europeans with some Maori blood in them – people like the multi-millionaire Irish New Zealander, Stephen (alias “Tipene”) O’Regan who is only one-sixteenth “Maori” while his daughter, Hannah (or “Hana”), who has also been on the Maori gravy train, is only one thirty-second “Maori” – less than 4%.

Here are some examples of how the National Party has honoured its “core value” of “equal opportunity for all” New Zealanders. The 1991 Resource Management Act forces local authorities to have an agreement with their local part-Maoris to co-govern with the democratically elected local authority. These part-Maoris have been made “official guardians” of the country’s natural resources which used to belong to us all and should still do so. The Act made Maori land exempt from the subdivision restrictions that are imposed on the rest of us. It also gave the tribes special rights to geothermal waters – which used to belong to every New Zealander and should still do so. Not surprisingly the part-Maoris who have wormed their way on to these committees have wielded their new powers against white property owners at every opportunity. 

Their trick is to claim sites of “special cultural significance” on people’s private land even though such site might just be an old rubbish dump where these Stone Age people threw their old fish bones. Then, to do any work on your own land – e.g. erect a carport – you must get a “Cultural Impact Assessment” done (cost: $4,000, with bigger sums demanded for commercial properties). This is just a gift to some part-Maori opportunist masquerading as some sort of cultural “expert”. Then, to gain consent, one might have to negotiate with up to eighteen different tribes, all with their hands out in one way or another. At least 3,661 such sites have been marked in Auckland. (For more on this, see Peter Cresswell’s chapter, “Property, Plunder, Planning – and Auckland’s Taniwha Tax” in the Tross Publishing book, “One Treaty; One Nation”).

In 1992 The Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Act gave part-Maoris special food gathering rights in rivers, etc. even though so many of them eat at McDonalds.

The next year came the Biosecurity Act. Requiring the Minister to consult with local part-Maoris when making biosecurity plans even though these people know next to nothing about biosecurity and do not have a broad, national viewpoint such as is required for such matters. The year after that came the Maritime Transport Act requiring that, in the event of a marine oil spill, local part-Maoris must be consulted on contingency plans. Why? What would they know about oil?

In 1998 came one of the worst instances of violating the principle of “equal opportunity for all” when the Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement Act barred the public from various former public fishing spots in the South Island at various times of the year so that only the pale-faced part-Maoris of the O’Regans’ tribe could fish there. 

In violation of the principle of accountable democracy the National government, under the malign influence of Christopher Finlayson, created “co-governance” of the Waikato River, the Waipa River and the Kaituna River, thus creating the precedents for more of the democracy sapping and racist principle of “co-governance” – e.g. the Hawkes Bay Regional Planning Committee Act of 2015.

The greatest theft of all – the largest theft of public rights and resources in New Zealand history – was the notorious Marine and Coastal Area Act. This thieving and racist statute granted special rights over the beaches and coast of New Zealand to groups of part-Maoris, including their right to exclude the public from certain parts of the coast that have been publicly accessible ever since the fortunate establishment of British rule in 1840. 

By various Acts passed in 2015 (Ngai Takoto Claims Settlement Act, Te Aupouri Claims Settlement Act and Te Rarawa Claims Settlement Act) part-Maoris were given rights over Conservation land that were not available to other New Zealanders. 

The salient fact about all these legislative privileges for one particular ethnic group at the expense of the rest of us is that they were all made by National governments. Admittedly Labour governments have not been any better but these examples show how utterly dishonest and corrupt the National Party has been and still is in asking for votes on the basis of its “core values” when at the first whiff of grapeshot it runs like a frightened rat and ditches its professed “principles” or “core values” along the way.

The truth is that the ACT Party and NZ First are closer to National’s founding principles than the National Party itself. It seems to have only one principle and that is to stay in office in betrayal of the purpose for which it was founded in the 1930s. It is not opposed to socialism, one of its most important founding principles, and it has lied to the public for far too long. Such a party can only be described as a fraud.

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