A talk given by John of Tross Publishing to Voices for Freedom at Nelson on 20th September, and at Blenheim on 21st September, 2025.
Estimated time to read: 40 minutes.
Modern New Zealand was founded in 1840 on British principles, one of the most important being equality before the law or, if you like, One Law For All. In other words, the same laws and rights for everyone – both Europeans and Maoris – and not different laws for different groups based on race.
For the next century and a half New Zealanders prospered under British law, and in the two world wars our servicemen laid down their lives for the freedom, democracy and equality before the law that underpinned New Zealand society. However, around the 1980s the train started to go off the rails as new doctrines were introduced that sought to drive a knife through our stable, colour-blind society based on equal rights, and to replace it with a new regime of superior, race-based rights for part-Maoris who can claim somewhere in their many hued ancestry at least a teaspoonful of Maori blood.
This racist concept is now destroying some of our age-old rights, increasing our taxes to pay for unfounded “Treaty settlements”, swiping resources from the public and handing them over to private tribes, enriching a new tribal elite of very pale-faced part-Maoris, and driving our best and brightest overseas to Australia and elsewhere.
This remarkable transition of New Zealand society has been achieved by a bullying, lying and self-enriching tribal elite, aided and abetted by feckless governments both National and Labour, crooked judges and an air-headed media that knows everything about the trivialities of the moment but nothing about New Zealand’s history, constitution and heritage. However, the biggest factor in this disaster is the gullibility, ignorance and cowardice of the masses of the New Zealand people who continue to vote for the two main parties who are fleecing us of our rights and national resources.
In this talk to-night I am going to state some historical and constitutional truths so that at least those who are present will have an opportunity to see things in a different way from the lies and propaganda that are churned out by our smug, biased and dishonest mainstream media.
To understand the issues we do need to go back into history but only briefly. At the time of Captain Cook’s first visit in 1769 the Maoris were a Stone Age people, that definition applying to people who still used stone for their tools and weapons because they had not yet invented metal. In fact, the fish-hooks and nails that Cook’s sailors traded with them for food were the first metal they had ever seen. Nor had they invented the wheel or footwear (they ran everywhere, even into battle, in their bare feet) or even furniture for their huts – not even chairs or seats as they always sat on the ground, which was often damp.
Over the next few decades the Maoris came more and more into contact with the outside world – sometimes serving as crew on the sailing ships that plied the Tasman Sea. However, the early years of the nineteenth century also saw an escalation of their inter-tribal wars. There were approximately 3,000 battles and raids fought among the tribes between 1807 and 1845 in which one third to one half of the Maori population were killed. “This was a time of genocide; a true holocaust”, wrote Doctor John Robinson in his book, “Unrestrained Slaughter; The Maori Musket Wars 1800-1840.”
From about 1820 onwards the tribes were slowly brought round to the view espoused by the missionaries that their endless tribal warfare was wasteful and destructive and so they asked for a single powerful sovereign to rule over all the tribes so as to give them the peace, law and unity that they were unable to achieve themselves. Due to the ever growing strength of the New South Wales colony and its increasing penetration into New Zealand through trade, that sovereign could only be Queen Victoria.
The chiefs were particularly attracted to the British concept of property rights since such did not exist in Maoridom. Any property was held by might only and not by right; a tribe could be dispossessed of everything it had in the event of an attack by a stronger tribe. In fact, nobody owned anything in any legal sense; there was no law apart from the law of the spear. By conceding the right of the British to rule as the sovereign power the chiefs would have their lands guaranteed to them for the first time. Thus they were happy to exchange the sovereignty of the land for the protection of their property against their tribal enemies. This resulted in the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840.
It was a simple document. Its first Article ceded the sovereignty of New Zealand to the British Crown absolutely and forever. The second Article guaranteed to the Maoris the ownership of their land until such time as they might wish to sell it, while the third and final Article extended to all the people of New Zealand (including the Maoris’ approximately 10,000 slaves) all the rights of British subjects – the first time that such valuable status had been bestowed on a native people.
Much of the credit is due to the Maoris of the time for having the wisdom to accept the new – and improved – ways which lifted them out of darkness and insecurity into the light and comfort of the modern world. At the Kohimarama Conference of 1860, the largest ever meeting of chiefs in New Zealand, and on other occasions the chiefs, being the spokesmen for their tribes, stressed the value of the new British order and their disinclination to return to the bad old ways.
And so, for the next century and a half, New Zealand developed as a relatively harmonious society that was the envy of other countries – especially in respect of race relations. At the centenary celebrations of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1940, Sir Apirana Ngata, probably the greatest mind that Maoridom has ever produced, said in his speech at Waitangi, “Let me acknowledge first that in the whole of the world I doubt whether any native race has been so well treated by a European people as the Maoris.”
However, this stability and contentment, that had lasted for several generations, started to become unhinged in the 1980s as a result of various part-Maoris deciding that the Treaty was not what generations of statesmen, teachers, judges and Maori leaders had said it was. Instead, by lies and intimidation, they started to weave it into something entirely different – what some people now call the Treaty of Wellington.
I use the term “part-Maori” in the interests of truth and linguistic precision as the last full-blooded Maori died in the 1950s and to-day there are not even any half-bloods. All those claiming to be “Maori” and to speak for “Maori” have in fact more European blood in them than Maori for the simple reason that over the generations Maoris preferred to breed with Europeans rather than with each other and so Maoris as an ethnic group became extinct. There is no such thing to-day as an ethnic Maori – just a successor race of part-Maoris.
Take for example that loud-mouthed and pushy Irish New Zealander, Stephen (alias “Tipene”) O’Regan, who is believed to be only one-sixteenth Maori and therefore fifteen sixteenths European. He adopted a Maori persona when it became apparent that there was to be a flood of taxpayer dollars to flow into the hands of those who could claim some Maori blood – no matter how small or remote.
O’Regan married a blonde European lady so that their children are one thirty-second Maori or, if you like, more than 96% European. One of these offspring is Hana O’Regan, who was on the Maori gravy train for years and who was instrumental in assisting Christopher Finlayson and the National government to steal the beaches off their rightful and traditional owners, the people of New Zealand, by means of the thieving Marine and Coastal Area Act. And guess which tribe stood to gain the most from this Act by virtue of having the longest stretch of coastline? Ngai Tahu. And guess which tribe the O’Regans claim to be members of? Ngai Tahu.
I have been told that, when she was about eighteen, this Hana O’Regan was at a function in Wellington where she met that master of wit, Bob Jones. “And what do you want to do with your life, Hana?” asked Jones.
“I want to help our people,” she replied piously.
“What a good idea”, said Jones. “The Irish always need help”.
As we have seen, by Article One of the Treaty, the chiefs ceded to the Crown “absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of sovereignty”. Couldn’t be clearer than that. However, in 2014 five members of the Waitangi Tribunal – Joanne Morris, Craig Coxhead, Professor Richard Hill, Kihi Ngatai and Ranginui Walker – through either ignorance or deliberate deceit – declared that the chiefs did NOT cede sovereignty at Waitangi in 1840. I am not making this up. By propagating this nonsense contrary to the evidence these five fools simply exposed themselves as public menaces and provided more grounds for abolishing the Tribunal.
To call it a “tribunal” is misleading as that word suggests a quasi-judicial body that hears both sides of an argument and decides issues fairly. The Waitangi Tribunal is an activist organisation that pushes the interests of the tribal elite and corporate iwi at the expense of the rest of us. Unlike a normal tribunal it often discards reliable written evidence, preferring oral testimony that is inherently unreliable, having been passed down about seven generations and added to here and there so that by the time it reaches the Tribunal and the prospective pot of gold it is likely to have become both self-serving and mendacious in order to create the required grievance.
The Waitangi Tribunal is like a cancer on the body politic, distorting history for the benefit of claimants, acting racistly and against the general good of a fair and united society, and costing the taxpayer an ever increasing sum of money that now stands at $4.6 billion as it enriches a tribal elite at the expense of the rest of us. And the only way to get rid of a cancer is to cut it out completely.
After the demise of apartheid South Africa in 1994 the new Black government set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with the injustices of the recent past. Despite the size of its task the Commission completed its work in five years and was then closed down.
The Waitangi Tribunal on the other hand, dealing with alleged remote “grievances” of a hundred years ago in which, unlike South Africa, there are no living so-called “victims”, has been going for more than forty years and, rather than completing its job, is forever looking out for new and ever more imaginative opportunities to expand its scope so that it can continue to feed endless historical grievances and give highly paid employment to all the greedy and biased parasites who work there.
Since the budding tribal elite realised that the words of the Treaty did not give any special race-based rights to Maoris they invented two new concepts – “partnership” and “principles” – to get over this obstacle. These concepts were never part of the Treaty or the events of 1840 and neither of these two words was even mentioned in the Treaty. Nor had such ideas ever been dreamt up in the years from 1840 to the 1980s.
In 1840 the British could exercise sovereign authority over the anarchic islands of New Zealand only if they had full sovereignty. The last thing they could ever imagine would be so-called “partnership agreements” with the very same Stone Age chiefs who had failed so spectacularly in bringing any form of peace, security or good order to the country. In fact, one of the instructions to Captain Hobson from the Colonial Office in London was to walk away if full sovereignty could not be ceded as, without it, Britain would have no legal basis for bringing peace and order to these islands.
This was clearly understood and accepted by all parties until the Maori radical movement got off the ground in the 1980s when they invented “partnership” and “principles” that until then had never been associated with the Treaty.
Having signed the Treaty, the chiefs became not partners, but subjects of the Crown, as did all other Maori. As subjects of the Crown, i.e. New Zealand citizens , all those of Maori descent are entitled to the same rights as other citizens. No more and no less.
Group rights, whereby one group enjoys separate, different or superior rights on the basis of group membership, are anathema to a free and equal society. Group rights create two classes of citizenship where only one existed before. They require the intervention of an activist government forcibly taking rights from one group to bestow on another. As Richard Prebble once stated, “One group’s positive discrimination is another group’s negative discrimination” because it is not possible to bestow special rights on one person or group without taking them away from another.
To explain this, let us look at New Zealand’s health system. The Auckland District Health Board prioritises part-Maori and Pacific Island patients for some surgeries, pushing European New Zealanders down the waiting list. This medically indefensible move was introduced by that “kind” Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. Priority for an operation should be based on how sick the patient is, how urgently the treatment is needed and how long one has been on the waiting list. Nothing else – least of all racial considerations just to buy Maori votes for the Labour party. Health is too important to be subjected to the politics of race.
Then again in 2023 – also during the Ardern nightmare – Pharmac introduced “ethnicity criteria” – preference for part-Maoris and Pacific Islanders – for drugs for Type-2 diabetes, heart problems, lung cancer and breast cancer.
In New Zealand’s two Medical Schools – Auckland and Otago – non-Maoris are actively and institutionally discriminated against as they can attain higher marks but are rejected from entering medical school so as to enable those with lower marks to be admitted solely because by accident of birth they happen to have some Maori or Pacific Island blood in them.
After 2020 these two Medical Schools got on the apartheid train and went full steam ahead so that by 2016 Maori and Pacific Island students entering Otago Medical School increased by 179% – not on merit but on race.
In 2020 Otago had 202 places in its Medical School but 120 of them (more than half) were reserved for the “privileged categories”, leaving only 82 places (40%) for others. How on earth is New Zealand ever going to get a competent medical profession with policies like these?
In 2020 Auckland University’s Medical School had 185 places, with part-Maoris and Pacific Islanders taking up 52 of them – again not on merit. These Maori and Pacific Island candidates are not selected by the entry exams but are assessed “by reference to special material provided by applicants about their engagement with their communities”. In other words, take an active part on the marae on week-ends and you should get into medical school. It would be hard to make this stuff up.
These policies stink as they breed resentment on the part of white and Asian students who are rejected in favour of those with lower marks but who can tick a certain racial box, they reduce the prestige of the two medical schools, and they lower the standard of competence within the medical profession.
It also stigmatises those students of Maori or Pacific ancestry regardless of whether they got in by means of a racial leg-up or on their own merits. It is here that one of the worst injustices occurs. If, for example, a part-Maori or Pacific Island student sits the general entrance exam with the other students (European and Asian) and passes with flying colours and without any race-based help and then becomes a doctor, he/she is likely to be looked at with a certain amount of suspicion by the general public who would say – wrongfully but understandably – “I’m not going to a Maori doctor because they only got there by racial preference rather than competence”.
The lie that the Treaty created a partnership between the Crown and Maori has been embraced for their own reasons or to indulge their own prejudices by politicians, bureaucrats and judges – including the notorious Robin Cooke (Lord Cooke of Thorndon), who said that the Treaty was “akin to a partnership”. The reason why Cooke propagated this lie was to create confusion, which it most certainly did. Then, out of the confusion the judges barged in and grabbed more powers for themselves at the expense of our democratically elected parliament. It was a dirty trick but is unfortunately characteristic behaviour of the senior judges of to-day.
The lie of partnership is also being taught in our schools in an effort to soften up the next generation for a whole new tranche of tribal demands.
Worse came in 2020 when New Zealand’s media companies were in dire financial straits, with all of Stuff News being sold by its Australian owners to its local New Zealand manager for ONE DOLLAR. Spotting an opportunity to control the media by a much needed taxpayer funded bribe, the Ardern government dreamt up the Public Interest Journalism Fund which showered $55 million of taxpayers’ money on to the media companies. They all accepted the bribe except The Platform, RCR Radio and the Westport News.
Of course, there was a snag since bribes are not usually given out without conditions. One of the conditions was that the media had to report Treaty of Waitangi issues in accordance with government policy, which itself is based on the lie that the Treaty was a “partnership” between Crown and Maori when it was no such thing.
The actual words were that the media must “actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, acknowledging Maori as a Te Tiriti partner”. Nothing about reporting the news honestly and objectively. Such lies and propaganda are at variance with editorial independence. And so, in taking the money, the mainstream media has committed itself to telling lies and those who read or listen to what the media has to say should always bear in mind that what they are seeing or hearing is not necessarily the truth.
The other big lie that the Maori supremacists rely on is that the Treaty has “principles”. Once again nobody had thought this one up in the century and a half between 1840 and the 1980s for the simple reason that there were no principles – just the black and white words of the document.
Like certain other destructive policies that have been inflicted on New Zealand in recent years the new idea that the Treaty had “principles” came out of the confused mind of Geoffrey Palmer who had earlier been responsible for the folly of allowing tribes to take their “claims” for so-called “grievances” all the way back to 1840 – way beyond the experiences or knowledge of anybody living and so ripe for malicious fabrication by tribal leaders and their friends in the Waitangi Tribunal. Palmer tried to justify this nonsense by saying that he did not believe that there would be many claims, thus showing how little he understands the issue and the nature and extent of the greed of the tribal elite.
On the matter of “principles” all sorts of opportunists – politicians and judges – put in their sixpenny bit so that to-day there are several newly invented sets of principles of the Treaty which in 1840 had no principles.
The possibility of “principles” gives the Treaty whatever meaning somebody wants to give it simply by inventing a list of “principles” and these are invariably to the advantage of the tribes and to the disadvantage of the rest of us. The worst offenders have been the judges – unelected creatures who are always trying to increase their own powers at the expense of our democratically elected parliament.
Thus by bastardising the Treaty of Waitangi and making it into something that it wasn’t or isn’t, the governing elite of politicians, judges, the Waitangi Tribunal and mainstream media have destroyed our once equal and harmonious society which was enjoyed for several generations. Instead they have introduced not only a race-based society not all that dissimilar from apartheid South Africa but also a new tribal elite of greedy, undeserving and very pale-faced part-Maoris who are inventing a new tribalism so as to keep part-Maoris apart from the rest of New Zealanders, and in the process they are increasing a mood of racial hatred against the white man that is being stirred up by no end of troublemakers on maraes, in the kohanga reo (total immersion Maori language schools) and in the Maori Language Departments of the universities. This is no way to build a harmonious, unified or prosperous society.
Tribalism in the 21st century is harmful not only to the integrity and unity of the State by part-Maoris identifying more with their tribe than with the nation but it is also harmful to those whom it engulfs, giving them a backward looking world view. And it doesn’t help that Maori tribalism has traditionally been enmeshed with violence.
This new tribalism is the very thing that the chiefs of 1840 were trying to get away from by signing the Treaty and now we have a bunch of people with majority European blood trying to bring it back for their own financial purposes – people like O’Regan, Willie Jackson, John Tamihere and all the others who always have their hand out.
As Doctor John Robinson pointed out in his book, “Who Really Broke the Treaty?”, the Treaty of Waitangi imposed on the Maoris who were brought within its fold the same obligations as other British subjects – namely to obey the law and not rebel against it. This some of them failed to do, e.g. Hone Heke’s rebellion in Northland in the 1840s and the later Kingite Rebellion in the Waikato in the 1860s.
On the other hand the only obligation that the Treaty imposed on the Crown was to govern the country, which it has done democratically and by the will of the people through elections. That’s all. Nothing more.
And yet we have had governments – both National and Labour – that have handed billions of dollars of cash, national resources and superior rights over to the tribal elite by means of what are erroneously called “Treaty settlements” for “breaches of the Treaty”. There is no justification for these by the Treaty for, as already stated, the Crown had no more obligation to Maoris than to any other New Zealanders. Their obligation was simply to govern the country.
These so-called :”Treaty settlements” have been justified on the grounds that somehow somewhere the Crown “broke” the Treaty in respect of this tribe or that tribe. This is pure fiction or, if you like, straight out lies. And yet on the basis of these lies some $4.6 billion has been transferred from the taxpayer to the tribes in 107 Treaty settlements to date. Since the Crown never broke the Treaty all these settlements for so-called “breaches of the Treaty” are fraudulent.
If any of these grievances are genuine – and some of them might be – the correct remedy would have been for the tribe adversely affected to seek redress through the courts for breach of contract or a tort or whatever. If, for example, the Crown took land off a tribe for a public purpose and was required to return the land when that purpose ceased to exist and yet failed to do so, that is not a breach of the Treaty but a breach of contract for which damages could be sought in a court in the normal way. And yet the so-called “clever” lawyers in Parliament and the bureaucracy claim that such is a “breach of the Treaty” when it is no such thing. Instead, they have showered over $4 billion in lump sums on the tribes on the most spurious of grounds and on the recommendations of that most biased of organisations, the Waitangi Tribunal.
And never once has any tribal leader or other recipient of this largesse been recorded as having said “thank-you” to the taxpayers. All that they ever say – and with considerable surliness – is “We’ll take it but it should have been more”. Ingratitude is a feature of Stone Age societies. The Maoris did not even have a word for “thank-you” until the missionaries arrived and introduced them to the concept of gratitude. Sadly the ill will of the tribal elite has grown in proportion to the goodwill showered on them by taxpayer dollars.
One of the stated reasons for these Treaty settlements was that they would bring harmony by satisfying tribal demands. Instead they have done the contrary as, the more money and special rights that are given to part-Maoris, the more they demand.
The most important thing to remember about Treaty settlements is that they are first and foremost a power grab and a money grab by a small number of private tribal hands to seize priceless national resources – beaches, rivers, forests, that were once owned by all of us and still should be.
These grasping millionaires in the tribal elite – Stephen O’Regan, Willie Jackson and all the rest of them – who are so loud on “Maori rights” are, in fact, enemies of a united and non-racial nation. And the only way to deal with an enemy is to defeat him – not appease him.
Our soldiers did not fight and die in two world wars to make non-Maori New Zealanders second class citizens in a racially divided society – as is now happening. Part-Maoris have no reason to think and act like a nation apart and, in fairness, it should be pointed out that most of them don’t.
For any group like the tribal elite to regard itself as a people apart is a recipe for division, conflict and the eventual break-up of the nation. The recent He Puapua Report has even set out the steps for breaking up our unified country and destroying our democracy by the year 2040. That’s how serious it is and all their little tricks such as co-governance and special Maori wards on local councils are all part of a much wider plot.
To get the nation out of the mess that National, Labour and the judges have got us into there must be a return to equality of citizenship without any race-based privileges for any group. In other words, a colour-blind state free of all race-based favouritism. One Law For All.
When this noble principle was put to the National Party’s Treaty Minister, Christopher Finlayson, he damned the idea as “nuts”. Then, when tens of thousands of concerned New Zealanders joined together in Coastal Coalition to try to prevent the theft of the nation’s beaches from the public so as to make them available for tribal ownership, Finlayson dismissed such people as “clowns”. This is the type of arrogance, ignorance and bigotry that we are up against.
“One Law For All” must be unqualified and non-negotiable if New Zealand is to have a future as good as its past. This would be of benefit to everyone – especially part-Maoris who would be forced to stand on their own feet instead of increasingly being regarded as bludgers off the taxpayer. No doubt they would be pleasantly surprised at what they could achieve without the ongoing flow of special, race-based funding.
I must stress again that this is nothing more than a naked power and money grab by a group of very pale-faced part-Maoris in the name of a race that no longer exists. It would be hard to think of anything more fraudulent.
So, having seen through the various Treaty lies that are destroying our society, stealing our rightful resources, pushing white people down hospital waiting lists and threatening our accountable democracy, what you might ask can one do about it? The worst thing would be to throw up one’s hands and say “There is nothing I can do about it”. That would be both cowardly and unpatriotic. Better to keep informed of the issues and spread the truth as widely as possible. As Longfellow wrote in his wonderful poem, A Psalm of Life:
“In the world’s broad field of battle,
