From the Tross book “Once We Were One” by Andy Oakley
CHAPTER 10.
The Pakeha to Maori Illusion – Stephen O’Regan Exposed
As we learned in Chapter 1, race is just an illusion and the fact is that everyone alive to-day is a 100th cousin of everyone else. However, although science and biology rule out the concept of “race” it still
dominates the political landscape in New Zealand. We do have a few politicians and lobby groups such as Winston Peters and NZ First, Hobson’s Pledge and Muriel Newman’s New Zealand Centre for Political Research, warning us of the corruption that such race based policies will bring.
As far as I am aware none of the people warning us that race based policies are taking our country in the wrong direction have been recognised for their efforts and are unlikely to be in the future. Instead
they are ridiculed and vilified by the political class and mainstream media – just as Churchill was in the 1930s when he warned of the growing dangers of Nazi Germany’s rearmament. On the other hand several ministers and others in charge of treaty handouts have been awarded knighthoods for services to “Maori” people.
Sir Douglas Graham and Sir “Tipene” O’Regan are two who come to mind, the former having been in charge of giving taxpayers’ money to iwi and the latter bullying the government for more and more of it.
After taking so much off the taxpayer to enrich the tribal elite, Graham and O’Regan, both of them being “Maori” by virtue of a mere teaspoonful of Maori ancestry, went into the business world where they were responsible for tens of thousands of New Zealanders losing their life’s savings through the collapse of the Lombard and Hanover finance companies. It seems that these two tribal elitists regard ordinary New Zealanders as nothing more than cannon fodder to be fleeced of their money by fair means or foul.
Douglas Graham, a director of Lombard, was convicted in the criminal court for making a false statement to investors, while O’Regan and his fellow directors faced a $35 million claim from the Finance Markets Authority over their behaviour at Hanover, a claim that was later dropped.
When Hanover Finance collapsed in 2008, with O’Regan as a well-paid director, it owed $554 million to approximately 16,500 investors, many of them elderly, who lost their life’s savings.
Both of these rotten company directors should have been stripped of their knighthoods but that’s no longer how things work in New Zealand. In the words of Ron Asher in The Jaws of the Dragon, “The Key
government has corrupted New Zealand in much the same way as the Clintons corrupted America during the husband’s presidency”. In the Key-English government loyalty to your mates trumps any values of honesty.1
Graham, O’Regan and Ngai Tahu’s lawyer, Christopher Finlayson, colluded secretly to bring about the excessive Ngai Tahu Treaty settlement, by far the dodgiest of all Treaty settlements (and that’s
saying something!). Ngai Tahu bullied the minster (Graham) and his department as they knew that, on the facts, they did not deserve the huge amount that they got. As is so often the case with Treaty claims,
intimidation prevailed over honesty.
In 2013 Bill English appointed O’Regan as the co-chair of the Constitutional Advisory Panel even though at the time O’Regan (and his fellow directors of Hanover) was facing a claim of $35 million from the Government’s Finance Markets Authority. In this capacity O’Regan accused those opposing the continuing separatism of our society at the behest of the tribal elite as “Nazi sympathisers”. This was a lie and is typical of what appears to be O’Regan’s deceitful character. David Round, a law lecturer at Canterbury University and a member of the Independent Constitutional Review panel, wrote a letter of complaint to Bill English, the minister in charge of the Constitutional Advisory Panel. English replied that he was perfectly happy with O’Regan’s behaviour, thus showing his trademark cowardice when confronted by bullying forces – be they a smear merchant like O’Regan or the Chinese Embassy in Wellington, which forced English to cancel a scheduled meeting in Wellington in October 2016, with Anson Chan, former head of the Hong Kong civil service, and Martin Lee, a prominent Hong Kong barrister, because China’s dictatorship did not like their democratic credentials.2
The Tipene O’Regan Enigma: Maori speculator or Pakeha denier?
We see regular headlines warning us of the number of children living in poverty in New Zealand and yet Sir Tipene O’Regan’s specialty seems to be one of diverting money from the taxpayer straight into the pockets of wealthy corporations. Whether it is by fleecing the investors of Hanover or repeatedly raping the middle and lower class taxpayers through his excessive and unjustified Ngai Tahu deals it seems that wherever there is an opportunity to make the rich richer, Sir Tipene is close by.
He has redefined the words “full and final settlement” as his alleged tribe, Ngai Tahu, has now had FIVE “full and final” settlements from taxpayers over the years. Ngai Tahu thought so little of their land that they had sold most of the South Island to Australians before the Treaty was even signed in 1840. Governor Hobson gave an undertaking to investigate these sales as a result of signing the Treaty, opening the way for Ngai Tahu to get back land they had sold (without reimbursing those who had paid them for it) and sell it all over again. They subsequently sold most of the 15,121,483 hectares of the South Island again in ten deals over a twenty year period from 1844 for a total of 14,750 pounds.3
These events are all the more incredible when it is remembered that Ngai Tahu only went to the South Island in the mid 1700s and, with the aid of Ngati Apa, they exterminated Tumatakokori, who had confronted the Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman, in 1642. They annihilated the peaceful West Coast tribe who were the guardians of the greenstone that they claimed as their own and they killed and ate the few Ngati Mamoe survivors whom Captain Cook had met in Dusky Sound.4
Despite all this these Johnnie-come-latelys were given the ownership of ALL the greenstone of the South Island (and it is found only in the South Island) by their crooked Treaty settlement that was cooked up behind closed doors by O’Regan, Finlayson and Doug Graham.
Since the first “final” settlement that they received in 1868 Ngai Tahu have been given other “settlements” in 1906, 1920 and 1944. Payments of $20,000 a year in perpetuity were awarded to Ngai Tahu in 1973, the tribe’s fourth settlement, and then they were given a further $170 million of taxpayer dollars in 1998 by Doug Graham and the National Government. This was the tribe’s FIFTH “full and final settlement”. All this cash and land from the rest of us has given Ngai Tahu a net worth of close to $900 million and they will soon pass the billion mark as, unlike others, they don’t pay tax on the profits from their business enterprises as they are registered as The Ngai Tahu Charitable Trust.
Settlement 1: In 1868 Ngai Tahu grievances were examined in the Native Land Court. On top of land they had been given back after initially selling it, Judge Francis Dart Fenton reserved a further 1,995 ha
in Canterbury and Otago and set aside a number of small fisheries and easements.5
Settlement 2: The South Island Landless Natives Act 1906, granted Ngai Tahu 57,652 ha of land to settle.6
Settlement 3: The Ngai Tahu Claim Settlement Act 1944 awarded 300,000 pounds as a final settlement.7
Settlement 4: The Labour government in 1973 introduced a Bill to facilitate payments of $20,000 per year with Maori Affairs Minister, Matiu Rata, arguing that the 1944 settlement was accepted only on the
basis that more was to come in the future.8
Settlement 5: Ngai Tahu was awarded $170 million in another full and final settlement in1998.9
The most disturbing thing about all these ongoing and fraudulent settlements is that, like other tribes such as Ngati Toa, the land that they sold to the Government in the 1800s (and for which they are being paid more to-day) had been gained by them through their extermination of men, women and children – the previous owners of the land who were murdered by Ngai Tahu colonization. They have done nothing to earn or deserve all the money and other assets they have been given by reckless and dishonest governments, other than stating that at least one of their ancestors happens to be of the “Maori” race. This opens the door to preferential treatment and the swiping of assets from New Zealanders in general for the benefit of small private groups they call “tribes” – even though tribalism was ended almost two hundred years ago by the Treaty of Waitangi. Instead, a new tribalism has now been created purely for
financial reasons.
All this undeserved and ill-gotten wealth is posing problems in our society, especially when the gains are invested in a tribal corporation that dodges tax by claiming “charity” status. Our gutless Parliament had
to overturn the sensible and longstanding common law definition of “charity” so as to accommodate these rich corporations which invest only a tiny fraction of their wealth back into anything that will address the poverty of their own or other people. And, of course, there is a growing problem of poverty; all people who are poor, including those who identify as “Maori”, are equally deserving of our help.
Despite the Maori tribal elite having an asset base of some $37 billion, those who identify as “Maori” are grossly over represented in all of the measures of a bad society. Poverty, prison and bad parenting are all
huge problems for people who identify as “Maori”. What we are seeing is a direct correlation between the Treaty “settlement” money laundering that began in 1975 with the inception of the out-of-control Waitangi Tribunal and the steadily worsening social statistics, especially for Maori. Thirty years ago poverty was an issue for 14% of the population; to-day it is 17%. Had there been no Treaty industry lining the pockets of wealthy people like O’Regan, there would have been an extra $3 billion plus to address poverty and no doubt the 14% of thirty years ago would now be lower and not higher.
O’Regan and others cunningly and cynically use “Maori” poverty as the reason for them to extract ever more money which finds its way into the pockets of the tribal elite. The result, however, is that the statistics for poor people who identify as Maori continue to worsen in an awful downward social spiral.
So, who is this self-professed Maori kaumatua who has been rewarded with a knighthood by the Crown for swiping so much money from the taxpayer for himself and his tribal elite?
Born Stephen Gerard O’Regan, his father’s side were poor West Coast Irish Catholic immigrants made good. Grandfather, P.J. O’Regan, became a celebrated politician and a judge of the Court of Arbitration,
not having gone to school until the age of twelve. Stephen’s father, Rolland O’Regan, was a successful Wellington surgeon.10
Stephen grew up in a European world – and a privileged one at that. The O’Regan home, on Wellington’s Mount Victoria, overlooking Evans Bay, was a two storey mansion with a tennis court – a rarity in Wellington due to the scarcity of flat land. They also owned a two- storey house on the next door property and they had a maid – a European lady who was a type of family retainer. Stephen had two adopted siblings – both European. This was a rich and privileged white family and the very thought that the taxpayer should have to give money to one of them for alleged matters in the long distant past is both absurd and morally repugnant.
After leaving his private school Stephen attended Wellington Teachers College where the story goes that someone once called him a Maori, whereupon the pale faced O’Regan took off his jacket as if to fight and declared loud and clear that he was an Irishman. At least he would have got that right.
At Victoria University he was secretary of the students’ Socialist Club. At the time it was not legal to have a Communist club on campus and many of Marx’s fellow-travellers gathered in the Socialist Club, which was far to the left of the Labour Party club.
Stephen, a one-sixteenth Maori, married a blonde European, Sandra. and their children, including Maori rights crusader, Hana (Hannah), are one thirty-second part Maori! They moved from Wellington to Christchurch and Stephen did not change his name to Tipene until he reached middle age and the financial merits of being “Maori” as a result of the Treaty process were becoming plain.
Usually people who change their names – especially in later life – do so to hide something. Often it is to hide the truth about the person, and hiding the truth is plain deception. Possibly the only other person in
New Zealand to change his name from Stephen to Tipene in his mid-forties was Mark Stephens, the serial rapist who was known as the Parnell Panther. I went to school with this sicko in Porirua and he has
had many subsequent convictions for indecent assault and intimidation since his release from prison. He changed his name to Mark Tipene in his forties for similar reasons to Tipene O’Regan – to alter the truth.11
Altering the truth allowed Mark Tipene to place himself in situations where he could commit further crimes, usually against women, without people suspecting his motives. And altering the truth of who he is seems to be the reason for O’Regan’s change of name – just as he changed from being a “Socialist” (Marxist?) to the greediest capitalist of all.
Mark Tipene not only changed his name, he also changed locations Porirua to Parnell. It seems for similar reasons O’Regan moved to Christchurch, to remove himself from all those in Wellington who knew him in his previous life as “Stephen”.
It is only fair to point out that other members of the O’Regan family have been seriously embarrassed by Stephen’s shameless money-grubbing activities and all the shenanigans that go with it. When
Stephen’s father was in an old people’s home in Wellington, Stephen paid him a visit and announced himself to the staff as “Tipene O’Regan”. The nurse went to old Mr. O’Regan and said, “Your son,
Tipene, is here to see you,” whereupon the old man roared out, “I have no son called Tipene. Who is this man, Tipene? I don’t know any Tipene and I don’t want to see him.”
Stephen O’Regan’s mother, Rena Bradshaw, was a Southlander in an area where many people are descended from the Waitaha and Ngati Mamoe as well as from the Ngai Tahu invaders, who were latecomers to the area. Ngai Tahu exterminated many Waitaha but inter-married with others.
The Waitaha “nation” goes back 2,000 years, according to Gavin Menzies. In his book, 1434, he states that two hundred tribes of the Waitaha nation settled in New Zealand and were then decimated by the
warlike tribes who invaded New Zealand some 800 years ago – an eerie precursor of the massacre of the Moriori in the Chatham Islands by tribes from Taranaki in the 1830s.12
In his 1995 book, Songs of Waitaha; the Histories of a Nation, Barry Brailsford claimed that the ancestors of a “Nation of Waitaha” were the first inhabitants of New Zealand, three groups of people of different
origin, two of light complexion and one dark, who had arrived in New Zealand through an unspecified location in the Pacific.13
The Waitaha claim that they pre-empt the Maori and therefore challenged the Ngai Tahu claim in the Waitangi Tribunal. Waitaha leader, Rangimarie Te Maiharoa said that the Ngai Tahu settlement
would “extinguish customary rights and aboriginal title of our people”.14
None of this should be of public concern in the twenty-first century and it wouldn’t be but for money – the money that racist and crooked governments rip off the taxpayer, to redistribute on a race basis to the
newly created tribal elite of very pale faced “Maoris” with far more European blood in them than Maori. Money is the root of the problem and will remain so until the Waitangi Tribunal is closed down. That is a
necessary pre-condition for returning to the type of egalitarian, non-racist and fair society that we had before Geoffrey Palmer so foolishly extended the remit of the Waitangi Tribunal, to investigate all sorts of fanciful claims that go all the way back to 1840 – way beyond anyone’s memory or knowledge.
As far as I am aware there is no current definition of what a Maori is. I have written a number of letters to the Waitangi Tribunal to ask them for a definition but they do not respond. The answer is simple. Anyone can state that they are “Maori”; it is just that you will not be allocated privileges, extra rights and money via the Waitangi Tribunal unless you can prove that at least one of your parents happens to be related to someone who has the teeniest amount of Maori blood in them; but with no definition for “Maori”.
As we have seen there were no people known as Maoris in New Zealand until the 1850s. Until then they were called “natives” or “New Zealanders”. The term “Maori” as a reference to people was coined
more than a decade after the signing of the Treaty. Before that date there were approximately 600 separate groups of people in a constant warring state of flux. These people had arrived from different lands and at different times and some were not related at all except that they were human beings. None were known as Maori.
To-day the term “Maori” is a reference to self-identification by indoctrination. It is a quasi-religion and Tipene O’Regan is a pastor in the church of Maori. The following is a sublimely ridiculous example of
how this Irish pastor, Stephen O’Regan, delivers his Maori sermon. It is from the launch of the new book, Tangata Whenua:
“I think one of the great challenges facing us is a really decent study of Pakehatanga. What makes the character of Pakeha, Pakeha? There is not just non-Maori because in my view Pakeha have now been here ….THEY do not belong anywhere else now, THEY are indigenous to this place, THEY are acclimatised, THEY are here and the great challenge for biculturalism is that Pakeha are better able to articulate what being Pakeha is in this place.”15
The context of his verbal diarrhoea was in a room of well-known separatists expounding the virtues of being a different race to everyone else, i.e. Maori. Patricia Grace, an ex-teacher of mine, was there and
Ranginui Walker, both of whom have wallowed in Western ways of living but seem to deny any other ancestry that they may have, except for Maori. What O’Regan is really saying is that, although he is a
Pakeha; was raised as a Pakeha; his siblings are Pakeha; has been married to a Pakeha for more than fifty years; had a father and grandparents who were fully Pakeha; and a mother who was seven-eighths Pakeha; he has no idea what it is to be a Pakeha!!!!! This is because he implies that he is a Maori and, as such, puts it out there to Pakeha to write this history of what it’s like to be a Pakeha. If this is not the ultimate deception, then I don’t know what is.
Coming from a rich and privileged white family in Wellington O’Regan knows more than most what it’s like to be Pakeha. Biologically he is one himself – at least fifteen sixteenths of him is. He has tried to hide it with his name change and hopes that we have forgotten who he really is.
This is the kind of racist nonsense that needs to be stamped out. There is no room in New Zealand for people who are intent on driving a wedge between humans who have everything in common. Unfortunately some are susceptible to the quasi-religious and false indoctrination by people such as the person who calls himself Tipene O’Regan. Perhaps it’s time for him to consider returning to Ireland, the land of his forebears. That would be a positive for New Zealand but a negative for Ireland, which over the centuries has had more than enough of the divisions between humans that O’Regan preaches.
Here we have the ex-chief negotiator for Ngai Tahu treaty settlements who is now stating that Pakeha are also indigenous to New Zealand. How generous of him! While Pakeha might be every bit as indigenous as anyone else I would like to know how this statement affects every Treaty settlement. How does it affect every one of the almost $200 million that Ngai Tahu has extracted from the taxpayer by dubious means; and how does it affect the activities of the Waitangi Tribunal? How can this manipulator and smear merchant use the term “biculturalism” as the reason to separate people, when he is the perfect example of how a Pakeha is a Maori and a Maori is a Pakeha?
Culture is the amalgamation of the ideas, customs and social behaviour of a particular people or society. Stephen O’Regan wears a suit, drives a car, flies all round the world (on a passport that is allegedly in the name of “Stephen” and not “Tipene”), watches TV, goes to the movies, shops at the mall, and uses a microwave like every other New Zealander. Yet apparently he belongs to a culture that cannot understand this way of life, and so he advises the people who live this way to write a book to explain it! What sort of absurdity is this?
He is so cunning and manipulative that he even managed to incorporate this absurdity into the 1998 Ngai Tahu settlement whereby the Crown gave up 72 public camping sites alongside lakes and river banks for the EXCLUSIVE use of members of the Ngai Tahu tribe between mid-August and the end of April each year, all seasons except winter when people don’t go camping. Each site is about one hectare in area.
Why are the public now banned from these formerly public places? So that those Westernised New Zealanders of the twenty-first century who just happen to have as one of their ancestors a person who defines as Ngai Tahu, can have “an opportunity to experience the landscape as their tupuna did and to rekindle the traditional practices of gathering food and other natural resources”. Well, that would be a change from McDonalds.
These “noahanga” sites “were an integral part of the mobile lifestyle of Ngai Tahu as they moved around the South Island in pursuit of food” – including the flesh of the Waitaha people and anyone else that got in the way of these ruthless invaders from the North Island.
And who was it who stole these prime lakeside sites from the general public? Douglas Graham of course. Just further evidence of how Graham’s character is such that it is a continuing disgrace that he should have a title. How do the other knights feel about having to share their order with a type like him?
The grounds for creating these racially exclusive “noahanga” sites was that the Ngai Tahu members of the twenty-first century are such lovers of their environment that they want to savour it. Since actions speak
louder than words I shall quote from my earlier book, Cannons Creek to Waitangi (Page 12): “It seems that Ngai Tahu’s main object is to rape the wilderness. We are talking about the proposed “Maori monorail”
that would have ruined Greenstone Valley and the proposal for a road and a gondola via Caples Valley. Both these formerly publicly owned valleys were given to Ngai Tahu in 1998. We are talking about Tipene O’Regan being one of the investors in the Milford Dart Tunnel proposal. Thankfully these Ngai Tahu/O’Regan money grabbing proposals have been rejected by government on environmental grounds.”16
For a millionaire like O’Regan, living in a mansion full of mod cons, to claim that non-members of Ngai Tahu have to be kicked off public land (the “noahanga” sites), has nothing to do with Ngai Tahu’s need to catch fish in the wilderness to provide them with food in the twenty-first century; but everything to do with O’Regan’s barely concealed self-loathing of his European self.
This self-loathing seems to have been passed on to his daughter, Hana (Hannah), a Maori rights activist whom the deeply compromised and biased Christopher Finlayson, appointed in 2009 to his carefully loaded “Foreshore and Seabed Review Panel”, to “advise” him on his theft of the foreshore and seabed from the people of New Zealand so that this precious resource can be handed out to his chosen tribes. Hana O’Regan recommended that the foreshore and seabed be taken out of public ownership. This gave Ngai Tahu, her “tribe” insofar as a one thirty-second part “Maori” can have a tribe the potential to grab 40% of New Zealand’s coast. This potential turned into a reality on May 1 st , 2017, when Ngai Tahu made their claim to almost all of the South Island.
Hana O’Regan’s conflict of interest as a member of Ngai Tahu and also as a member of the Foreshore and Seabed Review Panel became clear and an effective collusion between Hana O’Regan and Chris Finlayson had been shown to blossom into what appears to be full-scale fraud when Ngai Tahu claimed the foreshore and seabed of most of the South Island.
It is a sad day for democracy and honesty when a self-interested person like Hana O’Regan is appointed to, and accepts a position on such a panel. Unfortunately it is typical of the secrecy and bias, if not
corruption, which have contaminated the Treaty Settlements Office since the deeply compromised and not very honest Christopher Finlayson, became the Minister. Although on paper a National List
M.P., Finlayson’s politics are more those of the separatist Maori Party than of National – something that Key and English either have not yet worked out or, even worse, condone.
The snow flake Hana O’Regan has done very nicely for herself by trading on her one thirty-second teaspoonful of Maori blood despite the ridiculousness of such a situation, When she was about eighteen a Wellington man asked her what she wanted to do with her life. “I want to help our people,” she said sanctimoniously. “What a good idea.” he replied. “The Irish always need help.”
Stephen O’Regan and his daughter Hana are a stark and ugly reminder of the ways that New Zealanders have been indoctrinated over the years. This fraud has fooled a generation into thinking there is such a thing as Maori, and they have fooled us into thinking that they are one of the chosen ones, Maori. They have fooled us into believing that this made-up and apparently separate people that are alive to-day deserve more rights, more public resources and ever more cash handouts from the taxpayer, because of nothing more than the accident of birth. That is not a recipe for a modern democracy or a fair and healthy society. No society that has ever embraced a separatist agenda has finished up in anything but tears.
1 Asher, Ron. The Jaws of the Dragon. Wellington: Tross Publishing. 2016. pg 180 2 Ibid.
3 Butler, Mike. Ngai Tahu. Otago Daily Times. 9 Oct 2013
4 Begg, AC and Begg NC. Dusky Bay, Whitcombe and Tombs,1966 5 Butler, Mike. Twisting the Treaty, Tross Publishing. Wellington. 2013.Pages 123-167.
6 Ibid
7 Ibid. Page 85
8 Ibid
9 Ibid 10 McCrone, John. Man of mana. Stuff. 8 th Feb 2014. 11 Binning, Elizabeth. Youth worker appears on two sexual assault charges. NZ Herald. Nov 2006. 12 Menzies, Gavin.1434. London. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 2008.
13 Brailsford, Barry. Songs of Waitaha: the Histories of a Nation. Christchurch. Wharariki Publishing. 2006.
14 Maiharoa, Rangimarie. Mana of Waitaha must not be silenced. Evening Post, 5 Apr 1993; p.5 15 YouTube. The launch of Tangata Whenua.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=557Q3c5j75o Data Retrieved 11.07.17 16 Shuttleworth, Kate. Milford tunnel proposal rejected. NZHerald. Jul 17. 2013
