This morning at church I had the privilege of hearing a very interesting talk from my Pastor, Rev. Dr Stuart Lange about the lead up to the Treaty signing. Stuart is a church historian and something of an expert on the history of Christianity in New Zealand. When he is not being a pastor at Massey Presbyterian Church he lectures in Church History at Laidlaw College where he used to be Vice Principal.

Stuart looked at the role of missionaries in NZ society. He pointed out some interesting facts, such as: the relationship between early missionary Samuel Marsden and William Wilberforce, the famous evangelical reformer who spearheaded the abolition of the slave trade in England; and that prior to the Treaty being signed, large numbers of Maori converted to Christianity; he touched on the role of Missionaries in brokering peace between warring tribes, and how these conversions lead to Maori tribes liberating their slaves who then carried the gospel back to their homes. He also noted that, in many respects, prior to 1840 Christianity was more prevalent amongst Maori than the colonial settlers, many of whom were fairly unscrupulous and had little time for serious evangelical commitment.

He noted also the theological and pastoral motivations of the missionaries in pushing for the Treaty; they were concerned to see that, with colonialists arriving in great numbers, the indigenous people they worked with were protected. He also noted the role of several missionaries in speaking out against early violations of the Treaty.

Stuart is apparently giving a 90 minute lecture on these issues at Congress 2011: 2020 Vision – The Gospel in the Decade Ahead, a Christian leadership conference in Wellington later this month – check it out if you’re in Wellington. This was a very brief snippet of that talk but it was thoroughly interesting and it was delivered with Stuart’s characteristic humour.

I have posted on some of the moral issues around the Treaty before and I plan in the future to write some more on this topic but now  I also plan to look into some of the theological history as I found this talk fascinating.

Anyway happy Waitangi Day fellow kiwis! Let us today all pause, consider and celebrate our country’s heritage and future together – take up Pat Brittenden’s idea and have a Waitangi Day barbeque! Kia kaha.

RELATED POSTS:
Maori and Pakeha are Not Partners to the Treaty of Waitangi
Sovereignty and The Treaty of Waitangi
View “Marae: The Great Waitangi Debate” Here
The Foreshore and Seabed Repeal: The Inconvenience of Due Process

It was with great pleasure that I accepted TVNZs invitation to participate in this debate, and agree with Steve Franks who said it was truly a great thing for tvnz to open up this discussion in the public arena as a lack of serious debate plays a large part in perpetuating the troubles surrounding race relations and the treaty.

I completely agreed with his argument that the real treaty was not holding us back but that the bogus treaty separatist interpretations and sexed up versions were the trouble. I did not agree with his position that it was ok for the state to treat different peoples differently or that some of the favoritism was pragmatic common sense. This was in fact picked up by Matthew Hooten when he slammed Franks for claiming the favoritism that worked was not treatyism but that the rest was!

Hana Oreagan was nice enough in person, but the politics she espoused can only be described as flakey and hypocritical. For example she could not see that when she slammed the NZ government for being discriminatory against Maori in the 1920s ( Lower pensions for Maori was one example she used) that she her self was advocating the same type of discrimination be imposed today …favoring Maori…this completely escaped her just as she did not recognize that some of the favoritism in the 1920s was actually in favour of Maori such as exemption from rates.

Off air I did my best to show her this error and that what was needed was one equal law for all. Her claim the treaty can mean whatever we want it to mean just shows how flakey her ideas really are.

When the time came for me to present my arguments, I attempted to give as broad a range of the troubles as I could in two minutes, hoping to fill in the details later when interviewed. Yet Shane decided it was better to attack my views on taxation instead! This worked in my favour as it gave me opportunity to slam socialist rapaciousness.

I do want to add in here a couple of historic references to support my speech which I was unable to include in the debate. The first is Governor Grays declaration to the Waikato Chiefs about respecting the sovereignty of the queen and keeping the peace dated 11 July 1863 (as can be found in Richard Stowers book The Forest Rangers pg6) Governor Grey asked them to stop the evil acts against peaceable settlers…Grey asked for the free passage of Europeans in the Waikato district, in particular movement on the Waikato river. He also stated:

Those who remain peaceably at their own villages in the Waikato , or move into such districts as may be pointed out by the government, will be protected in their persons, property and land.

Those who wage war against her majesty, or remain in arms, threatening the lives of her peaceable subjects, must take the consequences of their acts and they must understand that they forfeit the right of possession of their lands guaranteed them by the treaty of Waitangi; which lands will be occupied by a population capable of protecting for the future the quiet and un-offending from violence with which they are now so constantly threatened.

A second reference is to Sir Apirana Ngata who stated in his ‘The Treaty of Waitangi, An Explanation’ that…

Some have said that these confiscations were wrong and they contravened the articles of the treaty of Waitangi, but the chiefs placed in the hands of the Queen of England, the Sovereignty and authority to make Laws. Some sections of the Maori people violated that authority, war arose and blood was spilled. The Law came into operation and land was taken in payment. This in itself is Maori Custom-revenge-plunder to avenge a wrong. It was their chiefs who ceded that right to the Queen. The Confiscations can not therefore be objected to in the light of the treaty…

Finally I am happy I got a plug in against the anti freedom Nannyism and anti colonialism of Minto regarding Crime and health statistics that are used as vindication for socialist favoritism and ongoing regulation.

“Why are we trying to manipulate fat people I said?”

“That is not a duty of government but a matter of self responsibility!”

(Socialists believe its their right/duty to force you to be the politically correct weight)

I liked Matt Hootens smug grin…very amusing, but he said little worthy of note except that people will continue to use the current system to gain filthy lucre which more supported us and not them!

I think even Hana O Regan thought she had been paired up with a wally.

Valuable contributions from the audience came from:

• Martin Doutre, New Zealand’s foremost expert on the history of the treaty documents when he verified Steve Franks assertion that the modern treaty used by the separatists and current government is a fraud.
• Matt and Madeleine Flannagan both questioned the interpretations of the separatists … “How did they get their idea that the treaty obliged the state to teach and propagate Te Reo?” … “Why do they think a legal document like the treaty can be interpreted without applying the usual rules of law?”
• Prof David Round criticised the ongoing and deepening riff caused by the separatist treaty industry.

Most of the rest from the likes of Minto, Dalamere and co were the usual socialist rubbish that denies any responsibility of the Maori people to stand on their own two feet lumping the taxpayer with the burden of carrying them like babies.

It was difficult to follow much of the commentary as it was so muddled up with some truth and a hell of a lot of false assumptions/propaganda.

I was even dis-owned by my tribe for supporting equality before the Law! (Oh well, I shall continue to walk on alone if I must)

I was happy that in the last segment I got to slam our racially divided electoral system and parliament adding that what made the election of Barack Obama great is that he was elected in a proper non-racist election competing with white men and woman, unlike our current shameful apartheid system in NZ.

In closing I want to state for the record that…Just as the state education system is a propaganda machine of the theory of evolution…so too it propagates the lies of treaty separatism.

This exposes the travesty of having a democracy with state control of our schools and the urgent need to divest the state of its evil encroachments and control over our children’s minds. Privatize education!

The battle goes on…

RELATED POSTS:
View “Marae: The Great Waitangi Debate” Here
Sovereignty and The Treaty of Waitangi
Maori and Pakeha are Not Partners to the Treaty of Waitangi
(Our Review of the Debate)

Obviously, the normal conditions of the existence of a contract are not fulfilled if the promisee misunderstands what the promiser intends. … a promiser is morally bound to perform whatever he believed his promisee to have understood him to promise. He cannot reasonably do less; for he should have corrected any misunderstanding he was aware of. And not even his promisee can fairly claim that he has knowingly bound himself to do more.[1]

Donagan here notes that when two parties enter into a contract they are bound by the terms of the contract because they agreed to them. Given this, they are only bound to do what they agreed to do, or what it is reasonable to assume that they agreed to do, given the circumstances. They cannot be required to do more than this as they did not agree to do more and could not reasonably have been expected to forsee needing to do more.

I think these points are fairly obvious; however, they have implications that are often less obvious. Today is Waitangi Day in New Zealand. One common argument proposed in the debate around the Treaty of Waitangi is that in the Maori translation, under Article 2, the Crown promised,

… to protect the chiefs, the subtribes and all the people of New Zealand in the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures.[2]

Now there is some debate about whether the phrase translated “chieftainship” (tino rangatiratanga) entails the idea of sovereignty or self-determination in this context or whether it simply conveys an idea of property rights.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the former is correct. The fact that the Maori translation promises Maori sovereignty does not mean that the Crown promised this. In order for the Crown to be bound in this manner, the Crown would have to have believed (or been in a position where it was reasonable for them to have believed) that they were promising various Iwi (tribes) “sovereignty” in this sense. This clearly was not the case. The crown thought that they were merely promising what the English translation affirms they were:

Her Majesty the Queen of England confirms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and to the respective families and individuals thereof the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession;[3]

It is clear that, under the English version, the Crown intended to guarantee Maori property rights in their land and it promised to protect these rights. Any promise of sovereignty was due to a translation error or not speaking Maori fluently. The representatives of the Crown could not have reasonably believed they were doing anything else. They relied in good faith on a translator to put their terms accurately into Maori and had no reason for thinking he had done anything other than this; hence, the Crown did not agree to provide Maori sovereignty and so did not promise it under the Treaty. It may be that some leaders mistakenly thought they did, but they were mistaken. Whatever the Maori version says, the Crown is not bound by it.

I can think of two objections to this line of argument. The first, as Madeleine tells me, is the contention that the majority of Iwi signed the Maori version and under international treaty jurisprudence, where there is a conflict in translation the version that the majority of the parties signed is the valid one.

This argument, however, misses the point. It is not that I am claiming that the English version is valid and the Maori one is not. I am quite willing to grant that the Maori version is valid, the point is that the Crown is morally bound only to do what they reasonably believed they were agreeing to do when they accepted the terms of the Treaty and the terms they believed they were agreeing to were those contained in the English version of the Treaty.

Moreover, this argument appeals to international law. International law recognises that the Crown is the legal sovereign of New Zealand as it has been a stable de-facto government, recognised as such, by the majority of its citizens.

A second objection is to note reciprocity; just as the Crown was not bound by what it reasonably believed it was agreeing to, so too the various Iwi are only bound by what they reasonably believed they were agreeing to. If one grants for the sake of argument that “tino rangatiratanga” means sovereignty, then Iwi were not bound to relinquish this sovereignty over to the Crown. They believed, quite reasonably given the translation they had, that they were not promising to relinquish sovereignty to the Crown but rather to maintain it.

If this were the case the problem still arises that today in New Zealand, in 2010, the Crown is Sovereign. We do not have independent tribal nations that hold sovereign political power over their lands. All land in New Zealand is under the sovereignty of parliament and is subject to English common law and NZ statutes. Hence, the question is not whether Iwi are required to relinquish sovereignty to the Crown under the Treaty as, for better or worse, justly or unjustly, they have done so. The question today becomes, whether, after 170 years of the Crown being sovereign, Iwi should attempt to gain this sovereignty back? On this issue the Treaty is silent. It says nothing about what various parties are entitled to if another party misunderstood the agreement.

The question then of Maori sovereignty is not a question of the Treaty at all. It is simply a question of morality in general. The real question is this, if one lives under a de-facto government that has been sovereign in practise for 170 years and if this government is relatively just then should one continue to defer to its sovereignty?

I think the answer to this question is yes. I believe that when a stable de-facto government exists and has existed for over a century and when there is an absence of gross abuses of human rights then its sovereignty should be recognised as legitimate by the citizens of that nation. I will not further advance this argument here but I will simply note that whatever the answer to this question it seems reasonable to say that the Crown never promised sovereignty to Maori and claims that it did are based on the mistaken idea that a person can be bound by the terms of a contract which he or she both did not agree to and could not reasonably have been expected to have agreed to – to expect anything else is nonsense.

[1] Alan Donagan The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) 91.
[2] “Treaty of Waitangi” Kawharu Translation Article 2.
[3] “Treaty of Waitangi” English Version Article 2.

RELATED POSTS:
Maori and Pakeha are Not Partners to the Treaty of Waitangi

The debate featured panelists Stephen Franks, Tim Wikiriwhi, Matthew Hooten and Hana O’Regan and an active studio audience, including Matt and I, who were expected to comment and ask questions from the floor (which we did).

Our thoughts from inside the program are here.

The audience, who comprised a range of commentators, Members of Parliament and even activist John Minto, were expected to comment and ask questions, which we dutifully did. Who knows if we’ll make the editing room cut, or how what we said will play on screen (it always feels different in the moment to how it looks on air I find)  – one way to find out I guess!

The debate will screen on Marae tomorrow morning, Saturday, 6 Feb, from 8:00am – 9:30am on TV One.

Here is a brief rundown of our thoughts:

• Speaker of the Day goes to Stephen Franks for presenting the best case and for managing to use terms like “fake treaty”, “bogus” and “spurious” whilst still managing to come across calm, pleasant and reasonable.
• The Most Inflammatory award goes to Tim Wikiriwhi – you can read his transcript at Not PC. The award was for his  student-politician-styled-delivery coupled with claims later on in the debate that there had not been a single past injustice towards Maori, which earned him shocked and awed hissing. (That aside his message was good and his historical claims were fascinating.)
• Best Impersonation of Peter Dunne award goes to Matthew Hooten for trying to take the middle ground and please everyone whilst effectively saying nothing but sounding profound.
• The Loonie Leftie Why–Didn’t–Her–Over-Sized–Tiki–Explode? award goes to Hana O’Regan for (and it was hard to pick a winner from the many incoherent and internally inconsistent examples she had on offer) arguing for the confiscation of property  (tax dollars) to support the promotion of Maori language “because it is beautiful” [so too is the NZ countryside] citing the Treaty as justification for said confiscation of property (I kid you not!). We both called her on this in the Q&A.
• Funniest Moment was when the producer decided that our paper voting forms didn’t look so good on camera so had the audience pretend to push invisible electronic voting buttons and to vote multiple times so that the camera could grab a range of shots. Shane Taurima, the host, completely lost it with laughter when he delivered the instructions to the audience to push the green button for the affirmative and the red button for the negative “on the small electronic device you see before you” and he had to re-shoot it. (Then they decided to have us vote with the paper ballots).

I must note that at the beginning of the debate the audience was asked for a show of hands as to who was for the motion and who was against it. At the outset less than 5 people were for the motion. This is an important consideration to factor into the voting results announced at the end of the debate. As Stephen said to me afterwards, I think the for’s won it as they gained votes and the againsts lost them.

RELATED POSTS:
Maori and Pakeha are Not Partners to the Treaty of Waitangi

Recently I read a document that stated, “This institution seeks to honour the partnership between Pakeha and Maori that is laid down in The Treaty of Waitangi.” I have seen this type of statement numerous times before in the mission statements of many different kinds of New Zealand institutions. I think this claim is nonsense. Below I will argue why.

At the heart of this kind of statement is the notion that The Treaty of Waitangi (The Treaty) constitutes a partnership between Maori and Pakeha; Maori and Pakeha apparently entered into an agreement which contains mutual obligations.

The problem with this claim is that only persons can enter into contracts. Persons are either rational self-conscious agents, such as adult human beings or legal persons which are an organisation of rational agents into an institutional structure of some sort. One cannot enter into a contract with concrete objects that are not persons such as rocks or trees; nor can one enter into contracts with abstract objects such as the colour blue. One would have thought this was an obvious point which did not need pointing out.

‘Maori’ and ‘Pakeha,’ however, are not persons. Individual Maori people and individual Pakeha people are persons, and individuals of either race can organise themselves into an institution which will have a legal personhood separate from their own individual personhood, but the racial groups ‘Maori’ and ‘Pakeha are not persons.

The term Pakeha is an abstraction, it is simply a reference to an aggregate of individuals who share a particular genetic trait. It is false that everyone who has these genetic traits signed The Treaty. In fact, as The Treaty was signed in 1840, no individual alive today signed The Treaty. It is equally false that simply because someone with the same genetic traits as me at some point in history signed a treaty that it follows that all members of my race signed a treaty.

What is accurate is to say is that two institutions entered into an agreement, the Crown and various Maori tribes. No Pakeha individual can be identified as the crown and no Maori individual can be identified as a tribal group unless the individuals are acting in an official capacity as the agent of these institutions. Hence, no Maori or Pakeha individual is bound by The Treaty; no individual is responsible or culpable for breeches of The Treaty.

Someone might object that the Crown being the head of a representative government acts on behalf of all Pakeha and hence, Pakeha can be said to have entered into a partnership via The Treaty. I think this claim is mistaken. It assumes that whenever a government performs an action one can attribute the actions of the government to any and all private citizens of that government.

This error is precisely the error we condemn when terrorists target a civilian population. When terrorists target non-combatants they assume that because a government has unjustifiably committed aggression against them that it follows that the citizens of that government can be attacked. The principles of non-combatant immunity, however, deny this. If a state engages in aggression then the military personal who act as the state’s agents can be attacked but citizens who are not acting as agents for the state cannot be. They are innocent third parties.

Maori and Pakeha, therefore, did not enter into a partnership at the time of The Treaty was signed, and private individuals from either race have no obligations to each other under The Treaty. To suggest they do is to commit the error of attributing personhood to racial groups as opposed to individual members of that group. It suggests that the actions of one person who has a particular genetic trait can be attributed to everyone who has that trait. The implication of this is that whenever a Maori gang member commits a crime one could justly claim that ‘Maori’ committed the crime. This is of course racist and would justifiably be condemned in any other context. It should equally be condemned in the context of discussions over The Treaty of Waitangi.

Of course this is not to say that Pakeha and Maori individuals do not have duties to each other. The normal duties to not steal from each other or vandalise each others property, to refrain from rape and assault, etc still apply. These apply because these are general duties laid down by God. I am not bound to fulfil them because some other person signed a contract with a third party. Moreover these have nothing to do with race. I have a duty to not steal from a Maori individual because I have a duty to not steal from any human being. The duty would hold whether the person in question was Maori, Chinese, Persian or Tongan. The duty has nothing to do with a historical event in 1840.

Nor are my comments meant to deny that one party to The Treaty was treated unjustly and unfairly by the other. There is probably good historical evidence that they were. My comments simply point out who the parties in question are. They are not Maori and Pakeha. They were the Crown and certain Maori groups.

By all means let’s have a discussion about what the Crown should do to honour its obligations under The Treaty. I have no problem with the idea that a state should keep its obligations to other states and parties. I have no problem with the idea that government should both protect and respect the property rights of its citizens regardless of their race. I also have no problem with courts demanding the state compensate its victims if it can be proven in a court of law that the state has not done these things – one of the insidious features of the former government was its continual rejection of these principles. But stop suggesting that Maori and Pakeha are “partners” under The Treaty and that they and private individuals have obligations under it. They do not. As Dr Martin Luther King said, individuals should be judged by the content of their character not the colour of their skin.