Property rights come about in one of two ways:
1. What in a pre-legal society might be referred to as “Customary Title.” This is not ownership at all, merely a temporary right of use or occupation, lasting only until extinguished by superior force.
2. Legal ownership. This means the ability to exclude others by the force of law. The underlying requirement is a universally recognised, settled form of civil government that protects property owners against violent dispossession, and provides for ongoing security of tenure, i.e. “time without end in the land.”
1. What in a pre-legal society might be referred to as “Customary Title.” This is not ownership at all, merely a temporary right of use or occupation, lasting only until extinguished by superior force.
2. Legal ownership. This means the ability to exclude others by the force of law. The underlying requirement is a universally recognised, settled form of civil government that protects property owners against violent dispossession, and provides for ongoing security of tenure, i.e. “time without end in the land.”
Former Auckland University Professor of Maori Studies, Dr Ranginui Walker, has stated: “On the eve of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, there was not one inch of land in New Zealand without its Maori owners.”
Such
an assertion, while politically useful, is factually vacuous.
Prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in February 1840, there was no such thing as a collective “Maori.” Nor was there any settled form of civil government. The functional social unit of pre-European Maori society was the hapu, or sub-tribe. Each hapu was in a Hobbesian state of nature (“War of every man against every man”) with every other hapu, rendering life “nasty, brutish and short.”
In his book Maori Land Tenure: Studies of a Changing Institution (1977), Sir Hugh Kawharu sets out to fabricate a universally recognised body of Maori property rights pre-dating the Treaty of Waitangi. By implication, these were rudely subsumed by white-settler governments, who substituted their own Eurocentric notions of property ownership. This now widely accepted thesis is arrant nonsense designed to fudge or remove the fact that “Customary Title” is in practical terms no title at all.
Within the hapu-controlled estate, whanau groups sometimes enjoyed the exclusive rights of occupancy or usufruct that Kawharu has identified, but the only universally accepted concept of land ownership BETWEEN hapu was "Te rau o te patu" or "The Law of the Club."
This means that before 1840, though various Maori tribes were effectively the sole occupants of New Zealand, they were never owners. In the absence of a settled form of civil government, hapu merely used or occupied land only until someone else came along and took it off them.
Article I of the Treaty of Waitangi (the assumption of national sovereignty by the Crown) modified this position; also Article II, which purported to convert this ephemeral “Customary Title” into permanent legal ownership.
However, the Treaty was never meant to convey to Maori ownership of the entire land area of New Zealand. It was intended to secure the various hapu in a legal (as opposed to “Customary Title”) ownership of land that they actually used or occupied as at February 1840.
In practice, this meant ownership of land identifiably occupied and cultivated. It is ludicrous to propose that someone would expend more energy foraging for food than it would provide once found. So at a most generous assessment, such ownership might stretch to include perhaps one day’s hunting and gathering range around a Maori settlement.
Prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in February 1840, there was no such thing as a collective “Maori.” Nor was there any settled form of civil government. The functional social unit of pre-European Maori society was the hapu, or sub-tribe. Each hapu was in a Hobbesian state of nature (“War of every man against every man”) with every other hapu, rendering life “nasty, brutish and short.”
In his book Maori Land Tenure: Studies of a Changing Institution (1977), Sir Hugh Kawharu sets out to fabricate a universally recognised body of Maori property rights pre-dating the Treaty of Waitangi. By implication, these were rudely subsumed by white-settler governments, who substituted their own Eurocentric notions of property ownership. This now widely accepted thesis is arrant nonsense designed to fudge or remove the fact that “Customary Title” is in practical terms no title at all.
Within the hapu-controlled estate, whanau groups sometimes enjoyed the exclusive rights of occupancy or usufruct that Kawharu has identified, but the only universally accepted concept of land ownership BETWEEN hapu was "Te rau o te patu" or "The Law of the Club."
This means that before 1840, though various Maori tribes were effectively the sole occupants of New Zealand, they were never owners. In the absence of a settled form of civil government, hapu merely used or occupied land only until someone else came along and took it off them.
Article I of the Treaty of Waitangi (the assumption of national sovereignty by the Crown) modified this position; also Article II, which purported to convert this ephemeral “Customary Title” into permanent legal ownership.
However, the Treaty was never meant to convey to Maori ownership of the entire land area of New Zealand. It was intended to secure the various hapu in a legal (as opposed to “Customary Title”) ownership of land that they actually used or occupied as at February 1840.
In practice, this meant ownership of land identifiably occupied and cultivated. It is ludicrous to propose that someone would expend more energy foraging for food than it would provide once found. So at a most generous assessment, such ownership might stretch to include perhaps one day’s hunting and gathering range around a Maori settlement.
The North Island in 1840 was home to an estimated 100, 000 Maori. Ernest Dieffenbach, a German-born naturalist who travelled throughout the North Island in 1844, reported that "even in the areas of greatest Maori habitation, there are huge tracts of land, even up to hundreds of miles, between the various tribes [hapu]."
The South Island lay practically deserted. Edward Shortland's 1846 census found some 2, 500 Ngai Tahu, resident at several coastal locations. To suggest that 2, 500 people [a] lived on; [b] cultivated; or [c] hunted and gathered over more than 13 million hectares of land is arrant nonsense.
Even in the North Island, aside from the immediate areas around a Maori settlement, the "waste lands" were uninhabited, unimproved, uncultivated, and untrod by human feet, other than those of an occasional war party or traveller. Since the forcible exclusion of other groups was in practical terms impossible, the “waste lands” had no “Customary Title” owners to become legal owners under Article II of the Treaty.
The mischievous notion that Maori “owned” land and associated resources they neither used nor occupied was a fiction propounded in the 1840s and 1850s by the missionaries. They were well aware that the Crown had little money for land purchasing. The missionary agenda was to keep secular, worldly Pakeha confined to areas already settled, thus ensuring missionaries remained the only European influence in the all-Maori hinterlands they sought to Christianise.
The Crown was obliged to accept this misinformation because it had a mere handful of troops available to enforce its edicts against 100, 000 well-armed and potentially warlike Maori. Once Maori learned that the Treaty supposedly gave them title to the entire land area of New Zealand, each hapu became an instant "owner" of huge tracts of "waste land" adjoining its settlement(s). Naturally, this created multiple competing “ownership” claims.
To convey a clear title to subsequent purchasers and ensure incoming settlers went unmolested, the Crown was obliged to extinguish this Maori "ownership" by paying all purported claimants. In many early land purchases the Crown paid out anyone asserting a right to be paid.
The Native [now Maori] Land Court was originally set up to deal with these competing claims to the “waste lands.” "Ownership" was typically awarded to whoever could spin the most convincing whakapapa about how his remote ancestor had travelled over the land 500 years before naming natural features after parts of his body.
Had the missionaries not queered the pitch for the Crown, the "waste lands" and appurtenant rights would have simply been assumed by all to be vested in the Crown, to be held, managed, onsold, or otherwise used for the benefit of ALL New Zealanders, irrespective of race.
"Appurtenant rights" of course include those associated with the foreshore and seabed, which in any event fall outside the scope of any rights purportedly reserved to "Maori" under the Treaty.
The English Treaty version at Article II refers to "fisheries." This is simply the right for Maori to go fishing and gather shellfish. Since Article III conveys to individual Maori “all the rights and privileges of British Subjects,” the Crown holding the seabed and foreshore in public ownership clearly fulfils these requirements.
Correctly interpreted, the Treaty establishes no exclusive rights for today’s mixed-blooded New Zealanders whose Maori ancestors signed the Treaty to control any of New Zealand's foreshore and seabed, let alone clip the ticket for activities not in contemplation at the time that the Treaty was signed.
Corporate Iwi claims to seabed and foreshore are already being mounted on the basis of maps such as those accessed via the links below below:
http://www.takoa.co.nz/iwi_maps_north.htm
http://www.takoa.co.nz/iwi_maps_south.htm
As the foregoing discussion demonstrates, this “Map of Europe” approach with its arbitrarily drawn “frontiers” is yet another trougher-fabricated nonsense.
Since Maori owned nothing in 1840, the foreshore and seabed are resources that should rightly remain vested in public ownership for the benefit of ALL New Zealanders, not passed to self-identified, self-interested, minority groups.
28 comments:
Well said Reuben!
Absolutely brilliant!
Is Reuben Chapple quoting some undeniable natural law of the universe when he declares that Maori property rights do not amount to ownership, or is this just based on his preconceived and prejudicial opinion that because indigenous systems of property ownership are not the same as Eurocentric and capitalist conceptions of property, therefore they are somehow not valid or not entitled to equal protection?
Of course, this line of argument is also politically useful when you are trying to rationalize and justify the extinguishment of customary title in order to free up that land or other resource for private ownership, say, for the purposes of colonial settlement or the on-going maintenance of a society formed in this way.
The idea that indigenous people have no right to the soil is based on the doctrine of ‘terra nullius’ which was advanced by European legal experts to argue that “civilized” people had a superior right to property in the lands in which they settled because indigenous peoples had no written law, therefore they did not legally own the land.
But a “right” to property, regardless of whether its form is customary or legal fee simple title is nothing other than a human cultural construct, so to hold up one over another as being more ‘correct’ or ‘superior’ is arbitrary and directed by the political motivation of those who take up this line of argument. It is also fundamentally racist.
How ironic is it for Reuben to argue for the superiority of legal ownership when the Crown itself used the rule of the “law of the club” to take the land it wanted in the Waikato and Taranaki, and to threaten the “law of the club” to subdue Maori elsewhere (e.g. Ngai Tahu) who did not want to sell their land?
Supposedly, a civilized people who want to possess something go into the marketplace and pay the rightful owner the market rate for it, presuming that the thing is available for sale. But the Crown’s unnecessary and hostile policy toward Maori in both places was not based on higher modes of civilization, but a preference to take what they wanted by “the law of the club” because it was within their power to do so, and in preference to dealing with Maori on equal terms.
I woke up this morning, the Maori Council told me my Trust was worth nothing. My assets were income and it was arranged by John Key
Reuben Replies I
“Is Reuben Chapple quoting some undeniable natural law of the universe when he declares that Maori property rights do not amount to ownership, or is this just based on his preconceived and prejudicial opinion that because indigenous systems of property ownership are not the same as Eurocentric and capitalist conceptions of property, therefore they are somehow not valid or not entitled to equal protection?”
Translation: “Reuben is white and biased, and thus a ‘bad person.’ This means I don’t have to engage with his arguments or provide a substantive rebuttal.”
That’s called argumentum ad hominem, or playing the man, not the ball.
You’re going to have to do better than that.
I’ve already shown that in a pre-legal society, property rights are an oxymoron, since there is no rule of law to maintain them against others who might want to extinguish them by force.
“Of course, this line of argument is also politically useful when you are trying to rationalize and justify the extinguishment of customary title in order to free up that land or other resource for private ownership, say, for the purposes of colonial settlement or the on-going maintenance of a society formed in this way.”
"This line of argument" is based on rational thinking and simple logic. “Customary title” amounts to nothing more than a right to maintain one’s claim to something by force. Something that doesn’t exist in the first place is incapable of extinction. It's no more substantial than a puff of air.
Creating a society based on the rule of law requires the identification at a given point in time of who has a better claim than others to rights in a defined parcel of land. If one has performed no acts of ownership to take the land out of its wild state (lived on, cultivated, or at a most generous assessment regularly hunted and gathered over it), no legitimate moral claim to ownership to it can be sustained.
“The idea that indigenous people have no right to the soil is based on the doctrine of ‘terra nullius’ which was advanced by European legal experts to argue that “civilized” people had a superior right to property in the lands in which they settled because indigenous peoples had no written law, therefore they did not legally own the land.”
The Crown could have simply walked into New Zealand and taken that view. Instead, it gave an undertaking to the Maori tribes who signed the Treaty that their customary title occupancy of land to which they identifiably had a superior claim to over other tribes would be converted at some point into a legal title, thus providing for “time without end in the land” as opposed to a clubbed head and “see you later."
“But a “right” to property, regardless of whether its form is customary or legal fee simple title is nothing other than a human cultural construct, so to hold up one over another as being more ‘correct’ or ‘superior’ is arbitrary and directed by the political motivation of those who take up this line of argument. It is also fundamentally racist.”
More playing the man and not the ball to avoid substantive engagement.
Rendering customary title and legal fee simple title to equally viable cultural constructs is the reductionist, relativist nonsense beloved of leftists the world over. It is simply a way of fudging the fact that a customary title is something that can exist only in the minds of those asserting it. Those looking to forcibly dispossess someone claiming a customary title would hold a completely different view of the matter as evidenced by the way land changed hands (perhaps we should say "imaginations") in pre-European Maori society.
Legal fee simple title, requires a legal system to uphold the rights that derive from the sovereign power of the community as expressed in a registrable proprietary title and accompanying enforcement mechanism.
Reuben Replies II
“How ironic is it for Reuben to argue for the superiority of legal ownership when the Crown itself used the rule of the 'law of the club' to take the land it wanted in the Waikato and Taranaki, and to threaten the “law of the club” to subdue Maori elsewhere (e.g. Ngai Tahu) who did not want to sell their land?”
A lamentable ignorance of New Zealand history.
The Crown didn't war with Tainui to take land. "Land Wars" is a complete misnomer. A better title is "Sovereignty Wars" undertaken to extend Crown sovereignty over the Tainui tribes who'd never signed the Treaty in the first place and were thus not entitled to its protection. Tainui had challenged the Crown and were appropriately punished with land confiscations for their impertinence. This is exactly what a victorious Maori tribe would have done to the vanquished, except the redcoats and militia didn’t eat anyone.
It should be noted that nobody was turned off his land or cultivations as a result of this process. The land actually confiscated was waste land at the north of the Tainui rohe (mostly raupo and ti tree-covered swampland) that the Crown proposed to put military settlers on to provide for a buffer zone of armed militia against a resurgence of hostilities from Tainui. Much of it was later returned when the Crown was persuaded the confiscations, though warranted, were excessive.
As for Taranaki, go read my blog post on this site about that matter.
Reuben Replies III
Before the Treaty was signed, Ngai Tahu had sold pretty much the whole of the South Island to Sydney-based land jobbers. Bu one conservative estimate these sales had netted Ngai Tahu consideration (money and trade goods) of £93, 000. This equates in today’s money to upwards of $10m (use the Reserve Bank Inflation Calculator which only goes back to 1862 if you disbelieve me).
After the Treaty was signed, unless these sales met strict guidelines, they were cancelled and the land to returned to Ngai Tahu to sell all over again, which they duly did in several major transactions between 1844 and 1878. These were voluntary sales agreed to by both parties at the time. As evidence of this, Crown land purchase agents were under instructions only to buy from willing sellers. There was never any question about Ngai Tahu’s readiness to part with their lands. In the 1850s, when they were down to their last good-sized block on the mainland, the Crown had to stall them for several years for want of sufficient funds.
This was money for jam, as Ngai Tahu re-sold massive tracts of land they’d never occupied, cultivated, or hunted and gathered over.
Problems arose because these sales took place over a period of more than 30 years. In the 1840s, when Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s notion of a nation of small cultivators ruled, about 10 acres per head was considered enough for Europeans, and reserves of similar size were set aside for Ngai Tahu. A decade or so later, when it was apparent large-scale wheat and pastoral farming were the most economic land use, the estimate moved accordingly. By 1860, when 100 or so Ngai Tahu sold the West Coast, they were reserved over 67 acres per head.
Naturally, Canterbury Ngai Tahu and others involved in the earlier land sales thought they’d been short-changed. And so a grievance industry was born, though the Crown more than doubled the size of their reserves over the next thirty years.
“Supposedly, a civilized people who want to possess something go into the marketplace and pay the rightful owner the market rate for it, presuming that the thing is available for sale. But the Crown’s unnecessary and hostile policy toward Maori in both places was not based on higher modes of civilization, but a preference to take what they wanted by “the law of the club” because it was within their power to do so, and in preference to dealing with Maori on equal terms.”
The Judeo-Christian culture that originated in Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, then took root in Europe, is vastly superior to other cultures. This culture has raised more people from poverty, ignorance, and barbarism than any other in world history. As such, it is to be celebrated, not denigrated. Many non-whites have also benefited massively in adopting Western cultural norms and values. This fact is undeniable to anyone except a moron.
Judeo-Christian culture also used to value values logic.
By any objective standard, the sum total of Maori culture’s contribution to human felicity is an ugly, gesticulating, tongue-poking, eye-rolling, thigh-slapping war dance of limited curiosity value when deployed before a rugby match.
If anyone can show otherwise, let them step up to the plate.
As for the Crown deploying “the law of the club” rather than “dealing with various Maori tribes on equal terms,” once it stopped wavering over whether to invest primitive tribes with title to massive tracts of waste lands they never used, most this land was “sold” to the Crown by its various tribal “owners” in willing buyer-willing seller transactions. Seems like “equal terms” to me.
Indeed, in the early years of the colony, Maori were queuing up to “sell” land and in such numbers that they even prevailed on Governor Gore Browne to temporarily waive the Treaty’s pre-emption clause so that private sales could occur.
The problems brought on by multiple competing claimants to tracts of waste land meant it soon had to be reintroduced. As noted in the above post, this is why the Native Land Court was eventually set up.
Reuben, great post and enlightening as it places nearly all the pertinent matters into a single precise summary by which the thinking New Zealander can see the result of devious if dis ingenuous constructs done around the meeting rooms in idle Universities, of backroom deals done behind Waitangi Tribunial doors and less than honorable political doors.
However I would have thought your original treatise being that "Customary Use" dating from pre- legal times, is only a recognition of the (former) "convenience of use", entirely subject to a use of any other force by any other agency to restrict that use.
A sort of historical acknowledgement of no legal standing.
That this "Customary Use" condition would naturally lead to the formal English Act and process of Annexation, namely the unfettered raising of the English flag and the military command having been formally established at that point, that from that point hence of all the named land, in the name of the King as being the Regent for the annexing (Legal Act) country of England. From that day to this that Act of Annexation has stood in so far as, NO Maori, claimant, group, Hapu or otherwise has removed the presence of the legally occupying and thus legally owning, power as then vested in the Regent, (now transfered and vested in the "Crown" representing the body of Citizens), by force from the land and been capable of further annexing the land from that Regents (Crown) administrative control.
In this context the Treaty of Waitangi is nothing more than an "appeasement arrangement" that served to postpone a maori war following Annexation, and gave Maori more than it received, in that it gave the ignorant uneducated savage cannibalistic native, (a generalization covering all Maori of all tribes, of the day), a right of equality before the law. This was arguably a quantum leap in freedom and privilege compared to all other native populations annexed and settled by European colonizers elsewhere in the world prior to that time, where most were enslaved or indentured, many transported.
This fixation on the Treaty of Waitangi, elevates the Treaty status and supposed delivery, way above its real value.
The real point of Colonial Settlement in my comprehension of Maritime Law, Under which the Governor would have acted in his Maritime Captain capacity, of colonial practice and of administrative protocol, as established by the colonizing nations, the Act Of Declaration of Annexation commences the point of legal occupancy and coupled with the sustained and developing presence of the Victor under the office of the Regent, establishes right of ownership, and was the definitive and un-reversed act of seizing undivided and undiluted power over ALL the land.
The single law of the law exemplifies this to be so.
The concept of shared power, partnership, is nothing more than an idle academic fiction borne out of the disgruntled minds of some individuals who might provide the nation with more genuine value if they got a real job.
Your take on this aspect of the commencement of our nation would be appreciated.
The sooner the Tribunal is purged of the radical history re-writers and served by a higher caliber of judicial thinker the better for or nation. Time to wind up the compromised Tribunal before the Chinese gold miners claim they also have a shared right to local governance and start their own drilling down in the beehive for more taxpayer payouts, after all the Chinese could claim to have migrated to the south in 1418.
Richard W
So the highest court in the land, the High Court of Parliament, the House of Representatives under a National government in 1995 enacted the Waikato Raupatu Claims a Settlement Act 1995 apologising for the invasion and confiscation of lands belonging to Waikato referring to such events as unjust, unfair and wrongful. Since then no government including those containing ACT party representatives have repealed that legislation nor the plethora of statutes making similar apologies and reparation.
The courts and governments of several common law countries have long recognised the validity of aboriginal title, some for over 100 years. The Privy Council, the US Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada, the High Court of Australia and even the New Zealand Court of Appeal and Supreme Court accept these realities.
As a supporter of the rule of law, laid down by parliament and the courts, shouldn't you at least provide some balance to your assertions?
You seem to advocate an out of touch perspective that no major political party or court would ever entertain that is more aligned with the much discredited Wi Parata v Bishop of Wellington case of 1877. Saying aboriginal or customary title does not exist will not make it go away, no matter how hard you may wish it does.
You realise of course that your population birthrate is in decline while Maori, Polynesians and Asians are on the rise? That our numbers in the top of the civil service, the judiciary, the police, the army and in commerce are increasing along with our tribal wealth? That our tribal trade links with Asia are also increasing and that we are significant wealth holders in fisheries, forestry, geothermal power and agriculture as well as tourism and commercial property? That the bulk of our population is aged under 25?
So while there are many negative statistics, we continue to rise across every aspect of cultural, economic and political life. Quietly. Confidently.
Carefully.
The protest movement has it's uses, certainly.
But it is through more subtle activities and strategies that power imbalances will be redressed.
Mary Stuart
Reuben replies I
Firstly, Mary Stuart (nice English surname there), you require a little education about the elephant in the room:
So-called “Maori” (let’s call them Maori In Name Only or MINOs) are not the Maori of 1840, but New Zealanders of mixed European-Maori descent who have chosen to identify monoculturally as “Maori,” elevating one set of ancestors while trampling down another. Yet traditional Maori culture says that one is to honour all ancestors equally.
For many decades now, there has been no discrete or separate "Maori" ethnic group. All so-called “Maori” alive today are of mixed European-Maori descent. It would be virtually impossible to find a “Maori” who doesn’t possess more of the blood of the colonisers than that of the colonised.
To illustrate this point, prior to the passage of the Electoral Amendment Act 1975, the legal definition of “Maori” for electoral purposes was “a person of the Maori race of New Zealand or a half-caste descendent thereof.” After panicked complaints from its Maori MPs that soon nobody would be eligible for the Maori Roll, the then-Labour Government changed this to read “or any descendent of such a person.”
Under current electoral law, New Zealanders with Maori ancestry can determine once every electoral cycle if they wish to be on the Maori Roll or the General Roll. We thus have a legal definition of “Maori” that defies definition in the Courts, since it is entirely based on an individual’s periodic decision to identify as “Maori.”
Writing in 1972, historian Joan Metge offers a compelling explanation as to why a subset of New Zealanders today might continue see themselves as “Maori.” She states: "New Zealanders, both Maori and Pakeha, tend to identify others as 'Maori' if they 'look Maori,' that is if they have brown skin and Polynesian features. Those whose Maori ancestry is not so evident in their appearance are left to make their own choice."
Since the Maori phenotype tends to predominate in a person’s appearance, many who are considerably less than half-Maori are likely to be identified by others as "Maori" whether they like it or not. This psychic wound is often compensated for by aggressively embracing a collectivist "Maori" identity and seeking utu from the majority culture these people feel shut out of.
The psychological roots of Treatyism may well amount to little more than the hurt child looking for someone to punish. The rest of us should not be obliged to validate someone else’s adjustment issues. There is no logical reason for public policy to support the notion that anyone who is less than half-Maori should be regarded as “Maori,” or to dignify their cultural pretensions, particularly with other people’s money.
You have stated “the highest court in the land, the High Court of Parliament, the House of Representatives under a National government in 1995 enacted the Waikato Raupatu Claims a Settlement Act 1995 apologising for the invasion and confiscation of lands belonging to Waikato referring to such events as unjust, unfair and wrongful.”
I refer you back to the Waikato-Maniapoto Maori Claims Settlement Act 1946, the preamble of which reads: “An Act to effect a Final Settlement of Certain Claims relating to the Confiscation of Maori Lands in the Waikato District …”
After a grand hui at Ngaruawahia, the majority of those present voted to accept an annual payment in full and final settlement of these claims. While a minority faction wanted “land-for-land” Princess Te Puia and others prevailed upon those assembled to accept a cash settlement.
The Act established the Tainui Maori Trust Fund, which would receive the payments, and the Tainui Maori Trust Board, which would administer the fund for the benefit of the members of the "Tainui tribes" who had owned the confiscated lands in the "Waikato district.”
Any part of “Final Settlement” hard to understand?
The Crown should have refused outright to engage with these opportunists in the 1990s on two grounds:
1. They were displaying a complete lack of honour in relitigating the closure that their ancestors had negotiated with the Crown decades earlier; and
2. If you didn’t sign the Treaty of Waitangi in the first place, how can you claim that its protections apply to you or that you are victims of a breach?
Arrant nonsense, or to use words that we might all understand bullshit artists trying it on.
As for courts in other jurisdictions accepting aboriginal title, liberal ankle-grabbers have abounded in the legal profession and judiciary in recent years.
They learned at the Univarsity that their membership of “Club Virtue” requires them to pander to and coddle anyone belonging to a Marxist-designate “victim” group. If you can’t be a “victim” the next highest status accords to the totally supine and penitent “victimiser.”
In their search for that warm glow which comes from “saving the [insert preferred “victim” group] they have sold the rest of us out in the most disgusting manner possible
You haven't dealt with my principal points very well have you. Parliament dominated by White settler offspring, overwhelmingly so, passed this legislation in 1995. Governments of every hue since have followed the same pathway. Your White European descendants' governments. When they didn't need or have to. They chose to. Your One NZ rhetoric hasn't in 20 years changed or modified that now well entrenched Treaty settlement policy one iota. Back to the days of Stuart Scott and his hilarious Travesty of Waitangi diatribe. Since then we've had Maori TV established, the Treelords Settlement and the co governance over the Waikato River. The Spectrum claims and now water. Watch that space.
I say again it was White politicians and White Judges in the Court of Appeal who did all of this to restart the modern Treaty settlement process, not Maoris. How could they? Maoris are plainly in the minority. Have been for over a century. Yet White voters keep electing governments who do these things. So keep blaming yourselves.
Anyone understands the words full and final. But they are of no effect if the jurisdiction of courts and tribunals is not ousted to prevent future claims. So White lawyers and politicians stuffed it up for you again in the 1940s. But even then, no parliament can bind another - Public Law 101. A future government, say reliant on Maori voters for supply, might just look at the settlements again. After all, they are not justice. Let's call them a deposit or down payment?
Funny how you say there are all these part Maoris running around, mostly White too. Yet when there's a crime committed, what's the description of the alleged offender usually given by a White witness? "It was a Maori". Not a part Maori, or a mostly White part Maori, as you say. Funny that.
I say again the superior courts of common law jurisdictions including the Privy Council and the US Supreme Court no less have given recognition to native peoples rights in land and related resources for over a century. This is nothing new. It is here to stay. Much like the Maoris.
Regarding the application of the Treaty to non signatories, once again White power as in the courts and parliament have determined without our consent that it applies to us all regardless of whether we signed. And the non signatories still had their lands taken. It would please my Tuhoe relations no end to have Te Urewera under their total control again because they were non signatories. Oh, that's right. The Tories have done just that. You see, it just takes time.
And I have never extolled my English and French ancestry to the detriment of my Maori blood and vice versa. We're tracing our lands there too, thanks to the help of a Ancestry.com. Oh the benefits of civilisation. How lucky we all are.
Mary Stuart
Great Article Reuben and very well researched. I wish your words could be carried to higher places and all this nonsense would come to an end.
Best Wishes.
I just want to say that Mary Stuart's attitude of "us" and "them" and "whites" is very racist and explains why there are so many race problems in this country. All I can say is thank god she is in the extreme minority. I don't call Maoris "blacks" and don't know anyone who does. She needs an attitude adjustment and also needs to go back and get an education. Better still, go live in Australia and help raise the IQ of New Zealand.
Thank You.
Anon, posting on 24 Jan, I am educated, to masters and PhD (enrolled). I'm also half White and I mean England and France not the colonial copies from here. I've been self employed billing $400K pa in a professional firm, have been a director of $20 million entities, am involved in many community and charitable activities and have over $1 million net worth. Oh and I play grade 8 piano, Scarlatti, Couperin and the like and have learned many traditional waiata next to Gregorian plainsong. So I am not really your stereo typed Maori radical or ill informed slogan laden would be poly. I'm part of the establishment. And for you, that's probably the most unsettling part of all.
Mary Stuart
I guarantee, Mary Stuart, that the financial wealth to which you allude in your most recent posting comes from being a Treatyist "trougher."
What an economist calls "rent seeking behaviour" or to use words we might all understand "if the reward is great enough, the prostitute will always appear."
Your studies to date seem to have ill-equipped you to recognise that group rights have no place in a free society.
In a free society all citizens enjoy individual equality in citizenship. This is so regardless of whether some of a citizen’s ancestors arrived in a waka in 1350, a sailing vessel in 1850, an ocean liner in 1950, or more recently by airliner. Even someone who put his hand up 30 seconds ago at a swearing-in ceremony is entitled to all the rights of citizenship. Prior arrival or ancestral longevity in the land is no basis for special privilege.
Group rights, whereby one group enjoys separate, different, or superior rights on the basis of group membership, are anathema to a free 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 them upon another. As Richard Prebble reminds us: “One group’s positive discrimination is another group’s negative discrimination.”
In Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, Black American academic, Thomas Sowell records the downstream effect of government-sponsored identity politics. Touted as promoting inter-group harmony, Sowell found that wherever such policies had been tried, they invariably expanded over time in scale and scope, benefited already advantaged members of the preference group (those with the smarts to work the system), and led to increased rather than decreased inter-group polarisation. In many places they have brought about decades-long civil wars.
Sowell correctly identifies that troughers and social discord result inescapably from such policies.
Sorry to disappoint you again but our family have been farmers for 4 generations. They financed me through studies and then supported me working for one of the big 7, in those days, accounting firms dealing mostly with tax and the rural sector. Nothing to do with Treaty anything. The fact that I have skills and experience and deploy those now as a community service to tribal affairs is simply a duty.
As for your tired cliches about free societies, when you find one, let us all know. You'll be waiting until doomsday. See my earlier post for an insight into reality about demographics, political power shifts and wealth redistribution. As the Marquise de Maintenon, eventual second wife of Louis XIV said to his then principal mistress Marquise de Montespan while passing her on a staircase "You are going down, Madame? I am going up."
As for prostitution, I suspect that remark provides more insight into your own predelictions. Abuse is never a substitute for rational argument. Anyway, back to the Auckland Nines.
Love the goodwill in Mary Stuart's posts. This is what I'm sick of, and migrating to get away from, all this hate masquerading as moral right. Maori society seems to have gone mad with thoughts of power and revenge. I just don't like associating with people who take such obvious satisfaction in rubbing other people's noses in it, whenever they perceive themselves to have gained some slight advantage. Maori ascendancy will be the death of transparency, of sense and fairness, of goodwill. And, sad to say it, of a mentality that freely admits to incoherence in an argument. I find time and time again Maori-first promoters resort to the kind of internally contradicted, self-invalidating arguments that take the patience of a saint to unpick because they are so convoluted, and are delivered with such an assumption of absolute inviolability, there is no room for honest engagement. It's just emotionalism and guilt. Why waste a lifetime mired in this atmosphere? Thank god I have dual citizenship. I want to live in a community, not a bitchfest.
Mary Stuart wrote: "Tired cliches about free societies ..."?
That's called "Argument by Dismissal."
Perhaps Mary Stuart can tell us how a society increasingly dominated by people playing identity politics for special privileges based on ever-more tenuous claim to group membership is better that a society where every individual citizen enjoys equality in citizenship and in which group rights [sic] are unknown?
This crap only works when the troughers can claim "oppressed" minority status in order to exact ongoing financial tribute from the majority of fellow citizens forced by self-hating race traitors in the Parliament and the Judiciary fund it.
The Emperor already has no clothes on.
Economist Simon Chapple noted in a September 2000 paper prepared for the Ministry of Social Policy entitled “Maori Socio-Economic Disparity” that according to 1998 census data, seven out of 10 people identifying as “Maori” (themselves of mixed European-Maori descent) in the 25 -35 age group who were married (legal or de-facto) with children were married to a non-Maori.
This means that “the majority of Maori [sic] children growing up today have a non-Maori parent.”
The troughers know that they must make hay while the sun shines, because sooner or later the majority will catch on that most (if not all) those demanding to be appeased with other people’s money possess more of the blood of the colonisers that of the colonised.
It is only be entrenching the Treaty (or rather its bogus “principles”) in a written Constitution that the rort can be prolonged indefinitely.
As noted in a previous NZCPD article, Racism is often conflated by Leftists with simple prejudice, which it is not. Principled opposition to unearned racial privilege is not racism. Nor is it typically evidence of prejudice.
Racism occurs where a group of prejudiced individuals get together to create a system affording them separate, different, or superior rights to everyone else solely on the basis of group membership.
I will leave it to readers to decide if NZ is a racist country, and if so, which group benefits from this racism.
Perhaps Mary Stuart can also tell us how a minority enjoying special privileges at the expense of the majority in South Africa was to be loudly decried as racism, and why the same situation here is to be loudly applauded?
Because, silly, the minority in South Africa forced their will on the majority through Parliament and the Armed and security forces who murdered without trial hundreds of innocent Black citizens, tortured and brutalised thousands more, forced Blacks into ghettos and took away even basic human let alone legal rights including the right to vote. The White minority forced their will be denying the right of the Black majority to vote. The news last week highlighted a black ops state security opeative who confessed to these outrages and is still serving time. All of this was done while for the most part the so called Western world closed their eyes and pretended it wasn't happening until rather late in the peace. Are you really suggesting that the situation here and what was there is the same?
As for your equal society fantasy, you remind me of the euqally unrealistic leftists on the Daily Blog website of Bradbury ranting on about the virtues of a classless society. Utopian myths inhabit the pages of text books of totalitarian regimes the world over. If we're all so equal why do we persist with accepting the disgraceful treatment of the homeless, the mentally impaired, the destitute and poverty stricken intergenerational welfarism? Oh that's right, it's all their own fault! if they would only work, stop having babies, stop drinking, dope and smokes, eating too much fast food and robbing the rest of society, they'd all be a lot better off. Yeah right.
Mary Stuart
Reuben replies I:
Mary Stuart wrote: “Parliament dominated by White settler offspring, overwhelmingly so, passed this legislation in 1995. Governments of every hue since have followed the same pathway. Your White European descendants' governments. When they didn't need or have to. They chose to” and “I say again it was White politicians and White Judges in the Court of Appeal who did all of this to restart the modern Treaty settlement process, not Maoris/”
This argument rests on two logical fallacies: “Argument by Appeal to Authority” and “Argument by Consensus.”
Let’s first educate you about how this group think came about:
“Public opinion is what everyone thinks that everyone else is thinking.”
The seminal role of one man, Antonio Gramsci, in the Leftist subversion of Western society and culture is not widely known, but certainly ought to be.
Gramsci, one of the many disreputable Communists enshrined as intellectual icons by the academic Left, was the theoretician of Italian Communism. Imprisoned by Mussolini in the 1920s, he had a lot of time on his hands to theorise about why violent Communist revolutions hadn't occurred in the advanced capitalist countries where Marx had predicted they would happen first.
Gramsci's answer was that the capitalist ruling class controlled the social discourse, meaning the "subordinate classes" [Gramsci widened this from Marx's "the workers" to include women, ethnic minorities, alternative sexualities] lacked all awareness of their own class oppressions.
For Gramsci, a revolution must first take place on the level of consciousness. This would occur with the formation of a body of intellectuals who would take over the academy and use it as a factory for ideological reproduction. These intellectuals would ideally come from the "subordinate classes,” but would also include those from the "dominant classes" who could be induced to switch sides.
Reuben replies II
Graduates of this indoctrination programme would then go forth from the academy as “agents of social change” and colonise the "autonomous social institutions" that shape society's governing ideas, thus allowing them to be used, Trojan Horse fashion, to progressively supplant the West’s Judeo-Christian culture with the views and values of the leftist counterculture.
Gramsci called this process “The Long March through the Institutions.”
These ideas gained ascendancy in the Western Academy through the efforts of the Frankfurt School, a group of predominately Jewish Marxists, who formed a Gramscian Marxist think tank at Frankfurt University in the late 1920s. With the rise to power of Hitler in the early 1930s, the Frankfurt School relocated to America, initially embedding itself at Columbia and Brandeis Universities.
The Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School patented the concept of “critical theory” – an essentially destructive criticism of Western society and culture – designed to indoctrinate students with “cultural pessimism” towards their own society. Frankfurt School academics helped their students to understand that the major social sciences, including geography, economics, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and psychology, were not neutral and impartial. They were instead instruments of race, gender and class oppression.
These views are now considered "mainstream" in the Western Academy. By the early 1970s, the Communists who began their takeover of the universities in the 1930s had achieved critical mass in many departments, particularly those specialising in the study of society. Their growing dominance on faculty hiring committees allowed them to exclude anyone not sharing their world view.
As a result, three generations of Western university students have been subjected to mass-scale academic brainwashing by disciples of Gramsci embedded within the academy with the express purpose of using it as a transmission belt for a raft of Communist narratives into wider society, including that of so-called “Maori” as an “oppressed” people.
Most graduates of this indoctrination programme are not Communists. A small hard core of Communist converts derives a sense of superiority from knowing they are manipulating the situation. A far greatest number are not “Reds,” but the fellow-travelling “Pinks” that Lenin once referred to as “useful idiots.”
Reuben replies III:
Group members were absolutely convinced they belonged to an intellectual elite. How did they know this to be true? They were constantly reminded that they were clever and enlightened for accepting the programming. Students were told they were learning “progressive” new ideas, not Marxism. They were indoctrinated with all the principles of Marxism without the label. If you told them they were Marxists or Communists, they’d respond with a pitying smile, eye-rolling, and accuse you of “seeing Reds under the bed.”
The late, unlamented Franz Fanon was a Communist race-monger, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Fanon made an observation in another context that is highly relevant to this discussion:
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong.
“When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.
“It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance.
“And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalise, ignore, and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”
The underlying problem, as Friedrich Hayek correctly identifies in The Road to Serfdom, is that most people, whatever their level of intelligence, represent “the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are ready to accept any ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.”
Having internalised the ready-made system of values upon which their membership of “Club Virtue” depends, most university graduates over the last thirty years display a strong emotional resistance to having it questioned. If you disagree with them you are racist, sexist, fascist, misogynist, homophobic or just plain stupid. Rational discourse with Lenin’s useful idiots is impossible.
After graduating, these people left the academy and slithered into the mass media, education system, government departments, legal profession, judiciary, trade unions, local or national politics, entertainment industry, churches, NGOs, and other autonomous social institutions which shape society’s governing ideas. They then embarked on their pre-programmed transformational project. As a result, the political centre of gravity has moved steadily leftward over several generations. This is no accident.
The useful idiot class could best be described as dilettantes playing with leftist ideology because they see it as intellectually cute, and because it gives them an identity and status well above their actual value in a competitive marketplace. Many affix themselves in various ways to the public tit and add hefty pay cheques.
Reuben replies IV:
US political columnist Joe Sobran uses the metaphor of a hive of bees, united by a kind of “group mind,” to describe the largely informal body of leftist opinion to which these people belong. There’s no central direction as such, but the bees can sense an enemy, and know when to attack.
Sobran says, “To become a bee in this hive is to surrender, voluntarily and eagerly, your own personality: to submerge the self in a collectivity; to prefer the buzzing cliché of the group to individual thought and expression; to take satisfaction in belonging and conforming to a powerful mass while punishing others for failure to conform ... The similarity to an insect colony - where the individual exists only functionally, being both indistinguishable from and interchangeable with its fellows - is not superficial, it is of the essence. To be an insect is to be relieved of the burden of having a soul of your own.”
Political scientist Eric Hoffer is another who provides us with deep insight into the collectivist mentality. Hoffer saw that mass-movements based on ideological populism and internalisation of received dogma are an outlet for people who know they are individually insignificant but want to feel important. He pointed out that the leaders of the Nazi movement were men whose artistic and intellectual aspirations were wholly frustrated, as were the Bolshevik leaders.
Those drawn to leftist ideologies are invariably people with a pressing need for self-inflation and ego-boosting (generally in the absence of any real claims in that direction). As Hoffer makes clear: “The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause.”
People who are fulfilled in their own lives and careers are unlikely to be attracted to mass movements: “A man is likely to mind his own business when it worth minding,” Hoffer said. “When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”
Reds and Pinks, of little or no value as productive individuals in a competitive market place, have done incalculable damage to a free society in their search for personal stature and meaning.
Hans Christian Andersen’s story of The Emperor’s New Clothes is a time-honoured warning against buying into group-think for social approval.
A vain Emperor who cares about nothing but appearances hires two swindlers who promise to make him the world’s finest suit of clothes cut from a cloth invisible to anyone who is stupid or unfit for his position.
After being provided with a workroom and large sums of money to buy materials, the fraudsters pretend to weave the fabric to make the suit. Invited to admire the cloth as it is being woven, the Emperor’s ministers can see nothing, but pretend to see looms full of beautiful fabric taking shape for fear of appearing unfit for their positions. On his own inspection visit, the Emperor does the same thing.
Finally the swindlers announce that the suit is finished. They pretend to dress the Emperor in it and he marches before his subjects at the head of a grand procession. Behind him, his courtiers pretend to be holding up the train of a non-existent cloak, so as not to be seen by others as unfit for their positions.
Not wanting to appear stupid, the townsfolk also play along with the pretence. Then a child in the crowd, too young to understand the desirability of keeping up the charade, loudly blurts out that the Emperor has nothing on.
Soon, others take up the cry, until everyone is saying the same thing. The Emperor cringes, suspecting that the crowd is right, but continues to pretend otherwise because backing down would be to own up to his own stupidity.
I’m sure the “high and mighty” were well-convinced of their own rectitude but all it took was one child speaking the unvarnished truth to explode the carefully crafted fallacy.
The problem you have is that your cherished free and democratic society framed within the rule of law has provided you with a set of outcomes you just don't like. That's the risk you run. Democracy in action.
What you struggle with is the cold hard reality that the major political parties elected by the voting public for a generation have foisted this entire structure of Maori land tenure and the Treaty process on everyone. There have been more settlements put in place by Tory governments than all of the previous governments combined. The level of funding for Maori television, wananga, schools, social service provision and business have increased dramatically over the last quarter century thanks to the governments that the voting public at large keep electing. And all you can do is in 500 words or more with lots of lovely quotes from lots of lovely famous people tell us that the voting public all stupid. Really? As if that's news. Even Stephen Franks has noted at least 10% of people believe in UFOs.
The real emperor's new clothes is that people like you who inhabit this space are a minority, much like the Maoris. You will only ever be a minority. If you weren't, you would have more success at the ballot box. But you don't. We've been waiting for 20 years since the time of silly old Stuart Scott for the silent White majority to rise up and put a stop to these terrible Maoris. We remember all of those predications of doom and despair and the great saviour to come. Oh dear. Hasn't happened, has it. And never will. The high point of this one law for all slogan has long passed. Newman was an ACT MP. How many settlements did she and her ilk stop? None.
John Key is the most popular PM for decades and he supports all of the Maori funding that has been in place since Clark. And as mentioned, he's presided over more settlements than any other PM. So he's not really a poster boy for your ONZF one law for all plan, is he? And poor old Conservatives, missed out again. And after all that money spent. Ouch. Probably needs to share an award with Kim.Docom for the most money spent on trying to get into Parliament but with the least outcome.
So you see, the hard left or right will never get anywhere in this country in terms of political power. There might be better pickings in Greece or Germany these days where right wing parties have gained, depsite the reality that ghastly Leftist junta has taken over in Greece. Oh, didn't I mention that? Maori nationalists are far more uncompromising than the Lefties you keep mentioning.
Have you counted how many Maoris are in the services and the police? Sadly I don't think they'll be your salvation either.
MS
At the expense of repeating myself, Mary Stuart simply reprises her fallacious arguments of Argument by Appeal to Authority (the notion that widespread consensus amongst those who should know what they are talking about means that they actually do) and Appeal to False Consensus (because a majority apparently goes along with something, they must be correct in doing so).
And this is precisely the situation prevailing in the Emperor’s New Clothes.
The intellectuals and opinion-shapers of this mythical kingdom had become a self-reinforcing echo chamber for fear of the consequences of not conforming to groupthink: social and intellectual ostracism by one’s peers, loss of status, loss of lucrative academic and government jobs and associated perks.
This persuasion model is known to marketers as “exaction pricing.”
Exaction pricing is the price paid by the target market for not purchasing the product, in terms of the product under discussion, the readymade suite of views and values (including Treatyism) that originated with Communists looking to topple our existing society in order to replace it with a model of their own choosing.
Excluding competing ideas from the West’s universities means that for society’s future opinion-shapers, central route processing occurs in an intellectual vacuum. The arguments presented have apparent merit because students are provided with no yardstick against which to compare them. This is reinforced by low elaboration processing based on the source credibility of lecturers who appear to know what they are talking about. Graduates are chained still further to received dogma by being told that only “correct” views and values will make them card-carrying members of the intellectual community.
Most people, whatever their level of intelligence, want to hold “correct” beliefs and attitudes. Their overriding drive is to belong and conform. In order to do so, they will overwhelmingly internalise received dogma without applying intellectual scrutiny to it.
In marketing, say, baked beans, it would be very difficult to paint someone as a bad person for preferring one brand over another. But when it comes to marketing ideas, imposing exaction pricing is like shooting fish in a barrel. The socialist capture of the culture means anyone swimming against the tide in the prevailing leftist intellectual sewer can expect to be thoroughly demonised.
In the marketing of ideas, exaction pricing works not just on intellectuals who centrally process information, but on the great mass of people who peripherally process it. It threatens the core identity of its targets, forcing them to accept the programming or risk being labelled as bad and evil.
Those who don’t go on to higher education are mostly too busy making a living to centrally process social and political questions, find the issues too complex to process, or both. They can be readily induced to adopt the views and values of the intellectual class via peripheral route persuasion based on perceived source credibility. The programming is then locked in by the same fear of being marginalised for not sharing group-approved attitudes that binds the intellectual class.
In social psychology, “pluralistic ignorance” describes a situation where a majority of group members privately reject a received norm, but wrongly assume it is widely held, and pretend conformity so as not to appear out of step with everyone else.
The great mass of people who rely on the intellectuals and opinion-shapers for guidance simply follow along like sheep, for fear of being seen to be out of step with their fellows.
Any of this ringing any bells?
Marxist National Question racial/cultural identity politics attracts three groups of people like flies to a turd.
- A numerically small group of hard core Communists who derive a sense of superiority out of knowing they are manipulating the situation by dividing society into "oppressor" and "victim" groups. They want power and aim to get it via the divide-and-conquer principle.
- The liberal 'Pinks' whom Lenin once referred to as 'useful idiots' due to how readily they can be co-opted to serve Communist agendas. They want moral preening and public virtue-signaling opportunities. The Communists provide these by telling the useful idiots they can earn brownie [sic] points by crossing the floor and going in to bat for the "oppressed." Since the highest status in our society goes to anyone who can claim membership of a Marxist-designated “victim” group, so much the better if one has a remote Maori ancestor and can switch sides altogether. One is now an ancestor-denier and an indigenous pretender. Outside one’s kin group, such an individual is actually a Pakeha with a little touch of the tar brush, not a “Maori.” This self-delusion needs to be pointed out loudly and often, not pandered to.
- The more “Maori” [part-] Maori who want utu for being brown in a white man's world. Their agenda is to shove everyone else’s nose in the racial turd as payback. We are back under the house again aged four, boobing uncontrollably the first time we realised our appearance made us "Maori" without the option. As Commie race-monger, Frantz Fanon reminds us: "The native is an oppressed [sic] person whose constant dream is to become the persecutor."
Here are the bottom line political actions necessary to dismantle the edifice of Treatyism.
1] The abolition of the racist Maori seats.
[2] The removal of all references to race/culture/ethnicity from the statute books.
[3] The removal of all references to the TOW and its fabricated "principles" from the statute books.
[4] No more taxpayer funding for the teaching of Maori language, culture, and 'history’ and no more tax funding for Maori immersion schools at all levels. If radical 'parts' want these things let them use their Treaty settlement money to do it privately.
[5] The defunding of all parallel social service delivery systems to Maori. If radical 'parts' don't want to use the services available to all NZers, let them use their Treaty settlement money to do it privately.
[6] The restatement in statute that seabed, foreshore, and water are in Crown ownership and held in trust for ALL NZers.
[7] All Maori incorporations to be taxed at the company tax rate with no 'charitable' exemptions allowed.
[8] All communally-owned Maori land to be brought into the Torrens Title system by creating limited liability companies with shares issued to beneficial owners on a pro-rata basis. Shares can be bought/sold/traded with anyone of any race, thus allowing the motivated to build up a majority shareholding to move forward with land that because of current ownership structure cannot be used as security for bank finance. Maori Land Court to be abolished.
[9] Local authority rates to be levied on all Maori land -- including marae and kaumatua housing -- with standard enforcement procedures applied in the event of non-payment. No more free riders on non-Maori ratepayers.
[10] The immediate repeal of the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 and abolition of the racist Waitangi Tribunal, with [[part-] Maori claims of any kind against the Crown to be dealt with in the Courts and proper evidential procedure applied.
[11] Re-writing the Education Act to change the mission of our universities from being "the critic and conscience of society" to "required to provide intellectual balance and rigour, and equal space for conservative and libertarian viewpoints."
And of course any downstream proposal that the beneficiaries of state-sponsored identity politics revert to being treated the same as everyone else will make such groups squeal like stuck pigs. As Thomas Sowell reminds us: “When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.'
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