1. To raise awareness of the Land Wars and how they relate to local history for schools and communities.
2. To introduce these local histories into the New Zealand Curriculum as a course of study for all New Zealanders.
3. To memorialise those who gave their lives on New Zealand soil with a statutory day of recognition.
Fairfax breathlessly reported on Saturday, August 20, that a date would be set for public holiday to commemorate New Zealand Land Wars. (1)
But Deputy Prime Minister Bill English quickly hosed down such heightened expectations on the following Monday when he said there would be no national holiday, only a day of commemoration that was up to tribes to agree to. (2)
Perhaps English had just worked out that with 2,460,000 employees in New Zealand, a Land Wars Day holiday would cost employers around $394-million (calculated at $20 an hour per worker).
I opposed establishing such a day, I sent in a submission, and said I wished to speak to the submission. I got no reply other than the electronic response that the submission had been received.
You and I know that New Zealand’s history has been rewritten through the Treaty of Waitangi settlement process and much of that rewritten history includes half-truths and misinformation.
For instance, Waikato claimants say that colonial troops murdered 144 women and children cowering in a church at Rangiaowhia on February 21, 1864, and set the church on fire.
Unfortunately for that untrue alleged atrocity tale, the church that was supposed to have been burned remained standing for years after fighting at Rangiaowhia. Eyewitness accounts record the deaths of five troops and 10 anti-government Maori as the result of a gun battle around a raupo hut, not women and children in a church. See Bruce Moon: Rangiaowhia Incident
The reasons for my opposition to such a commemoration day were because:
1. Such a day would most likely focus on those who fought against the government when Maori fought both for and against the government in New Zealand during the 19th century. Besides, the 19th century armed conflicts in New Zealand are more accurately described as tribal rebellions than land wars.
2. A further day like Waitangi Day to enable political grandstanding on tribal grievances is neither wanted nor needed. We don’t want a second Waitangi Day every year.
3. Those who grandstand often repeat stories of old grievances and ignore compensation paid in the 1940s, and the $3.2-billion paid over the past 25 years.
4. ANZAC Day is our national war memorial day. That is when we can remember the 2899 killed in 19th century armed conflict in New Zealand, the 71 killed in the Boer Wars, the more than 18,000 killed in World War 1, over 12,000 killed in World War 2, and 36 in Vietnam.
Sources
1. Date to be set for public holiday to commemorate New Zealand Land Wars, Stuff, August 20, 2016. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/83329239/Government-announces-Land-Wars-Day-at-Turangawaewae
2. No public holiday for NZ land wars, Stuff, August 23, 2016. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/83459046/no-public-holiday-for-new-zealand-land-wars
10 comments:
When a Society travels along a pathway to inequity and inequality, there will be by natural events a time of reckoning.
We know that Societies can become sick without knowing it, and it seems that the others are unwell, not us.
We know we are all right because most say so. We have the Television, the media, academia, and the priests of progress to repeat what the truth is.
We have Farrar propaganda blog with its downticks in case we stray from this truth.
We have a leader who did not appear to us as a flimflam, but he is.
We are a people with the foremost among us being Maori tribal leaders.
Then after that, European and other ethnic groups including Asian are roughly equal second class.
It is a fact as Mike Butler says, that we have a separatist Maori Party dominated government which is led by appeaser-in-chief John Key who only listens to what he has decided to hear.. It is a disgrace that a major event in our history is air brushed into our lives without our most determined proponents of democracy like Mike being allowed to speak of it.
The New Zealand Government today is without a core, direction or spirit , and absent to the utter imperative doctrine of equity, and equality. Entire civilisations fail and die on these grounds, as their former vigour is lost to social malady.
In a letter I burdened Don Brash and others with, I said that I see that our trouble is so deep within Government, institutions and individual apathy, that it is now irreversible other than by sudden revolution at the ballot box.
There are other nations in the world struggling for identity in the face of leaders who have lost all recognition what their people need.
This ballot box revolution will arrive, but not before they continue the self fulfilling listless soft appeasement .
In the meantime, I say to people, we have to come to terms with the options we have.
I have no career at stake, just an iron in the fire.
We can lift NZ First to 15% in the next election, and thereby sack most of the bad spirits we have now.
Thank you both, Mike and Paul. It is very difficult to refrain from coarse invective concerning the grossly self-serving behavior of our Parliamentary representatives. The wholly avoidable calamity that their avoidance of a very real issue is encouraging frightens me. I am not confident that NZ First can solve the problem but I am sure as hell they cannot make it worse. Vote NZ First you say: done.
Thanks Mike for summing this up very well. We can certainly do without further Grandstanding on the many dubious grievances that individuals and tribes have 'produced' over the years. We need to be celebrating unity not division.
Yes. Please do not refer to "Land Wars" as tbis is a nonsense. My understanding is that at that time Maori occupied 98% of NZ's land mass.
This would seem to be yet another example of an unwillingness to be non PC and say enough is enough. Holiday or not the day will become a device for misleading propaganda and a major event for concentrated introverted justification of maori shortcomings. Yet more cases for compensation will be devised.
Maori Focus has not worked for crime reduction. Drawing together felons already largely in denial and further brainwashing them that all their digressions are the result of colonialism has not improved their compliance with ordered lawful society. Similarly this commemoration day will not assist those who choose to be maori to fit the modern world.
It seems the only politician who fully understood maori and was willing to act was Helen Clark.
TAINUI TOFFEE
As outgoing Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe, reminds us in his 1922 farewell address: “In the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King. And he that does not know his own history is at the mercy of every lying windbag.”
Neither "Land Wars" nor “Maori Wars” accurately explain the basis of the conflicts that race mongers now wish to commemorate in order to further stoke anti-White and race separatist sentiments. These misnomers have been coined and propagated to imply the Crown made unjust war on a collective Maori in order to “steal” their land.
The war was in fact between the Crown and specific tribes, who challenged the Crown and lost. The Crown then punished these groups with land confiscations as it had earlier warned it would do if they didn’t lay down their arms and cease their provocations.
The tribes on which the Crown waged a series of localised wars between 1863 – 1878 were predominately based in the centre of the North Islam (Tainui, Tuwharetoa, Tuhoe) and had never signed the Treaty of Waitangi in the first place. Under the legal doctrine of privity of contract, only the parties to an agreement are bound by it or can claim its protection in the event of a breach. So no Treaty breach there.
The Tainui tribes set up a "King" as a rival sovereign to the Crown and drew a handful of other tribes outside the immediate locality who HAD signed the Treaty into joining them. The Kingite Movement was thus made up of aggressive challengers to the Crown's sovereignty and rebels against it.
"Sovereignty Wars" is the correct description of these conflicts, since they were undertaken both to extend the Crown's sovereignty over those who'd never acknowledged it, and to bring those who'd rebelled against it to heel.
Crown troops entered the Waikato in 1863-64 after numerous provocations from the Kingites that began several years before.
A number of Taranaki chiefs had in 1854 formed an anti-land selling league. Its ability to intimidate others who hadn’t joined the league was preventing local chiefs who wished to sell land they owned to the Crown from exercising their Treaty right to do so. In 1860, the Crown negotiated the sale of the Waitara Block with Teira, its legitimate owner. Wiremu Kingi acting as the head of the land league (see more detailed history lesson below) intervened to block the sale. The Crown upheld Teira’s right to sell.
Since the Kingite agenda was to resist further land sales and settler encroachment because they wanted the settlers gone altogether, this was manna from Heaven. After fighting erupted at Waitara on 17 March 1860, Kingite war parties travelled to Taranaki to meddle in a fight that was none of their business, in the hope of igniting a more general uprising against the Crown’s authority throughout the North Island.
Governor Thomas Gore Brown convened a month-long conference of around 120 leading chiefs at Kohimarama, Auckland, starting 10 July 1860, to confirm support against the Waitara rebels and to isolate the Kingites. Of the attendees, the only ones who endorsed Wiremu Kingi’s position in the Waitara Affair were his own relations.
The Kingites subsequently developed two plans of attack on Auckland, one involving a night attack when the town would be set on fire in a number of places by Maori who’d taken up residence there for that purpose. Their stated intention was “to drive the Pakehas into the sea.” Before any such uprising could occur, the government issued an order on 9 July 1863 requiring all Maori living north of the Mangatawhiri River to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown and surrender their weapons. Those refusing to do so were required to retire to the Waikato. A further proclamation dated 11 July 1863 warned that those who waged war against the Crown would have their lands confiscated.
Crown troops crossed the Mangatawhiri River on 12 July 1863. Maori who refused to take the loyalty oath were evicted as the soldiers advanced. Fighting occurred at Meremere, Ngaruawahia, Rangiaowhia (southwest of Cambridge) and at Orakau (near Te Awamutu) during 1863 and 1864. The final military action of the Waikato War was on 2 April 1864, at Orakau. A proclamation confiscating land was issued in December 1864 under the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863.
The Kingites formally sued for peace in 1865, though sporadic guerrilla warfare waged by small bands of dissidents hiding out in Tuhoe country continued until the late-1870s. A total of 619 anti-government Maori were killed in fighting in the Waikato and Bay of Plenty from 1863–1864, while 162 British troops and settler militia, settler non-combatants, and pro-government Maori lost their lives.
The confiscated Kingite territory initially comprised 486,501 hectares, including virtually all of Waikato north of a line drawn from Raglan to Tauranga. The Crown’s intentions were twofold. Firstly, to defray the cost of what had been an expensive war it hadn’t wished to wage in the first place. Secondly, the Crown intended to put settlers with military experience onto land in a buffer zone to be created between Auckland and the Waikato against a renewal of hostilities by the Kingites.
Approximately 127,218 hectares were prior to 1873 returned to Waikato Maori who were judged not to have rebelled. The final confiscations totalled 359,283 hectares. It should be noted that nobody was turned off land that he identifiably occupied or cultivated. Large tracts of “waste land” with no identifiable Maori owners --“Crown Land” of the Kingites being the best description of it – was simply Gazetted as Crown Land, meaning all neighbouring tribes actually lost was the opportunity to turn land they didn’t own anyway into cash at some future point in time.
Once peace was made, the Kingites were treated as British subjects, a far more benevolent fate than they'd have suffered had they been conquered by another Maori tribe, and indeed considerably better treatment than the Tainui tribes had meted out to others during the Musket Wars of the 1830s.
Nonetheless, for around 70 years, Tainui kept up an avalanche of complaints and petitions that the land confiscations were both wrongful and excessive. Eventually, the Labour Party buckled to this pressure, and gave them something to keep Princess Te Puea and the Kingites in the tent for Labour.
In 1946, after what one commentator at the time referred to as “the biggest and most representative hui of the Tainui tribes ever held,” the Crown and Tainui signed the Waikato-Maniapoto Settlement Claims Act, the preamble of which read: "The purpose of this Act is effect a full and final settlement of all outstanding claims relating to the raupatu confiscations ..."
I call that a done deal.
Yet Waikato-Tainui were handed a second full and final settlement of $170-million in 1995, on the basis of what the Waitangi Tribunal asserted were “Treaty Breaches,” despite never having signed the Treaty of Waitangi.
This settlement specifically excluded further claims that Tainui might mount over the Raglan, Kawhia, and Aotea Harbours, and to the Waikato River, so that one wasn’t “full and final” either.
The 1995 settlement went around the various Tainui subtribes for ratification, and was eventually endorsed by around 2/3 of the marae in the Waikato. A kaumatua at one of the dissenting marae famously told the New Zealand Herald at the time: “We do not see this as a full and final settlement, because who can anticipate the needs of future generations. To bind future generations like that is not the Maori way.”
And [part-] Maori continue to assert that the Crown has no honour ...
Thanks Mike, here we go again, a Land Wars Day' it will absolutely only be a day for further protests, abuse and rewriting of NZs history.
Are we all mad or just plain stupid. Unfortunately the Key government or any future government will all follow this endless pandering to the radical, racial left. Oh please when or will we ever see a political leader or party who has the guts to finally say no!.
To correct a few errors.Before the land wars of the 1860s Maori hapu had sold 10% of all NZ to the govt.The initial confiscations were 2% of all NZ land but within 6 months (and a change of govt) half of this land was returned so only 1% was actually confiscated. Tainui tribes made up the biggest group who signed the treaty per head of population.44 Chiefs signed. Te Whero whero did not sign but it was only because officials refused to bribe him.He actually had very good relations with the governor up until the late 1850s.The biggest time of land selling was from 1868.THe leading land sellers were all ex Kingitanga tribes especially Ngati Haua. By the 1900s The Maori king himself was selling land at the rate of 65,000 acres per years.
An interesting fact is that Te Whero whero's half brother was an informant to the British .It was he who in 1863 warned the govt of a pending attack on Auckland by Waikato insurgents.Historian.
Sad in retrospect to see commenst urging us to vote for NZ First. At this date -January 2019 we can see what a disaster NZ First have been in almost every regard. there support, far from appraoching 15% is now under 5% and likely to fall even further thus ensuring that they are wiped out at the next election....we can only hope!
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