Mike Butler: How to regain our nation

There is a new madness afoot. A determined race-based minority within the Maori community is seizing control of the country while most others remain ill-informed unaware and uncaring. Such are the words of John Robinson in his new book Regaining a Nation – Equality and Democracy.

Robinson, who has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and wrote Unrestrained Slaughter: The Maori Musket Wars 1800-1840, The Kingite Rebellion, Dividing a Nation: the return to tikanga, and He Puapua – Blueprint for breaking up New Zealand, gives insight as a scientist who did research for New Zealand government entities.

The Crown Forestry Rental Trust hired him to research birth rates among Maori. When he presented evidence that colonisation enabled the Maori population to recover after the devastating Musket Wars, he was told to obfuscate his report because, without doing so, it undermined the preferred narrative, that colonisation harmed Maori.

It’s an indictment that someone has to remind us, painstakingly, of the miracle that occurred in New Zealand, in which Maori people transformed themselves, and helped transform New Zealand, from the Stone Age to the Space Age, in a little over 100 years.

The first 80 pages shows that colonisation brought a huge benefit to Maori by way of peace, Christianity, literacy, freedom for slaves, and the end of infanticide and cannibalism that were a part of the grisly old Maori customs, otherwise known as tikanga.

The next section, on building a nation, is clear that roads, rail, home comforts, healthcare, schools, and housing, were built or brought about without traditional Maori knowledge, now referred to as matauranga.

The long march through our institutions started in 1975, with the Treaty of Waitangi Act, and included the reinterpretation of the treaty and the rewriting of history by the Waitangi Tribunal, the pernicious introduction of co-governance under a National-led government, and the ultimate roadmap to a divided nation as is the He Puapua plan that the current government remains in denial about.

As a scientist, he is contemptuous that the Royal Society of New Zealand, “once the champion of unfettered science” has made itself subject to tikanga and matauranga Maori. After explaining, in detail, the centuries-long battle for science to free itself from church dogma, he wrote:

Science cannot flourish without the necessary freedom; it will die if scientists are required to bow down before any dogma, any imposed worldview, whatever that may be. The idea that science should be directed by an ancient culture which lacked any of those millennia of information and had no knowledge of the scientific method, together with a treaty that is now torn apart with conflicting versions, is absurd.

Robinson’s recipe is that a basic principle must be adopted to guide the nation, that all New Zealanders are born equal, and that there can be no differentiation in public affairs (central and local government, public organisation and law) based on inheritance, race, or ethnicity.

The long march by brown supremacists has gone through all our institutions. Therefore, the remedy he prescribes is wide-reaching:

• Close the Waitangi Tribunal immediately.
• Remove the Treaty of Waitangi from all law and statutes (the original document has been reinterpreted and changed irrevocably.
• End treaty settlements.
• Withdraw from the 2001 United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
• Repeal the Marine and Coastal Area Act 2011.
• Abolish Maori wards in local government and Maori seats in central government.
• Affirm that there should be no change to the name of our country without a binding referendum.
• Repeal the Three Waters proposal.
• Reassert one universal health authority while scrapping the Maori Health Authority.
• Rescind the rewritten history curriculum.
• Remove all reference to tikanga in law and regulations.

To those who say it can’t be done, it can, simply, by a vote or series of votes in Parliament. After all, that is mainly how it all got to be like this, in a nation with a central government that is short of checks and balances, with a dodgy voting system, hobbled by a succession of cowardly and self-absorbed politicians.

If you doubt that a long-running strategy is imposing Maori sovereignty on New Zealand, this is the book for you. If you think that the brown supremacists have already taken over, this is also the book for you.

Regaining a Nation – Equality and Democracy, John Robinson, Tross Publishing, 237 pages, illustrated, $35 (including postage) is available from www.trosspublishing.co.nz or from Paper Plus.