Peter Hemmingson: Thoughts on the Treaty Grudge Industry

The ethnocentric polarisation of New Zealanders finds its entry point in the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1974.

Before the Act was passed, the legal definition of ‘Maori” was by blood quantum: “A person of the Maori race of New Zealand or a half-caste descendant thereof.”

After panicked complaints from its Maori MPs that soon nobody would be able to prove eligibility for the Maori Electoral Roll, Labour changed that definition tor read: “A person of the Maori race of New Zealand or any descendant thereof.”

With the stroke of a pen, anyone with a fraction of Maori blood, such as the 1/16th Maori, Stephen [aka ‘Tipene’] O’Regan, could hang a big mutton bone around his neck and identify himself as ‘Maori.’

Those of us who live in the real world take the view that 51% of the shares are required for a controlling interest in the company.

More than half-Maori by blood quantum = on balance a Maori.

Half-Maori by blood quantum = you get to choose what side of the fence you climb down on ( if you're a fence builder).

Less than half-Maori by blood quantum = a Pakeha with delusions of ethnicity, an ancestor-denier, an indigenous pretender.

If your kin group accepts you as a member, you're in.

You're a member.

And as long as this remains a private matter for those concerned, it's none of anyone else's business what you want to call yourself.

But once you start ramming your private self-identity into the public square, demanding financial and political patronage from your fellow-citizens far in excess of your actual market value as productive human beings, that's the point at which everyone else acquires the absolute right to tell you who THEY'RE prepared to accept as 'Maori.'

The Treaty of Waitangi — unless that part was in the bit the rats ate — makes no provision for anyone alive today with a Maori ancestor to enjoy group rights of any kind not also enjoyed by their fellow-citizens.

In a free society, rights accrue to individuals on the basis of citizenship, not to groups on the basis of group membership.

Even someone who stuck his hand up 30 seconds ago at a town hall swearing-in ceremony is a citizen, with all the rights and duties of citizenship.

The prior arrival or ancestral longevity of some ancestors in the land is no basis for special privilege.

Group rights are anathema to a free society.

They create two classes of citizenship where only one existed before.

They require the intervention of an activist government taking rights off one group of citizens to bestow on another.

And one person’s positive discrimination is everyone else’s negative discrimination.

Racism occurs whenever a group of people with an ethnocentric membership base creates or colonises a system to afford themselves separate, different, or superior rights on the basis of group membership.

Those who believe in one law for all, colourblind government, individual equality in citizenship, and an end to unearned ethnocentric privilege for brown supremacist part-Maori are the polar opposite of their racist opponents.

But the actual racists have carried out a sneaky little bait-and-switch.

Thomas Sowell identified this scam as far back as 1988: "Sixty years ago, if you believed everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, you were a radical. Thirty years ago, you were a liberal. Today, you're a racist."

Racists are people who give purpose to otherwise empty lives by adopting unfounded assumptions of collective superiority as their North Star. As Eric Hoffer points out: "The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."

When brown supremacist part-Maori bang on about ‘racism,’ they don’t mean getting rid of any ‘racism’ that might exist.

Just placing it under new management.

Theirs.

Never forget that it’s about utu.

Payback.

Revenge.

Since the Maori phenotype tends to predominate as a determinant of appearance, there’s a raft of people who’re way less than half-Maori by blood quantum, but who ‘look Maori’ - that is. they have brown skin and Polynesian features.

Identified from early childhood both by their own and outsiders as ‘Maori’ whether they like it or not, many aggressively adopt a collectivist ‘Maori’ identity and an adversarial attitude towards the majority culture they don’t feel fully part of.

And what does the hurt child do?

It seeks to hurt by way of retaliation and make others suffer too.

To justify acting out against their fellow-citizens, brown supremacist part-Maori need to demonise them as the 'other.'

Eric Hoffer again "Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil."

As Communist and anti-colonialist, Frantz Fanon reminds us: "The native is an oppressed person, whose constant dream is to become the persecutor."

So what is often referred to as "The Treaty Grievance Industry" is perhaps better understood as ‘The Treaty Grudge Industry.’

The ‘Maorification of Everything’ going on right before our largely unseeing eyes is largely driven by pathological haters and wreckers driven to bully and dominate non-Maori by way of payback.

Quite why public policy should validate someone else’s adjustment issues eludes me, especially as it is destroying our country and rapidly approaching the point at which only a civil war won by the good guys will suffice to turn it back.

Peter Hemmingson is a New Zealander of multiple ethnic origins, who believes in a single standard of citizenship for all.