Mike Butler: Fraud, plunder, treason, treaty

Author Chris Newman completed his BA in sociology before Mat Rata shepherded his Treaty of Waitangi Act through Parliament in 1975.

In his self-published book titled Fraud, plunder, treason, and our treaty, Newman launches a spirited attack on New Zealand’s treaty industry by claiming that it constitutes a long-running and massive fraud.

Back in 1975, when Mat Rata as Maori Affairs Minister brought his Treaty of Waitangi Bill into law, New Zealand was referred to as “New Zealand”, the Church of England was the state religion, and the treaty was hardly an issue, except for some graffiti and an occasional protest.

Fast forward 50 years, the chattering class persists in referring to New Zealand as “Aotearoa”, Maori custom (tikanga) appears to have superseded Christianity, and the treaty is regarded, by some, as superior law.

How did that happen? Newman asserts that fraud, plunder, and treason centering on treaty twisting was the cause.

Fraud is “a false representation by means of a statement or conduct made knowingly or recklessly in order to gain a material advantage,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of Law as cited by Newman.

To plunder is, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, to “rob (a place or person) forcibly of goods”. Treason is “violation by subject allegiance to sovereign”.

In a nutshell, Newman’s argument is that Mat Rata as Maori Affairs Minister had passed the Treaty of Waitangi Act which set up the Waitangi Tribunal which enabled claimants to plunder the people of New Zealand and deny that chiefs in 1840 ceded sovereignty to the Queen of England.

That sovereignty was not ceded means that Maori are not and never were subjects of the Queen and her successors which constitutes treason, which, according to the above definition, is “violation by subject allegiance to sovereign”.

This gives the appearance that members of the Waitangi Tribunal, as a government body, are committing treason by recommending to the government that those with Maori ancestry are not under the sovereignty of the New Zealand government.

Of course, this is batshit crazy since the last thing that claimants to the Waitangi Tribunal would actually want is to walk away from the goose that lays the golden egg, metaphorically speaking.

Curiously, some unchallenged realities support much of this view.

Treason, or “violation by subject allegiance to the sovereign” appears in the Waitangi Tribunal argument that Ngapuhi chiefs never ceded sovereignty.

The fact that a substantial number of public assets (worth $4.3b) have been transferred to private tribal entities from 1990 to December 2019 could be used to support that plunder has taken place.

The existence of a government-commissioned report titled He Puapua, which advocates two governments for New Zealand under tribal control as well as the transfer of vast swathes of Conservation estate “to Maori”, could be viewed as further evidence both of treason and plunder, although Newman does not say that.

Newman says that Mat Rata profited personally from his Treaty of Waitangi Act.

As evidence, he points out that when Rata left Parliament, he went on to become a claimant to the Waitangi Tribunal on behalf of Ngati Kuri for the Muriwhenua claim which resulted in the 1990 commercial fisheries treaty settlement in 1992 worth $170-million.

Further evidence that Rata intended to set up an avenue for “Maori” to gain wealth and political power is that he had the Act confer on the Waitangi Tribunal the exclusive authority to interpret the treaty.

This exclusive right has led to a reinterpretation of the treaty which argued that chiefs retained sovereignty ceding only to the governor the authority to govern British settlers to protect Maori from them.

Citing French legal philosopher Frederick Bastiat, Newman said treaty policy went off track right from the beginning. Bastiat wrote:

The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect persons and property. . . . . If you exceed this proper limit – if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, literary, or artistic – you will then be lost in uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or even worse in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it on you. This is true because fraternity and philanthropy, unlike justice, do not have precise limits. Once started, where will you stop? And where will the law stop itself?

“In Bastiat’s terms”, Newman wrote, “the Waitangi Tribunal is an agency for State-sponsored fraternalistic philanthropy. It is not promoting equity in terms of the treaty. It is the statutory mechanism to authorise those of fractional Maori fraternity to plunder”.

Newman coins a few useful terms.

A “fractional Maori” describes the reality that most Maori have substantial non-Maori ancestry, with many of those expanding the get-rich-through-the-treaty-while-pretending-to-help-poor-Maori industry have miniscule Maori ancestry and come from wealth.

“Race-based hypocrisy is the big problem for the Maori descendants to sort out,” Newman writes. “It sits behind a ‘brown curtain’ and remains hidden from the rest of society”.

Another useful term is “nudger” who is a trendy opinion leader who appears in media or writes op-ed pieces for Stuff or the Herald to “nudge” the great unwashed to accept establishment orthodoxy while appearing as “not-so-obvious establishment”.

Newman shows that the four pillars of Maori custom (tikanga), being authority (mana), revenge (utu), control by invoking supernatural power (tapu), and plunder as a consequence of defeat (muru) are manifested in 21st century New Zealand as incremental gains in political power for the tribal elite, extracting multi-million dollar compensation payments, asserting that areas are sacred as a means of getting control, and obtaining money and resources from taxpayers through the government in the name of affirmative action.

He shows how cultural Marxism and critical race theory work in practice – it is all about creating an oppressor and a victim while exploiting the conflict to gain or retain control.

Perhaps more evidence is needed to prove Newman’s assertion that in passing the Treaty of Waitangi Act and setting up the Waitangi Tribunal, Mat Rata was a bitter man seeking revenge for defeats in the 1860s wars.

Having said that, despite some errors in detail and shortcomings in research, Newman’s spirited polemic presents new insight into a long-running process that is well on the way to destroying the New Zealand that you once knew and loved.

Fraud, plunder, treason, and our treaty, Chris Newman, New Man Press, 342 pages, illustrated, $44 plus postage, available at www.newmanpress.com