On Reality Check Radio, Rodney Hide says that referenda are for divisive issues such as the Treaty Principles
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3 comments:
I find it hard to believe that Helen Clarke and Jim Bolger, among others, do not want a referendum on something which did not exist in the first place, that is the principles in the Treaty of Waitangi. It is time to wind this up once and for all.
Kevan
A popular vote doesn't seem to be an appropriate way of determining 'principles' of a Treaty. No more than having a referendum to decide on the principles of mathematics. Either those principles are valid or not. It would be better to have a properly set up, independent enquiry into the matter of Te Tiriti principles. That could determine whether the currently claimed principles are sufficiently well-founded.
A referendum might be useful to answer the question “Is it appropriate to base New Zealand’s laws and government on recently derived principles claimed to underlie Te Tiriti but are not mentioned in that document?” One might argue that the recent election already decided on that.
A more useful referendum would be “Should we (pretend to) treat a treaty designed for 1840 colonial New Zealand as a basis for running a democratic country almost 200 years later?” For this one to be binding on government and to be accepted as reasonable by Maori, the vote would need to be designed so as to provide 50-50 say between Maori and non-Maori. That is, each Maori vote would need to be treated as 2.94 votes to reflect their proportion in the population. Otherwise it would be as ethically unsound as allowing the ‘tyranny of the majority’ to trash any existing agreement simply because that suits the majority at the expense of another less numerous party to that agreement.
(Actually, that could end me and other mortgagees having to make any further payments. Let’s do it!)
But seriously, that vote balanced (only for this referendum) for equal Maori representation would be worth undertaking, with a good possibility it would still pass because there are enough Maori sensible enough to recognize the harm Te Tiriti activism is doing to the country, and the foolishness of continuing to distort reality sufficiently to try to make Te Tiriti relevant today. For example, if Te Tiriti still applied today then Maori would not be able to sell any property except to representatives of the British monarch, and Maori would all have to do what they are ordered to do by their tribal chief.
Queen Victoria's 1840 Royal Charter/Letters Patent is the ONLY document that made New Zealand into a British Colony with it's own Governor, and it's own Government under one flag and one law for 'all the people of New Zealand' irrespective of race, colour or creed, on the 3rd May 1841.
It supersedes Tiriti o Waitangi which was signed while New Zealand was under the laws and jurisdiction of New South Wales and where the Maori people agreed to give up their individual governments in exchange for becoming British subjects, with all the same rights as the people of England, no more,no less.
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