Bruce Moon: Response to Godfery

“Memories of emotional events are stamped on running water” - Aristotle

And now we have it ‒  in his view anyway ‒  from Morgan Godfery who has got himself a job as a senior lecturer in the law faculty at Victoria University of Wellington as reported by “The Post” for 30th November 2023.

While I emphatically do not identify with either the “radical left” or “libertarian right” to which he refers, I do agree with the point on which, Godfery says, they “probably agree”: emphatically the so-called principles of the Treaty of Waitangi are a sham.

 I seem to remember that a certain recent Te Heu Heu, in bargaining with Geoffrey Palmer for an augmented “treaty settlement”, conned him into believing that such at thing as “treaty principles” existed.  Well they don’t, whether any latter-day soothsayer says they do or otherwise.  Godfery proceeds to do an ‘inverse analysis” on all this – whatever that means.  We prefer to give our attention instead to what he claims about the actual “Treaty of Waitangi”, thus.

First: there is no “English language version of the treaty” to which Godfery appears to refer.  There was indeed a fake version written by Freeman, which he induced a stroke-stricken Hobson to sign.

Rejected by Freeman as unfit to be sent overseas, a copy got to Waikato Heads (probably with a consignment of stationery).  There, when the official document in Maori failed to arrive in time, missionary Maunsell, having first employed a printed copy of the text in Maori, used the Freeman sheet merely for an overflow of chiefs’ signatures.   All this should be well known to everybody (Godfery included) by now.  The Freeman fake was nevertheless legislated in the 1975 “Treaty of Waitangi Act” to be “The treaty in English”.  Legislating that lead is gold does not make it so!

Let us be clear:  there is simply no such thing as a Treaty of Waitangi in English.  What we do have are: 

(a) Hobson’s final text in English of 4th February, the so-called “Littlewood Treaty”, whose provenance officialdom continues to deny despite compelling evidence of its authenticity.

(b) Consul Clendon’s despatch to the American Secretary of State of 20th February 1840 which in all essential details verifies the substance of the “Littlewood” document.

(c) The report of 3rd April 1840 of American naval commander (later Commodore) Wilkes copied from the “Littlewood” document.

(d) The official translation of 1869 by T.E.Young of the “Native Department”

(e) The translation by the late Waitangi Tribunal member, Professor Sir Hugh Kawharu with many false inclusions about details of the treaty, but nevertheless, used in Cabinet business.

(f) a variety of texts in his own flowery “Royal style” used by Freeman to send to officialdom overseas with a degree of assent by the severely stroke-ridden Hobson.

We remark in passing that it is not clear why Cabinet does not use Young’s version written much closer in time to that of its source, rather than Kawharu’s version from a much later date when substantial changes had evolved in Maori meaning and usage.

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Godfery continues: “the vast majority of rangatira who put their names and their marks to the Treaty didn’t sign the English language version ... [they] were overwhelmingly signing the Māori language version”.  Well, more accurately, all the chiefs signed the actual treaty written in the Ngapuhi dialect, a few, mostly at Waikato Heads, putting their marks on an overflow sheet, one of Freeman’s fakes.

Then he says: ‘The rangatira retain their sovereignty - “tino rangatiratanga” - while deploying that sovereignty to carve out a subordinate power to the Crown: kāwanatanga or “governorship”.’ This is a blatant distortion of the truth. We have explained it all before but it seems necessary to do so again!  In default of a classic Maori word for “sovereignty” in Article first, the Williams used “kawanatanga”.  For  “possession” of ordinary property in Article second of the Treaty, again in default of a classic Maori word, the Williams used “tino rangatiratanga” and moreover, it was guaranteed to “tangata katoa o Nu Tirani”, unequivocally “all the people of New Zealand”, and “all” means “all”.  Get that, Mr Godfery – not a single suspicion of preference in tino rangatiratanga to anybody, Maori or otherwise!!  Read the actual treaty in Maori, Mr Godfery, and see all this for yourself!!

It is a monumental absurdity which must be obvious to all but those who will not see, that the chiefs “deployed” anything “to carve out a subordinate power to the Crown”!  In fact, at Waitangi, Hobson called the shots.  Both Hobson’s final text in English, the so-called “Littlewood treaty”, and the Williams’ translation, i.e. the treaty wording itself were read out at Waitangi and nobody said that their meanings were different!

There are activists today of course who wave around a flag which they call the  “tino rangatiratanga flag”, for which read “Maori sovereignty flag”, but that is no more than crude politicking!

Maoris were never more than a collection of tribes, never a sovereign nation.   Power was given up by each chief separately.

Well, of course, Godfery doesn’t stop there, quoting Fletcher’s doorstop of a book, saying: “ as Ned Fletcher demonstrates [sic] in his book The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi – the British were almost certainly never intending to seize and exercise exclusive sovereignty over New Zealand.”

Godfery, and Fletcher too for that matter, would be much better informed if they actually read Lord Normanby’s brief to Hobson [readily googled], in which he writes: “”Her Majesty’s Government have resolved to authorise you to treat with the aborigines of New Zealand in recognition of Her Majesty’s sovereign authority over the whole or any part of those islands which they may be willing to place under Her Majesty’s dominions.”

More than 500 made this recognition – from Kaitaia (or thereabouts) to Ruapuke!

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It is a very sobering thought, to this observer anyway, that this Godfery lectures to impressionable students at Victoria University of Wellington. 

Bruce Moon is a retired computer pioneer who wrote "Real Treaty; False Treaty - The True Waitangi Story".