This is a modified version of an article written for lawyers, published by the Auckland District Law Society (now named Law Association of New Zealand)’s LawNews on13 Jul 2023, under the heading Lessons for lawyers from the regulation of real estate agents. The original article can be found here. It included, “The point is not that a real estate professional should not take Te Kākano (the Seed) if she wants to. The point is that the REAA demands that the real estate professional do so, or she will not be permitted to work in her chosen field. I am publishing my LawNews article again now on Thoughts from the North because what I warned of has happened. Real Estate professionals have had their licences cancelled. One of them is Janet Dickson whose story is told here. Her licence has been cancelled because she refused to take the course
The Real Estate Agents Authority (REAA) requires a licensed real estate professional to undergo continuing professional development (CPD).1
The REAA’s CPD requirements for 2023 include two mandatory topics. The first is the Code of Conduct. These are practice rules setting out the standard of conduct and client care that agents, branch managers and salespeople are required to meet when carrying out real estate agency work and dealing with clients, contained in the Real Estate Agents Act (Professional Conduct and Client Care) Rules 2012.
These rules, required by s 14 of the Act, are a non-exhaustive statement of the conduct expected of licensees. It seems not unreasonable that a licensee should be required to know about them as a condition of being licensed.
The second mandatory topic is different. Part of the diversity and inclusion series, it is Te Kano (the Seed). The only approved training provider is Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. This is what Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi says.
The Real Estate Agents Authority (REAA) requires a licensed real estate professional to undergo continuing professional development (CPD).1
The REAA’s CPD requirements for 2023 include two mandatory topics. The first is the Code of Conduct. These are practice rules setting out the standard of conduct and client care that agents, branch managers and salespeople are required to meet when carrying out real estate agency work and dealing with clients, contained in the Real Estate Agents Act (Professional Conduct and Client Care) Rules 2012.
These rules, required by s 14 of the Act, are a non-exhaustive statement of the conduct expected of licensees. It seems not unreasonable that a licensee should be required to know about them as a condition of being licensed.
The second mandatory topic is different. Part of the diversity and inclusion series, it is Te Kano (the Seed). The only approved training provider is Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi. This is what Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi says.
Nau mai haere mai ki Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi
Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi are proud to partner with the Real Estate Authority to co-develop and deliver the first topic in the Diversity and Inclusion Series….
Overview of Te Kākano
Te Kākano consists of three modules:
· Module 1: Te Reo me ōnā tikanga – Māori language and customs
· Module 2: Te Tiriti o Waitangi – The Treaty of Waitangi
· Module 3: Whenua Māori – Māori land
Course completion cost: $29 + GST
The Act prohibits a person from carrying out any real estate agency work unless the person is licensed under the Act or falls within one of the narrow exemptions (eg, is a lawyer or an auctioneer).
When a licensed real estate professional (an agent, branch manager or salesperson who holds a licence under the Act) wishes to renew the licence (which has a 12-month term), the licensee must satisfy the registrar that he or she has completed any continuing education required by practice rules made by the REAA (s 52).
Section 54 compels the registrar to cancel a person’s licence if the person has failed to complete any continuing education required by practice rules made by the REAA (under s 15 which permits the REAA to make practice rules requiring that particular continuing education be undertaken).
No choice
So, any licensed real estate professional who fails to complete Te Kākano (the Seed) with Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi as the only approved provider must be refused licence renewal if a licence has not previously been cancelled for the failure.
The point is not that a real estate professional should not take Te Kākano (the Seed) if she wants to. The point is that the REAA demands that the real estate professional do so, or she will not be permitted to work in her chosen field.
If a particular real estate professional had or wanted to seek business in the Māori land area (I should think it would be a tiny number, if any at all), he or she might find it advantageous to take such a course, but REAA makes them all do it.
There is a difference in kind between the Code of Conduct and the Te Kākano (the Seed) topics.
The first concerns the way professionals should conduct themselves in their dealings with and for members of the community engaged in selling and buying property and the like, as outlined in the “scope and objectives” part of the rules.
They concern professional competence, fiduciary obligations, confidentiality, and other objective requirements relevant to the way the job should be done.
The brief description of the second mandatory topic, Te Kākano (the Seed), does not contain even a hint that it relates to real estate professionals’ conduct. Rather it suggests a REAA desire that attendees learn about Māori language and culture, the treaty and Māori land.
What’s wrong with that? you may well ask. Nothing at all, the answer is, except: “REAA, it is none of your business; mind your own, not the licensees’”.
What an adult human real estate professional decides to learn in matters unconnected with their professional conduct is for them, not REAA, to decide.
Regrettably, as John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859, in his famous essay On Liberty:
The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power….
Kindle Edition, p 19.
The Act gives the REAA power; the REAA says, we want you to do this; do it or you lose your licence.
The motivation cannot be to fulfil the purpose of the Act, of promoting and protecting the interests of consumers in respect of real estate transactions. Obviously, it has nothing to do with that. It is to promote an REAA agenda.
Tikanga
We can tease this out a bit further by looking at tikanga, which is the subject of much discussion at present.
The statement scheduled to the Supreme Court’s Ellis continuance decision ([2022] NZSC 114), under the heading “The nature of tikanga,” contains this:
25. The term ‘tika’ means ‘to be right’. Tikanga Māori therefore means the right Māori way of doing things. It is what Māori consider is just and correct.
26. Tikanga Māori includes all of the values, standards, principles or norms that the Māori community subscribe to, to determine the appropriate conduct.
According to the learned writers of the statement, these are for the Māori of whom the writers are speaking, “their own opinions and inclinations”, to use Mill’s words. The Māori of whom the writers are speaking are entitled to follow these values, standards, principles or norms without interference except to prevent harm to others, but there ought to be no attempt to impose them on others.
To put this in ways which have been developed over centuries and are now embodied in international conventions and domestic legislation, “the right Māori way of doing things,” “what Māori consider is just and correct,” “the values, standards, principles or norms that the Māori community subscribe to,” are matters of thought, conscience, religion, and/or belief for those who subscribe to them.
Those within the community who subscribe to them, be they Māori or non-Māori, are absolutely entitled to do so without interference (Bill of Rights, s 13). By the same token, those who do not subscribe to them are equally entitled to go about their lives without being subjected to attempts to make them do so.
Overreach
In 2008, the legislators may not have realised that the REAA they created would in 2023 use its powers the way it has. These so-called independent bodies the government creates enable surreptitious incursions on individual liberty immune from both democratic accountability and the parliamentary and public scrutiny attendant on legislative action.
1 The Real Estate Agents Act 2008 (the Act) created the Real Estate Agents Authority (REAA) as a Crown entity for the purposes of s 7 of the Crown Entities Act 2004 (CEA) which applies to the REAA except to the extent that the REAA provides otherwise. There is a variety of Crown entities. The REAA is a Crown agent (Part 1 of Schedule 1). The minister responsible for the Act appoints the REAA Board.
Gary Judd KC is a King's Counsel, former Chairman of ASB and Ports of Auckland and former member APEC Business Advisory Council. Gary blogs at Gary Judd KC Substack where this article was sourced.
10 comments:
It is hard not to perceive some parallels with 1930s Germany. Mandatory ideological training and in that case the indigenous and wronged race were Aryan Germanic Tribes. If we had allowed this to go on it is easy to imagine a day when people would be arrested for not doing mandatory courses.
The Supreme Court of NZ seems to be having a competition with MSM on who can lose the trust of New Zealanders the most.
At the moment I would pick the SC as winning. The arrogance shown by judges, that feel they have the right to ignore the law because they don't like it, is astounding. Surely it is time to disband it and ask the Privy Council to take on the job again. They may be miles away, but at least they could be relied upon to rule on the law.
This sort of enforced indoctrination must be stopped by Parliament.
It’s not quite got to the point of being compulsory at my workplace, but there is huge pressure nonetheless, and without the change of government I suspect compulsion wasn’t far off.
LFC
This smacks to me of abject communism!
Kevan
i'm sure one can take it to supreme court and get this specific decision overturned (not sure if court would dismantle reaa or throw those in charge in jail). however, the whole idea is that 'the process is the punishment'.
i have a feeling we are getting closer to the us model of an over-litigious society :(
Use trademe instead.
this is supposedly to promote diversity. i thought diversity meant all cultures but in nz it seems to only mean one primitive tribal culture.
The Marxists took over our universities decades ago, meaning that for over 40 years, graduates have been programmed with all the principles of Communism but without the label, then flattered for their cleverness in accepting the programming.
Central to the Marxist world view is the assumption that society can be divided into groups that ‘oppress’ and groups that are ‘oppressed.’
If born into an ‘oppressed’ group everyone else has to lick your *rse and give you things you haven’t worked for and aren’t entitled to, by way of compensation.
If born into an ‘oppressor’ group, you have two options: [1] continue to collude in the ‘oppression’ your group or class is intergenerationally responsible for; or [2] cross the floor and go into bat for the ‘oppressed,’ become an ‘ally’ and an enabler.
This, in a nutshell, is the essence of ‘woke.’
And this is what lies behind the ‘Maorification of Everything’ being rolled out at startling speed by sickly white liberals everywhere one looks in our society.
These white liberal public virtue signallers looking to polish their halos for ‘saving’ the part-Māori are causing irreparable damage to our social cohesion.
There is NO DOUBT that brown supremacist part-Māori are weaponising Te Reo Māori to divide New Zealand.
Marama Fox, former Maori Party co-leader, admitted as much in an interview in The Listener” before the 2017 election.
It involved replacing New Zealand’s Westminster model of Parliamentary democracy with a “unique form of governance that would favour Maori customs, principles and values.”
Fox explained it was all “plotted out.” She told readers: “It would take 36 years – 12 election cycles – for a Maori sovereignty party to share government … it’s a radical vision … but if we believe in it, then we need to march towards it.”
The “critical step” in shifting the thinking of New Zealanders was “to make the Maori language a core subject in the country’s schools.”
Fox argued that: “People look at things differently once they’ve acquired te reo. It’s a world view. The Maori world view is different and that’s expressed in the language. The language unlocks our history and our thinking.”
That’s why brown supremacists are determined to have Maori taught in schools as a compulsory subject.
The successful indoctrination of the next generation is a prerequisite to gaining political control.
To protect a common standard of citizenship for all New Zealanders all public square communication should by law be solely in English.
A stated commitment of this Government is that central and local government entities and government-funded organisations such as SOEs—unless they are dealing primarily with part-Māori—revert to a suitable English name and communicate with the public solely in English.
This directive should by law preclude taking partisan political positions on the public dime with respect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Māori language and culture.
As a postgraduate-qualified property professional with coming up 30 years of experience across a broad range of roles, I note that many of the best-remunerated property jobs advertised are with central and local government organisations.
Constructive dismissal is an employment law term covering a situation where the employer wants to get rid of an employee, and makes it so nasty for them to continue in the job that they leave it.
It is rightly illegal.
Constructive gatekeeping’ is a term that I have coined for ‘don’t bother applying unless you self-abasingly endorse the political views of the advertiser.’
This actually breaches the Human Rights Act 1993,which at Section 19(j), prohibits discrimination in employment on the grounds of political opinion.
These organisations are upfront effectively stating that those holding incompatible political views are unwelcome in their workplace.
Having applied for many of these jobs and despite being very well-qualified not even getting an interview, I know damn well this is because of my political views on Treaty issues, which are readily ascertainable via a Google search.
Unable to prove it of course.
One example (there are many more) from a recent Kainga Ora (Housing NZ) Seek job advertisement:
“What is exciting about working for Kāinga Ora is getting the chance to make a real and positive impact on New Zealanders' lives. With skills, planning and purposeful action, our people are creating the homes and neighbourhoods that will build the future of Aotearoa [who gave these Nimrods permission to rename our country?]
“We are passionate about transforming New Zealand for the better [who gave these Nimrods the mandate to ‘transform’ New Zealand into some ‘woke’ version of ‘better’?] That includes being a trusted partner [government departments are not in ‘partnership’ with groups with a self-selected ethnocentric membership base] for Māori and iwi, protecting and enabling their rights, interests and aspirations under the guidance of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”
Part-Māori under Te Tiriti are equal citizens of New Zealand with the same individual rights and duties as every other citizen.
HNZ is a government department that should be serving all New Zealanders on the basis of need, not ethnocentric identity, meaning this tendentious, virtue-seeking ethnocentric twaddle has to go.
Simple to end this horse wallop.
Bulk mail each taxpayer-funded organisation that this practice is to stop.
Set up a hotline and email address to which complaints of non-compliance can be sent.
Reduce organisation’s funding in next budget round by 10% for each offence.
Underscore to these Nimrods that partisan politicking using taxpayers’ money in unacceptable.
The supreme court attention to "Tikanga" assumes NZ pre 1840 was a cohesive and well organised community.
It was not. It was 100's of communities, small medium and large.
Tikanga may have had a place in each of the communities, but it would have been unique to the chief of that particular community, on that particular day and apt to change at his whim. Then of course the chief over the hill or around the headland might turn up, then everything could change.
Tikanga wasn't, and still isn't universal.
CXH is correct. We should go cap in hand to London and ask for the "Privy Council" to be our last line of appeal, again. It worked.
Post a Comment