Barrie Davis: We the People find the Grail

For fifty years our representative Government has been forcing a racist ideology upon us without giving a reason and without seeking a mandate to do so. Our Government has published propaganda in the media and groomed children at school until their furtive ideology has become suffused in our society. That zeitgeist is reinforced with the fear of ostracism and possible disadvantage if we dissent. We are now conditioned such that our thinking is constrained within the bounds of the zeitgeist.

I claim that scenario is wrong and quite the opposite of what we would best be doing. I will give my reasons for that belief and propose how we could flip to its opposite, namely “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

We have been forced apart 

The main reason why the Government has been able to manipulate us is that we are not speaking as one people. Our lack of unity allows the Government to behave in a way that makes a farce of our democracy, of our elections and hence of our expressed preferences, leaving them free to pursue their own agenda.

Despite Hobson’s dictum, from a political perspective we have become separated in two ways which bring about discord within the New Zealand population. The first is a separation into part-Maori and non-Maori ethnicities, together with exclusive civic and political rights for part-Maoris. The second is a separation into Left and Right individual differences, together with corresponding political parties and media opinions which cater to those orientations.

I will show how these two ways bring about our present political issues and identify how they may be transformed to solve the problems.

Lies, More Lies, and the Waitangi Tribunal 

The first way we have been separated is with biculturalism.

In “A Broken Nation” (here), Dr John Robinson writes,

“The [Waitangi] Tribunal has constructed and publicised a complete rewriting of history – the ‘retrospective recrimination’ and ‘counterfactual history’ of the Tribunal …” “The call for separation and special rights to Maori, coupled with a denial of equality, has become widespread, a national ideology. That belief in racial division is based on a belief in wrongs committed against Maori by the Crown – no other wrong from the past is admitted. … Constant repetition insists on the validity of this Big Lie.”

Our ideological biculturalism is being supported by a contrived interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi by Parliament and the judiciary which is intended to obfuscate the agreement. It arises from a specious claim that the cession of sovereignty in Article 1 is incompatible with the retention of chieftainship over land in Article 2. The British were well versed in making treaties and it is unlikely that they would have drafted and proposed a treaty that is internally inconsistent. That is especially so when a simpler and coherent interpretation is glaringly obvious.

The Treaty of Waitangi has long been called the Maori Magna Carta, including within academia. Paul McHugh in The Maori Magna Carta: New Zealand Law and the Treaty of Waitangi (1991) provides an account of the law surrounding the Treaty. The jacket cover claims it is “as complete guide to Maori law as is possible in one volume. … This book will become the standard work on the laws affecting the Maori people”. We need go no further than the title of the book to suppose that McHugh thinks the Treaty is comparable to the Magna Carta.

The comparison is obvious. The Magna Carta was an agreement between King John and his subject Barons, whereas the Treaty of Waitangi was an agreement between Queen Victoria and about 500 or so Maori chiefs. There is therefore a very obvious direct equivalence between the Treaty and the Magna Carta which removes the possibility of incompatibility between sovereignty and chieftainship. The takeout from the analogy is that the Maori chiefs are subject to the Crown, as were King John’s Barons.

However when I asked Bing “What is the Maori Magna Carta,” I am cautioned “it’s essential to recognize that the Treaty of Waitangi is not directly equivalent to the Magna Carta” and lists the following three differences, with my responses added:

• The Magna Carta focused on nobles’ rights and curbing the king’s power, whereas the Treaty of Waitangi addressed the relationship between the British Crown and Māori. [These two points are not incompatible.]
  
  
• The Magna Carta emphasized individual liberties, while the Treaty of Waitangi aimed to protect Māori land and cultural rights. [Again, these are not incompatible, and nor are they completely true.]
  
  
• The Magna Carta’s historical context differs significantly from that of the Treaty of Waitangi. [That does not mean the Magna Carta is not an historical precedent.]
  

Bing is channeling those who are writing to reject the similarity that previous writers had attributed to the Magna Carta and has given lame or mistaken reasons for not considering that opposing view. Let’s not be too worried, AI is still in its infancy. But in the meantime, this stuff is being pedaled to the world.

The 800th anniversary of Magna Carta was celebrated in New Zealand in 2015 by a series of presentations which are recorded in Magna Carta NZ: Power, People, Politics and Progress, edited by Jennifer Lees-Marshment, 12 May 2016 (here). It includes a “Transcript of Speech by Hon Judith Collins” (The University of Auckland Magna Carta Lecture Series, 6 July 2015, pp. 16-18), which reads in part as follows:

When we consider the modern day application of the Magna Carta, it is unhelpful to try to substitute the 1215 King John for Her Majesty the Queen or even for the Prime Minister John [Key]. The Barons could possibly be the Cabinet, but really the exercise of the Cabinet on behalf of the Crown sits the Cabinet more firmly with the Crown – after all Cabinet Ministers are Ministers of the Crown. Now, as representatives of all the people of New Zealand, perhaps it is Parliament that is more akin to the Barons of 1215.

I am astonished at that: Attorney-General Judith Collins KC is surely aware of McHugh’s book and its title. Yet she has ignored the simple and obvious answer that for the Crown, King John becomes Queen Victoria, and the Maori chiefs (and now perhaps the part-Maori iwi leaders) are analogous to the Barons. How do I know? Because that is what it says in the first Article of the Treaty of Waitangi: “The Chiefs of the Confederation and all the Chiefs who have not joined that Confederation give absolutely [i.e., with no qualification or limitation] to the Queen of England for ever the complete government over their land.” (trans. I.H. Kawharu, member of the Waitangi Tribunal from 1986 to 1996)

That is, the chiefs agreed that Victoria would be their Queen just as the Barons agreed John would be their King. We know the chiefs understood that from their speeches at Waitangi on 5 February and again at the Kohimarama Conference in 1860. I assume that Ms Collins did not consider that in her presentation because her thinking is constrained by the present zeitgeist; that is, she is a victim of her own Government’s propaganda.

The Principle of Parsimony, also known as Occam’s Razor, says that the simplest of competing explanations is the most likely to be correct. The ‘Magna Carta’ arrangement is by far the simplest because it nullifies the piles of documentation written by the Waitangi Tribunal to justify their unlikely scenario. All the stuff about ‘partnership’ and co-governance, none of which is mentioned in the Treaty, becomes arrant drivel.

It was errant nonsense anyway: It is preposterous that Queen Victoria, who ruled an Empire over a quarter of the Earth’s land surface and a quarter of the world’s population, would enter into a partnership with 500 Stone-Age slave-owning, cannibalistic tribal chiefs. Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Normanby's instructions to Hobson, 14 August 1839 (here), make clear that the principle object of his mission was to establish amongst the Maoris “a settled form of civil government” and to negotiate terms with the Maoris “for the recognition of Her Majesty’s sovereign authority”. No mention is made of a partnership.

Humanitarianism prevailed in England at the time. Humanitarian lawyer Sir James Stephen, Permanent Undersecretary of State for Colonies, was brother-in-law to William Wilberforce, who was instrumental in abolishing slavery with the Slave Trade Act 1807. Between 1808 and 1860 the British devoted half of the Royal Navy expenditure on the West Africa Squadron to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade. On the other hand, the Maoris continued the genocide of the Morioris by slavery and cannibalism from 1835 until 1862: They only stopped because the British forced them to by right of sovereignty and application of British law. That being the case, the Treaty could not have been a partnership of equals.

The Waitangi Tribunal documentation is contrived voluminous jargon piled high. Nevertheless, they will continue to cling to their fallacious construction like a sailor to a sinking ship. The Government is resisting pursuing the Treaty Principles Bill because they know that it will give the lie to the Treaty grievance industry. It will show that all those ‘full and final settlements’ were an unnecessary use of taxpayer money. Rather than admit they are wrong, they will allow themselves to be bullied into making New Zealand a Maori ethnostate.

Graham Adams wrote in Breaking Views (10 July 2024, here), “Seymour returned to his fundamental question — Whatever the Treaty says or doesn’t say, can New Zealand continue to prosper as a nation if some citizens, by accident of birth, enjoy more civic and political rights than others?”

Similarly, in “Conservative Failings and the Reform UK Party,” recorded 2 July 2024 (in full here), Dr. Jordan Peterson talks with Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage. They discuss his ongoing campaign to lead the UK, the importance of self-sovereignty for a nation to thrive, and the importance of family, community and country.

At 41:30 Farage alluded to Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, saying (in short here):

“I want us to completely abolish the diversity and inclusion laws, completely abolish the equalities act that was brought in by the Labor Party in 2010 and which the conservatives haven't had the guts to even talk about because they're cowards and I want us to basically say we don't care what you are. I was asked the other day what was I going to do for the black community. Do you know what I said? Nothing, absolutely nothing. I couldn't give a damn whether you're black or white, whether you're gay or straight. I really don't care. You'll be judged by your character, you'll be judged by your ability, you'll be judged by are you a contributor to society or a taker out, and right at the moment this is considered to be dangerous radical thinking. But I think if we can start to explain why this matters, if we can start to explain that that's the only way we're going to have any chance of a unified society that works together, you know with mutual benefit for each other. I think this is one of the next great political battles and we're going to need some quite brave leaders to take it on.

Our Government has foolishly allowed an exclusively privileged part-Maori faction to be distinguished in legislation from the remaining non-Maori population of New Zealand. I speak from old-school liberalism when I say that racial segregation is wrong. The ‘magna carta’ understanding of the Treaty is not just the correct one; it is the morally correct one. We should be one people and to that end, all of the Treaty legislation must be abolished as soon as possible. No ifs, no buts, no maybes, let’s just do it.

Projection and the Problem of the Opposites 

The second of the phenomena that separate us is Left-Right politics.

We are all familiar with the idea of personality as the combination of characteristics that form an individual's distinctive character, such as “she had a sunny personality that was very engaging” or “he has triumphed by sheer force of personality”. It’s a combination of both biological factors and environmental influences, and it tends to remain fairly consistent throughout life.

Psychologists have found that there are some shared dimensions to personality. They developed questionnaires that asked respondents to rate themselves on about a hundred traits. They then did statistical analysis of those traits and found that they correlate around a smaller number of main characteristics, called the ‘Big Five’ dimensions of personality; ‘introversion versus extraversion’, for example.

Further statistical analysis showed that two others of the Big Five – namely ‘openness to experience’ (curious versus cautious) and ‘conscientiousness’ (easy-going versus organised) – correlate with whether one votes Left or Right. That is, on average, people who are curious and easy-going naturally take a liberal Left position and people who are more cautious and organised tend to adopt a conservative Right position. (Klein, Why We’re Polarized, pp. 43-48.)

We are also all aware of this phenomenon, but what we may not consider so much is that it does not originate out there in the world but from within us. While it is ‘all in the mind’ we nevertheless shape our world accordingly, particularly in our government and our media. It means that we all have ‘unconscious bias’, which we usually refer to pejoratively. But here is how Klein (p. 46) put it regarding the ‘openness to experience’ and ‘conscientiousness’ which influence how we vote:

Openness isn’t better than closed. Conscientiousness is a trait, not a compliment. Evolutionarily, the power is in the mix of outlooks, not in any one outlook – that’s why this psychological diversity has survived.

One sees the world according to one’s perspective, or through one’s particular ‘lens’. When I went for a check-up, the dentist gave me some dark glasses to wear. At the end of the session, she had to remind me to return them, not because I’m a kleptomaniac, but because I had become accustomed to seeing the world ‘through a glass darkly’. For me it had become normal that the world was dark. So it is also for a person from the Left or the Right: our knowledge of the world is limited by the restricting perspectives of our psyche and we thereby have a diminished view of reality.

Psychologists use the term ‘projection’ because it is as if we project content into our environment, even though nothing actually leaves the psyche.

An example is the opinion pieces in The Post by Jack McDonald who has worked for the Maori and Green parties. In “Unity of French left shows what can be done to fight fascism,” 11 July 2024 (here), McDonald writes mostly of ‘the left’ and ‘the far right’ and conflates Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen with fascism. Because he himself is apparently of the Left, he sees the world as normally having leftist characteristics. So there is no ‘far left’ for him, and those on the Right are far away from his leftist world, on ‘the far right’.

In so doing, McDonald is pushing us even further apart from our otherwise more moderate Left and Right positions. When he complains, “For years the far-right has been stoking fear and division to advance their political interests, pitting culture against culture, community against community and neighbour against neighbour,” he is the pot calling the kettle black. He is projecting his own tendencies into others and I expect that most if not all of us do that to some degree.

We each have a perspective, which is just another way of saying that those loony lefties may (occasionally) have a point. The way out of this apparent dichotomy is to address the actual issues rather than worry about Left and Right. Beware the double bind of choosing one or the other without also considering rejecting both or choosing both. If you choose both, consider synthesizing them to give another higher thesis. Teach yourself how to withdraw the projections and transcend the opposites: “For now we see in a glass darkly [lit. ‘in a riddle’], but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1 Cor. 13:12) Paul is saying to identify with the rational part of the soul which, after Plato, he thinks comes directly from God. In a secular sense, we would today say to use evidence-based reasoning or ‘informed thinking’.

The problem remains, however, that both the politicians and the media habitually frame everything as a double bind of choosing Left or Right. That becomes a problem for us when we do not consciously consider the views they each provide rationally, and instead automatically retreat into our own camp instinctively and fortify it so it is impervious to its opposite faction. You cannot entirely blame yourself for that when we live in a dark world of powers and principalities who constantly barrage us with an endless stream of Left zeitgeist propaganda.

So, if you are a Stuff person reading this, please stop. Please stop telling us your opinion, we don’t want it. We are just as capable of forming our own. You could occasionally offer an evidence-based argument, but it must be logical to be sound. Telling us what you were told on your MAO 101 course or worse still what your children said they were told at school is not acceptable. Mostly, confine yourself to just telling us the news.

Finding the Grail 

There is one further step we need to take. We need to add a further dimension to the figurative discussion to transform the symbols into reality. We need to actualize the Grail in our real three dimensional world. We need to actually become one people, as Hobson said; a nation of New Zealanders. As such we need to develop a common set of values. Not those told to us by the authorities, but things which we hold dear. The debate on David Seymour’s Treaty principles is, I think, a very useful platform. For it to be successful we will need to participate in good faith to achieve a balance between robust dissent and common agreement. I am confident that we will agree on some central principles, and that is a very important thing for us to do as a nation.

What I think is not acceptable is continuing to allow Parliament to do our thinking for us; they have shown that collectively they do not have the requisite wherewithal. That is why Prime Minister Luxon does not want to proceed with the Bill past first reading, because they know the outcome. Is it not ironic that they willfully hand power to the Waitangi Tribunal but resist empowering the people who empower them? They must see us as a threat: I see them as an obstacle. We need to reset that relationship by taking whatever opportunities arise to assist our representative Members of Parliament to better understand their responsibility to us.

In her book How to Be a Citizen: Learning to rely less on rules and more on each other (2024), American professor of government and law C. L. Skach, says that democracy isn’t working well anywhere (p. 7). “We have become complacent as citizens by hiding behind the law, and what we can do about it now, together, constructively and without violence.” (p. 17) She says that judges interpret our legislation, that legal interpretation is a matter of opinion and much is lost in translation (p. 87).

Skach has this to say about constitutionalism (the doctrine that a government’s authority is determined by a body of laws or constitution):

“Popular constitutionalism, and other versions which scholars are now referring to as deliberative constitutionalism, are hot topics in legal theory these days. Persuaded, finally, by the crumbling political structures of representative government, with the emergence not only of poor leaders but also poor decisions and compromised protection of rights, many academics within political philosophy and law are asking whether there are different ways to do constitutionalism.” (p. 97)

With that in mind, our judiciary must accept that they do not rule over us, but that we rule over them. Their only power is that which is bestowed on them by our sovereign Parliament. That was amply demonstrated when Helen Clark asserted parliamentary supremacy over Chief Justice Sian Elias with the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004: As Chief Justice and presiding judge of the Supreme Court from 1999 to 2019, Elias was the head of New Zealand’s judiciary. It is unfortunate that National (Key and Finlayson) replaced that Act with the shambolic Marine and Coastal Area Act 2011 which is open to interpretation. (Ross Meurant, “Let’s All be One Nation,” Breaking Views, here).

However, our Government had gone a step further with the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 and what followed. The principles of the Treaty of Waitangi suggest fundamental constitutional arrangements, yet our Government handed the task of determining the Treaty principles to the Waitangi Tribunal. Skach says (p. 91), “by delegating to a judge the burden of deciding what is fair and what is not, we have lost our appreciation of what justice really is and have allowed a hollow sense of it to reign.” In New Zealand, the Waitangi Tribunal with the Government has gone even further and intentionally subverted our constitution without mandate from the people.

By the election, we agreed with our Government that they could make laws according to the manifesto they provided prior to the election. In so doing we bestowed sovereign power on our Government for three years. We did not give Sovereignty away, it is still ours and we did not mandate our Government to dispose even part of it. Yet our Government devolved the sovereign power we had bestowed upon them when they handed the task of determining the principles of the Treaty to the Waitangi Tribunal. The Treaty principles are now outside our purview and so the representative Government we elected has diminished our democratic power. It is like if you were to loan your offspring your car but there was a door missing when they brought it back, and they have no intention of retrieving it let alone apologizing.

It is obvious why they did it. They did not want to accept responsibility for making decisions on controversial constitutional issues themselves. So they played thimblerigger and hid the pea under one of a number of shells with the intention to obfuscate who actually made the decision. None seems to know specifically what the principles are or who if anyone approved them, yet they are being variously applied in legislation, court cases, and Government propaganda. I believe that I am being deliberately deceived by the Parliament which is supposed to be representing me: My own representational Parliament is lying to me on development of key constitutional aspects of my country. Government is nevertheless hypocritically fond of requiring in their legislation and rulings “to act towards the other reasonably and with the utmost good faith” (e.g., the Employment Relations Act 2000, Tainui v Coalcorp, 1989).

Our MPs are so bad that an Independent Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards, Lyn Provost, was appointed in 2022. Provost must have been busy recently with Green Party MPs Julie Anne Genter, Golriz Gharaman and Darleen Tana (here), and the Maori Party election scandal. The judiciary also has a false sense of entitlement. For the past year the Sunday Star-Times has been trying without success to use OIA provisions to get a breakdown of more than $6 million in expenses claimed by the country’s 200 judges over the last three years, as can be done for MPs. Ministry of Justice chief operating officer, Carl Crafar, says “The information belongs to the judiciary…” (here) No, that information, like the money it quantifies, belongs to the taxpayer and we have every right to know what happens to it. You’re fired Mr Crafar.

Our Government, particularly our Judiciary, is keen to set our boundaries, but they push the boundaries of their own activities. We need to completely reset their expectations in that area. We must make them accept that we rule, not them, and that we rule by democratic means via our representative Parliament. We supposedly choose our Parliament and their job is to administer the democratic process on our behalf. To be democratic the unelected Judiciary can only ever apply the laws made by our Parliament and we need to ensure they comply with that.

Our Government and Judiciary have been taking gross liberties and so we must now make them compliant.

To reset the government we need to reliably know what they are doing. But we cannot be getting quality information when our Government is paying the press to publish their propaganda, and whilst our children are being indoctrinated at school. These initiatives are predicated on highly dubious if not totally false presuppositions. For example, Rodney Hide (here) tells us of the Ministry of Education practice with respect of ‘boys without penises’, when ‘teachers without common sense’ is more likely to be the case. Surely, the first thing we must insist on is that this ghastly propaganda must stop.

An obvious alternative is to teach politics to children at school and point out to them some of the alternative propositions, such as the ‘magna carta’ Treaty proposed above, and encourage them to critically decide for themselves what they agree with. The authorities will resist doing that because they want to continue conditioning us like rats in a skinner box with their race and sex ideologies. But we need instead to be critical thinkers using evidence based reasoning in pursuit of shared values. We need a shared philosophy leading to pragmatic solutions. And we need to be bold and assertive. An illustrative example is given in “Chinese New Zealanders rally against crime in Auckland” by Gaurav Sharma (Radio NZ, 13 July 2024, here).

We need to stop listening to the Judiciary and instead insist that our representative Parliament start listening to us. They must be made to accept that they do our bidding and that without our support they are nothing. They must also be made to listen to reason and not political expediency and their own personal values, which individually are not more valid than ours. They can express their position when they vote, just like the rest of us.

To achieve this, Skach says the first step is a reliably educated population (p. 98-9):

“I came to understand that in order for such a model to work, for popular constitutionalism or deliberative constitutionalism to mean something real, a first step was blatantly missing: the real power in all of this lies with citizens themselves, not through formal structures, but informal fluid ones...

“That means adequate education for all of the community, through literacy and information campaigns, so that the person on the street has access to and the tools to understand and think through the issues, not just accept the elite spin about them. In a perfect world, we would ensure everyone has access to unbiased information, or know how to spot bias when it crops up. This will be hard...

“So we need much more thinking about ways to empower all individuals in a decentralized space, so that we can all look at information with a critical eye.”

Note that Skach places responsibility ‘to understand and think through the issues’ with ‘we the citizens’. She then gives consideration to issues – including information linkages, safety and support – that encourage what she calls ‘guerrilla constitutionalism’ (pp. 102-4). Then she says:

“These ideas – focusing on public awareness and education about the issues, on eradicating the disparities that allow large segments of our communities to remain ignorant and uninformed and therefore disengaged – and others have always been seen as the prerequisites for democracy in the academic disciplines concerned with democratic theory. (p. 104)

It occurs to me that much of the functionality proposed by Skach is provided and facilitated by the New Zealand Center for Political Research including their Breaking Views blog under the banner “Informed Thinking”.

Skach continues:

“For in addressing the prerequisites of democracy instead, we might one day see that we rely less on the institutions because we have the capacity, the capabilities, for doing the heavy lifting ourselves. And this is where we will begin to really own our own rights – when we are able to be ultrasocial,* as the psychologists and biologists say. Some of the most important work being done now across species and across continents brings together psychologists, economists, anthropologists, biologists and mathematicians, among others, to study the conditions necessary for the kind of cooperation and trust that happens not just within a group that looks and acts and has the same values as we do, but, most importantly, across these groups.” (p. 105) [*ultrasocial - social complexity beyond cooperation which includes division of labour, city states and reliance on agriculture.]

That seems rather idealistic and doing it is made more difficult by our shoddy Government. But it is the result I am hoping for and I expect others are as well.

For it to happen, we have work to do. We the citizens collectively need to mature politically; we can no longer leave it to shonky government. We need to do our individual homework, we need to rationally debate issues, and we need to agree on collective conclusions. We also need to assert ourselves with our representative Parliament, with the Judiciary, and with the institutions, at present particularly the education ones. And we need to do all of that democratically and with wisdom.

In short, we need to take responsibility for ourselves.

If we do that, we will have achieved the Grail.

Barrie Davis is a retired telecommunications engineer, holds a PhD in the psychology of Christian beliefs, and can often be found gnashing his teeth reading The Post outside Floyd’s cafe at Island Bay.