Hipkins stated:
“It’s pretty clear that if you follow the various court rulings over time, the academic research, and the Treaty settlement process, the answer is no.”
He further clarified, “That doesn’t mean the Crown doesn’t have sovereignty now, but Māori didn’t cede sovereignty in signing the Treaty.”
Such statements from a major political leader are deeply concerning and irresponsible. How can Hipkins claim Māori didn't cede sovereignty while also acknowledging the Crown's current sovereignty? This contradictory stance raises serious questions about his understanding of New Zealand’s history and constitutional framework.
Article One of the Treaty states:
“The Chiefs of the Confederation of the United Tribes of New Zealand and the separate and independent Chiefs who have not become members of the Confederation cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty…”
The intent of the Treaty was to unify New Zealand under a single sovereign authority.
Historical records, including speeches by Māori chiefs in 1840 and at the Kohimarama conference in 1860, confirm that they understood that they were surrendering authority to the Crown.
Sir Apirana Ngata, perhaps the greatest Maori leader of all time, emphasised this a century ago:
“Clause 1 of the Treaty handed over the mana and the sovereignty of New Zealand to Queen Victoria and her descendants forever.”
New Zealand has operated as a unified nation under the Crown's sovereignty for more than 180 years.
Hipkins’ claim that Māori did not cede sovereignty threatens our national unity and could undermine our legal and political system, creating divisions based on heritage where there should be none.
Former Labour Prime Minister David Lange observed:
“Democratic government can accommodate Māori political aspirations in many ways... What it cannot do is acknowledge the existence of a separate sovereignty. As soon as it does that, it isn’t a democracy.”
Willie Jackson has dismissed the notion that Maori chiefs ceded sovereignty in 1840 as “laughable,” further fuelling division and confusion. In contrast, National Party leader Christopher Luxon, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and David Seymour - the leaders of all the parties in the Coalition Government - have reaffirmed the Crown’s sovereignty.
Disagreements about New Zealand’s founding document should concern us all.
It’s time to stand firm on the principles that unite us as New Zealanders—one law for all, under one sovereign authority.
Dr Don Brash, Former Governor of the Reserve Bank and Leader of the New Zealand National Party from 2003 to 2006 and ACT in 2011. Don blogs at Bassett, Brash and Hide - where this article was sourced
14 comments:
If maori activists are going to appropriate my native language to pursue arguments against the presence of me and my non-maori compatriots, then they should learn to use that language correctly. For a start, today’s part-maori argue that they never ceded sovereignty to the English crown and that they should pursue their own version of sovereignty. In my language, the concept of sovereignty is defined (Shorter Oxford Dictionary) under four (4) headings: (i) Supremacy or pre-eminence in respect of excellence or efficacy (ii) supremacy in respect of power, domination, or rank; supreme dominion, authority or rule (iii) the position, rank or power of a supreme ruler or monarch (iv) a territory under rule of a sovereign.
Under the 1840 treaty, maori agreed to have Queen Victoria (i.e., the English crown) as supreme ruler, thus they accepted sovereignty. At that time maori as they currently identify themselves, were not members of a sovereign state; merely a collection of tribes and sub-tribes, still in existence today, where the prevailing power dynamic was ‘might was right’; take what you want without any suggestion of a rule of law. There was no collective ‘nation’ or ‘state’ or ruler. Overall, maori in their quest for separate sovereignty today, ignore all of the tenets of the definition: they are not pre-eminent in respect of excellence or efficacy; they are not pre-eminent in respect of power, domination or rank, although they fondly suppose themselves to have such attributes and, finally, they do not have the position of a supreme ruler or monarch; that lies with the NZ Government and its links to the British monarchy. The part-maori component of New Zealand has benefitted substantially from the technology, literary and legal history of the British peoples, and are fully protected under that system. If they indeed think separate sovereignty is a good idea then they should be prepared to give up any benefits and protection currently allowed to them under the present system of government. Sink or swim; go back to the stone age, because that is what awaits.
Truly unbelievable. While we all could expect such a comment from the TMP, or even the deluded Greens, that a former Prime Minister would express such nonsense, leastwise without a very clear qualification (e.g. Maori never had sovereignty to cede), this is outrageous and, quite rightly, he no longer, or ever again should hold the top position in our Parliament. It's clear he has another agenda, and it's not the unity of our country.
But with such a statement it, unequivocally, requires the right for the public to decide who they want as having the power of sovereignty and what it is and means to be a citizen of New Zealand. Circumstances have now irrevocably changed Prime Minister and you had better fast change tack and support Seymour's Bill, or face the consequences.
Of course, if you can come up with a better idea, great. But doing a, Key, or dismissing it like Winston, is no solution. Time to man up and be the leader you were elected to be.
Is Hipkins here attempting to induce an irreparable division within the population of this country? Might that be considered treason by any thinking person? But at least he appears to be consistent in continuing the Labour policy of divide and destroy.
While I agree with his conclusion that Maori ceded sovereignty with the Treaty of Waitangi, I am nevertheless disappointed with Dr Brash’s article for two reasons:
First, the Treaty is not New Zealand’s founding document and may at most be referred to as a foundational document, and
Second, as the Treaty is written in Maori, Article One does not state “all the rights and powers of Sovereignty”, which is from the so-called ‘official’ version wrongly included in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975. The Kawharu back translation of the Treaty in Maori reads, “give absolutely [not qualified or diminished; total] to the Queen of England for ever the complete [to the greatest extent of degree; total] government over their land”. That is clear, unambiguous and sufficient.
Unfortunately for the past fifty years our Government has made a complete hash of handling the problem of the Treaty of Waitangi and we get to cope with the mess.
Barrie Davis
Honest questions: Sovereignty is an essential component of every independent nation. If Iwi did not cede sovereignty, then how can the treaty be our founding document? And if the treaty isn't our founding document, why are we placing so much emphasis on it?
You are so right Don. I also think this is exactly why we must get David Seymour's referendum. To confirm what we altready know and to shut down the activists. Otherwise this will never end and will probably hold nz back forever. Why are Luxon and winston not backing this? Why don't they want kiwis to get their say?
It is a partially true statement, but an incomplete one, and that would be by design.
The full historically correct statement that the “compromised ones” can’t say is “Māori didn’t cede sovereignty because Maori had no sovereignty to cede”.
Britain had already obtained sovereignty by jure gentium* (Law of Nations) when Captain Cook first set foot in New Zealand in 1769, and then confirmed in the 1839 Royal Charter/Letters Patent for New Zealand and New South Wales, when New South Wales extended its boundaries to include all the Islands of New Zealand.
New Zealand was now under the dependency and Laws of New South Wales, which could not have been done if Maori had had sovereignty.
The “Law of Nations” (jure gentium) recognize no other mode of assuming dominion/sovereignty in a country of which the inhabitants were ignorant of the meaning of sovereignty, therefore incapable of sovereignty rights.
This is why Chief Justice Prendergast ruled in 1877 that the Treaty of Waitangi was a “simple nullity”. This ruling has never been overturned and of course is a ruling known by the State.
Chief Justice Prendergast in the trial between Wi Parata v The Bishop of Wellington stated, “So far indeed as that instrument purported to cede the sovereignty it must be regarded as a simple nullity. No political body existed capable of making cession of sovereignty. Any obligations which the Crown did have in relation to Maori arose from those “rights and duties” which jure gentium vest in and devolve upon the first civilized occupier of a territory thinly peopled by barbarians without any form of law or civil government”.
The Treaty of Waitangi gave those “rights and duties” vested in jure gentium to Maori by giving them the same rights as the people of England under one flag and one law, no more and no less.
The 1840 Royal Charter/Letters Patent which separated New Zealand from New South Wales and made it into an independent British Colony also recognised those “rights and duties” vested in jure gentium in clause 8, which reads, “Provided always that nothing in these our letters patent contained shall affect, or be construed to affect, the rights of any Aboriginal natives of the said Colony of New Zealand, to the actual occupation or enjoyment in their own persons, or in the persons of their descendants, of any lands in the said Colony now actually occupied or enjoyed by such natives”.
I guess Hipkins and others need to go back and research our “true documented” early history and not parrot the “false undocumented” and made-up oral history that supports an apartheid agenda.
I'm sorry to say, I think Hipkins is not that far from the mark in asserting Maori didn’t cede sovereignty with the Treaty, but have done so since. I get that view primarily from reading and listening to Paul Moon of AUT. Moon makes the point that at 1840 the Crown sought to gain acceptance from Maori to exercise sovereignty over the whole of NZ over the relatively small number of settlers in NZ. There wasn't really much of a political framework in place for Maori to cede sovereignty to anyway, or indeed enough Crown officers to exercise any authority over Maori except in certain specific cases/infringements by Maori. Not an arrangement that could last very long at all. BTW a “treaty” is generally an agreement reached between nations/peoples to help both sides to navigate the interaction between them.
Overall the Treaty was seen as a temporary step before further longer lasting arrangements for governance in NZ could be put in place and over the next few years and decades, through various steps, these were put in place. During those events, where one arrangement after another superseded the previous one, the Treaty was virtually never mentioned. It became effectively obsolete—an important first step, that lost its relevance as each succeeding step was put in place. Along the way Maori, who were also British citizens by virtue of the Treaty, became New Zealand citizens as did the settlers. No one wanted to see Maori shut out of the modernity that ensued, least of all Maori themselves. A department of Maori affairs was set up to deal with Maori specifics and Maori seats of Parliament were set up to help with representation, with both seen as temporary measures for an indefinite transitional period.
The real horror story is the Treaty Tribunal through which judicial activism resurrected this now moribund, and frankly ambiguous document into a whole new life of its own. The case for or against Maori ceding sovereignty through the Treaty rests entirely on interpretation. This is where I found Paul Moon’s view of what was transpiring in both Whitehall and NZ at that time so compelling. In short, no, Maori were not being asked to cede sovereignty through signing the Treaty, but so what. Shortly after that, there is no question that Maori accepted Crown sovereignty over them, like every other New Zealander. We did not become one people through the Treaty but through the constitutional arrangements that followed.
Hmmm (29 Aug at 4:16), thank you for your interesting comments.
Regarding the central point of cession of sovereignty, how do you and Professor Moon account for the comments of the chiefs on 5 February 1840, and subsequently at the 1860 Kohimarama Conference, that indicate they knew they would be subject to the Crown?
A further point. I and others referred to cession of sovereignty, but it has been objected by Anonymous at 12:27 above that “Maori didn’t cede sovereignty because Maori had no sovereignty to cede”. That seems to me to be correct and I apologize for my error. I would have been better to write “Maori accepted sovereignty with the Treaty of Waitangi”; that is, the chiefs knew they would be subject to the Crown.
A final point. In a note to his translation of ‘kawanatanga’ as ‘government’, Professor Sir I.H. Kawharu claimed, “There could be no possibility of the Maori signatories having any understanding of government in the sense of ‘sovereignty’ i.e. any understanding on the basis of experience or cultural precedent.”
I believe that claim to be mistaken as several chiefs travelled to England prior to the Treaty. As early as 1806, Moehanga (Te Mahanga) of Ngapuhi visited London where he met Earl Fitzwilliam and, he claimed, King George III and Queen Charlotte who apparently gave him tools and money. In 1820, Hongi Hika, also from Ngāpuhi, together with his nephew Waikato and missionary Thomas Kendall, had a five month stay in London, where he met King George IV who gave him gifts, which he sold to buy muskets, and Cambridge where he worked with Professor Samuel Lee and Kendall on the first Maori dictionary. (Unfortunately, the Lee and Kendall dictionary does not have an entry for ‘kawanatanga’ as it was derived from the English word ‘governor’ after 1820.) Hongi Hika’s visit to England contributed to the Treaty of Waitangi with Ngāpuhi and other iwi.
It seems to me, therefore, that Maori chiefs had significant opportunity to garner an understanding of sovereignty on the basis of experience and cultural precedent and to communicate that among themselves.
Barrie Davis
Barrie Davis, (August 30 at 11:49am), thank you for responding to my comments.
I have no issue with the points you raised. Fair enough. One of the points I was trying to make is that it is not difficult to make a plausible case for either side of the cession of sovereignty via the Treaty debate. On that point, Hipkins could reasonably point to historian Moon for support. I doubt he would because he won’t find much support from Moon for any of his other views or the policies he’s trying to promote. On a personal note, I find Moon all the more plausible in terms of history because of his remarkable lack of any axe to grind in the political arena. He seems to just call history as he sees it, based on the evidence he has uncovered in his research.
Like I said, the inference I take from Moon is that the Treaty has been blown out of all proportion in terms of its contemporary relevance. It makes sense, I think, for it to be an agreement between separate peoples to get the ball rolling in NZ at that time. So it’s also not unreasonable to see it as “akin to a partnership” AT THAT TIME, before constitutional arrangements could get worked out and the nation of New Zealand could emerge. Since then there is absolutely no question that all New Zealanders are Crown subjects. Whether Maori ceded sovereignty via the Treaty or not, the end result in terms of what it means to be a NZer is the same. There is nothing resembling a partnership between separate peoples anymore. There are no separate peoples anymore. That all ended a long time ago; maybe not at the Treaty itself, but shortly thereafter.
Once it was decided that the Treaty would provide a suitable legal platform for race-based class action lawsuits, the slow slide into an apartheid state was set in motion. As I see it, that’s the problem, not whether or not Maori ceded sovereignty via that Treaty. And my goodness what a hell of a problem we have on our hands. When it comes to the Treaty Tribunal, is there any better illustration of how the road to hell is paved by good intention.
Dear Hmmm,
Here is a passage from an older book by Professor Moon, The Path to the Treaty of Waitangi (2022), regarding Normanby’s instructions to Hobson which may perhaps interest you:
“The key issue in this segment is the type of sovereign power that Maori would be expected to cede. In the setting of the instructions as a whole, the sovereignty referred to is that of a national sovereignty, which the instruction’s author reasonably assumed was absent from the Maori communities in the country.” ... “No national system of rule was in operation by Maori at this time, so the British were essentially asking for permission to acquire a type of sovereign rule which Maori would not have to sacrifice, as they did not possess it. This is distinct from the superficial interpretation of this passage, in which Maori arbitrarily surrendered all their sovereign rights and powers to the Crown.” “The mana and sovereignty of each tribe and sub-tribe undoubtedly remained unaffected by these statements.” (p. 111)
For my part, I suggest an arrangement similar to the Magna Carta in which the Barons are subject to King John. The Barons are still barons, but as such they are subject to the Crown. I doubt that Queen Victoria, the sovereign of a quarter of the earth’s surface and a quarter of the earth’s people, would have agreed to a partnership with 500 Maori chiefs. But I agree with you about the present irrelevance of the Treaty; it is now used as a diversion for people like you and me to squabble over while the ruling class go about their nefarious dealings. And yes, because of them, we do have a hell of a problem on our hands. I do find the history genuinely interesting though.
Regards,
Barrie Davis
Excellent comment, Allen.
What of the Court ruling that the Treaty was null and void made in 1877? This should be the definitive status of the Treaty and would save the nonsense we are clobbered with now.
Hmmm thanks for your analysis. I believe the Native Exemption Ordinance of 1844 supports your argument. It largely maintained rule by chiefs in their own areas over their own iwi while placing Maori and Europeans under English law when in European settlements. That appeared to be envisaged in 1840 but could only ever be a temporary arrangement if NZ was to become a relatively settled and successful state benefitting all our inhabitants.
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