Dave Witherow: Treaty weather

 Democracy, as a prescription for society, is all or nothing. It can’t be diluted, apportioned...

Things are getting a little heated. Simple propositions that, not long ago, would have been understood, are no longer. We see this every day and we saw it recently in Wellington in front of the Beehive, being demonstrated by a large number of people.

It is now obviously a waste of time trying to explain, or even discuss, the contentious Treaty, and its alleged Principles. There are no Principles. There never were any — and despite the well-paid sophistries of the country’s “top lawyers”, there still aren’t.

There’s just the Treaty, which, if it is not a document establishing democracy in New Zealand, is long overdue for retirement and re-negotiation. Democracy, as a prescription for society, is all or nothing. It can’t be diluted, apportioned, or abridged, and there’s nothing to be gained (except by the troughers) in any more fabricated debate about the precise meaning of words such as “rangatiratanga”, or “kawanatanga”, or “taonga”. And it’s a sad comment on the intelligence of present-day New Zealanders that they’ve allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by propositions that primary-school kids would have laughed at years ago.

Let’s start with “taonga”, which was originally understood to refer to possessions, or “treasures”. It referred, in its 1840 context, to property, things that could be owned by individuals, or groups of individuals. But “taonga”, once profitably re-defined, was manna to the lawyers who, let loose by the extraterrestrial Geoffrey Palmer, lost no time in generating brand-new “taonga” — some of them, quite literally, out of thin air. Radio waves, for example – emanations in the ether – overnight became “taonga”, thus yielding more buckets of money to the usual clutch of beneficiaries.

There is no foreseeable end to the “taonga” racket. It can be expanded indefinitely, as the Waitangi Tribunal so regularly demonstrates. Whales are “taonga”, water is “taonga”, and before long, no doubt, the air you breathe will be declared “taonga” and measured by a meter attached to your nose.

This is what you get for bowing to blackmail – a lesson that our foremost appeaser, Mr Luxon, has yet to learn. Pay the ransom, and — regularly as clockwork — the next demand is in the pipeline.

We now live in an officially-sanctioned racist society, with different rights for different people, apportioned on the basis of genetic descent. We live in Apartheid, in other words, with the recreation of an infamous regime that once united many of us in worthy protest. But that was then, and all, somehow, has become inverted.

None of this, however, needed to happen. It was never inevitable and indeed could readily have been avoided many years ago – back when we still had sane people with the social cohesion to recognise and resist any plot to divide them. But now, thanks to greed, corruption, and the delinquent condition of our schools and universities, New Zealand is a de facto Apartheid state. Democracy is over, and we won’t get it back without much squawking, insolence and probably, sad to say, violence.

The media, competitively groveling for the favour of their paymasters, peddle the Orwellian proposition that anyone with a quantum of Maori blood, however minimal, is entitled to a bigger slice of the communal pie. Daily they display their drooling obeisance, their craven refusal to think for themselves.

Here, for example, are the recent musings of Stuffer columnist Verity Johnson (ironic, that “Verity”, all considered).

David Seymour, according to Verity “wants to take decades of legislation, carefully worked out by specialist lawyers, academics, and tikanga-experts who’ve been painstakingly studying Te Tiriti and replace it with. . . ah, three bullet points”.

She’s talking about the Treaty, you understand — the sacred Treaty, which, just to remind ourselves, is a document consisting of four sentences arranged in three brief clauses. (In other words, Three Bullet Points).

Verity is far from alone in her confusion. It’s been drilled into her, presented to her as holy writ by the intellectually-challenged, guilt-ridden halfwits now in charge of our former universities. Verity can’t help it. She’s one of an entire cohort of the partly-demented and pseudo-educated. She thinks that we should “leave notions of equity and equality to experts who actually study these things” — the same geniuses, no doubt, as those “specialist lawyers, academics, and tikanga-experts”, who, she says, have been studying the Treaty for the past fifty years.

You’ve really got to hand it to these inimitable academic termites — hundreds of them, thousands, more likely – hard at it, beavering away, day-in, day-out, for no less than half a century — on four sentences! What mind-boggling dedication. We’d be buggered, helpless, utterly at sea without such selfless supervisors.

Once, long ago before we lost our marbles, we only needed expertise in areas that were complicated, or specialised, or required special training. We left things like rocketry, or brain-surgery, or nuclear physics, to those with a bit of a track-record. But Verity wants to push the envelope. She wants to surrender her autonomy, bale out, and leave “notions of equality and equity” to the interpretation of her “expert” superiors. Why, I wonder? Does she not have a dictionary? “Equality” means “the condition of being equal”, and “equity” is defined, in one word, as “fairness”. Where’s the difficulty? Are we now so dim-witted that these simple concepts are beyond the reach of our understanding?

Of course not. We’re being played. The whole Treaty racket is a transparent con-job – a fraudulent arrangement for the transfer of money to a professional gang of shake-down merchants. We’re a global joke now. A nation of sheep, governed by a class of joke lawyers and cod-professors who bicker endlessly about the meaning of a few words on a scrap of decaying parchment.

Dead men are dead. They lived in their time and we live in ours, and their well-meant Treaty, created to unite us, now divides us. It no longer serves any useful purpose, and it is well past time to think again.

We’re back, in effect, in 1840. And the issue, as then, is whether we want peace and unity, or endless division and perpetual strife. Do we want a democracy, or do we not?

We could, of course, postpone a decision, prevaricate for another decade or two, while another generation of hapless children are appropriately brainwashed, and the “best legal minds” corner what’s left of the public purse.

Why put up with this?

We already know more than enough about the issues in contention — the Treaty, the eternal Money-Tree, the evolving document that, whatever it says now, will say otherwise tomorrow. And the Principles of the Treaty – let us not forget those wondrously protean little Principles — non-existent, yet magically capable of mutation, expansion, and everlasting fiscal fecundity.

Yes. We’re fully-informed: we know enough. So let’s have a referendum – a final, binding referendum, not about the Treaty, or the Principles, but about how, from now on, we want to live.

The choice is straightforward: Modernity or the Stone Age? Democracy or Tribalism?

So roll up, folks, Maori, Pakeha, and all the rest, from the first canoe to the latest Dreamliner. Wherever we came from we live here now. We all have a stake in this, a right to determine what is best for us.

Step right up and take your pick.

Dave Witherow, who emigrated to New Zealand from Northern Ireland in 1971, is a columnist, author, script writer, and former scientist for Fish and Game.