Chris Lee: Oral Submission Treaty Principles Bill

Thank you Mr Chairman. 

I support the intent of this bill because separatism has metastasised into sedition which aims to create tribal sovereignty in place of our sovereign liberal democracy. 

Radical Maori and their non-Maori fellow travellers have been emboldened by the success of their ahistorical revisionist treaty education programs and white privilege workshops.

The sedition has been enabled by a naive and/or gullible white-guilt public on the one hand and by cynical organisations concerned only with financial and/or political expediency on the other. Institutions and bureaucracies aid and abet this sedition because they are suffused with group think underpinned by the inordinate fear of being labelled racist. 

That said, I do not support progressing this Bill because it is a political compromise which avoids rather than challenges the revisionist meanings of kawanatanga and tino rangatiratanga. 

It also creates a new principle of undefined Maori rights supposedly existing at the time te Tiriti was signed even though ceding sovereignty and gaining the rights and privileges of British subjects actually extinguished any pre-existing rights. 

The bill also claims that “the treaty principles, as defined at this time, help reconcile differences between the te reo Māori and English texts…”. 

Firstly, the two treaties statement perpetuates the long-standing false notion that the “official” English version of the treaty was the version translated to te Tiriti. This is demonstrably wrong. 

Martin Doutré’s excellent research into the so-called Littlewood Treaty (which was discovered in 1989) proves that the Littlewood Treaty was the final English draft of te Tiriti and provides clear evidence of the intended meanings of the words in te Tiriti. 

In particular, kāwanatanga means sovereignty and tino rangatiratanga means guaranteed ownership of property - the latter applying to all the people then in New Zealand. 

Secondly, in addition to my comment above, any concept of pan-Maori "rights and interests" can no longer be credibly sustained given the wide range of philosophical, political, and religious views among Maori. It is also ludicrous to suggest that the "mixed-race" branches in many established New Zealand families should possess more “rights and interests” than others. 

To cure the seditious cancer we need to first recognise that New Zealand has built its sovereignty through many steps over many years. One of those steps was the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal, and Maori who have participated in Treaty of Waitangi claims have implicitly accepted New Zealand Crown sovereignty whether or not their ancestors signed the treaty. 

Mr Chairman, I don’t have any solutions to this problem but I would, with two provisos, strongly support the teaching of a compulsory course of New Zealand history to children from year 10 onwards, the provisos being: 

One - the students are first taught how to think, research, and debate independently 
Two - Accurate historical material is presented in a disinterested and unbiased way with independent references. 

I do know that if we wish to remain a sovereign liberal democracy we need to stop trying to appease Maori radicals and undo the proliferation of false treaty principles - particularly those of “partnership” and “co governance” which are merely interim steps towards tribal sovereignty in New Zealand. 

Thank you.

In 2012 Chris Lee learnt that according to WAI 262, taonga in the natural world was anything Maori said was taonga (even if they knew nothing about it in 1840) - and thus started his long journey from science and engineering to learning real New Zealand history and the origins of te Tiriti.