Dame Anne Salmond says that anyone who does not speak te reo who opines on the Treaty of Waitangi should be regarded as “a lunatic or a fool”.
Professor Sir Hugh Kawhāru has translated the te reo version of the Treaty back into English.
Article Three translates as:
“For this agreed arrangement therefore concerning the Government of the Queen, the Queen of England will protect all the ordinary people of New Zealand and will give them the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England.”
You do not need to speak te reo to know that the same rights and duties as citizens is not a promise of equality of outcomes.
If Salmond is correct, then only Chinese speakers can make a contract with the Chinese.
I have negotiated contracts in China.
When out of Parliament I negotiated a US$350 million contract. None of our engineers spoke Chinese. None of the provincial officials spoke English.
Like at Waitangi in 1840, there are English terms for which there are no Chinese equivalents.
I wanted to be sure the terms were understood. My translator conveyed the Chinese officials’ discussion of the terms to me.
They understood. I realised that because written Chinese characters are not exact, the Chinese officials were relying on the English text to express the agreement.
We know that similar discussions of words for which there is no equivalent in Māori occurred at Waitangi. Salmond disparages Henry Williams, who translated the Treaty, but we have his letter to Bishop Selwyn written on April 3, 1847.
“I can, however, confidently state that at the three several meetings held at Waitangi, on the 5th, 6th, and 7th of February, I gave the fullest explanation of the Treaty, and that no one chief signed the same through misapprehension, for I took the utmost pains to make them understand perfectly the character of the proposed engagement.”
Then there is another authority – Salmond herself.
“Far from being naïve or ignorant, the rangatira at Waitangi engaged in a sophisticated debate about sovereignty, power, and authority, drawing on their own ancestral precedents and political philosophies.” (Tears of Rangi: Experiments Across Worlds).
Arguments about the meaning of words in scripture have caused churches to split and the message of the gospels to be lost.
Arguments about the meaning of words is causing the message of the Treaty to be lost.
Anne Salmond is not a lawyer. I am.
If the tribunal is right and the chiefs and the governor misunderstood each other so there are two completely different treaties, then there was no agreement at Waitangi.
There is a legal principle of “misunderstanding”. If two parties completely misunderstand each other, then there is no “meeting of the minds” (consensus ad idem), which is essential for a valid contract.
This concept applies in treaties. The principle is found in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) 1969.
Article 48 of the VCLT – Error:
“A treaty may be invalidated if a party entered into it based on an essential mistake concerning a fact or situation …”
Either the chiefs and the governor reached an agreement, and we have one Treaty, or there was no consensus ad idem and there is no Treaty.
The tribunal is convinced that two parties speaking different languages could not have agreed when some concepts were foreign.
I have negotiated when the parties do not share a common language and there are concepts that have no direct language equivalence. I know agreement can be reached, because we reached agreement.
I have been accused by Government and opposition leaders of not doing my due diligence before joining the tribunal. The trigger for my resignation was the tribunal’s draft strategic plan. It was three months after my appointment when I was given a copy and given a few days to comment.
The tribunal is forecasting an increased workload. Reinterpreting Article Three to be a promise of equality of outcome is a promise no government can ever meet.
When I sent my comment on the draft plan my email bounced back. The message said I was not on the list of members entitled to email. I think my exclusion was a cock-up and not deliberate but a tribunal keen to hear my views would have ensured I was on the list.
I discovered the tribunal had consulted non-members, some of whom hold very radical views.
I was wasting my time, and at 77 I may not have a lot left. The tribunal needs to be reformed.....The full article is published HERE
The Honourable Richard Prebble CBE is a former member of the New Zealand Parliament. Initially a member of the Labour Party, he joined the newly formed ACT New Zealand party under Roger Douglas in 1996, becoming its leader from 1996 to 2004.
20 comments:
Salmond is a racialist. Like others, her logic would have only Maori teaching anything Maori (mostly
true already), only Chinese nationals teaching Chinese history, nobody born in NZ teaching any subject away from these shores....Well, maybe if you were 25 % British, one quarter of your course could cover British history.
And Luxon and co can’t/won’t put an end to the country being held to ransom.
Anne Salmonds comments tell us more about Anne Salmond than they do about the Treaty.
At the same time, the Tribunal's recommendations to date have been more about making a Maori aristocracy than equality of outcome. They do very little for ordinary Maori.
So the WT Strategic Plan is really the latest version of He Puapua? No surprise.
PS Dame Anne 's muddled arguments suggest desperation.
Well done for sticking to your principles. We know what The Treaty said. It is not ambiguous, but very simply stated. When people like Dame Salmond say this is a debate, they are totally wrong. What they really mean is "agree with them...or else". Any reasonable opposition is scorned. The National Party has been captured. Probably by Finlayson. Can't these people, like him, see that by trying to achieve equity for around 18% of the population they are doing a great disservice to their remaining fellow citizens? There is no doubt that this is what this is all about. A redistribution of wealth. They get paid handsomely for ripping off their fellow citizens. What about all the ordinary hardworking taxpayers who don't want this and don't have a voice at present? Personally, I want a say in this. I can see once all these resources and land and sea is given away, it will never be returned.
You absolutely did the right thing by leaving. I wouldn't want to waste my time flogging a dead corrupt horse at 77 either....made worse by disrespect. What has happened has confirmed when we already knew and quite frankly there should have been an uproar.
Dame Anne Salmond says that anyone who does not speak te reo who opines on the Treaty of Waitangi should be regarded as “a lunatic or a fool”.....
.....thus Dame Tariana Turia was clearly a lunatic and a fool as she had not one word of te reo maori and she opined at length about the treaty......
I think we see who the actual lunatic and fool is in this scenario and the old adage applies..... it is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove any doubt.....
....Dame Anne are you listening?
I regard Anne Salmond ( Dame? how colonial) as the lunatic and the fool.
I do not believe "The tribunal is convinced that two parties speaking different languages could not have agreed when some concepts were foreign." I think that the Tribunal has learned they can say anything they like and that will not be challenged by Parliament. The Tribunal are lying and Parliament are insufferable wimps. Just as Dame Anne is an insufferable snob.
“Professor Sir Hugh Kawhāru has translated the te reo version of the Treaty back into English”. (Note: Mr Kawharu’s “unauthorised” translation he himself called, “his attempt at a reconstruction of the literal translation of the Maori text)
(His) Article Three translates as:
“For this agreed arrangement therefore concerning the Government of the Queen, (the Queen of England will protect all the ORDINARY people of New Zealand) and will give them the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England.”
(Why did he translate tangata Maori to ordinary? In the original Maori treaty the sentence in brackets above is written as, “te Kuini o Ingarani nga tangata Maori katoa o Nu Tirani”)
From the “official” 1869 back translation of The Third (Article Three) from Mr T E Young of the Native Affairs Department.
“This is an arrangement for the consent to the government of the Queen. The Queen of England will protect all the MAORIS of New Zealand. All rights will be given to them the same as her doings to the people of England”.
The apartheid Waitangi Tribunal needs shutting down asap.
Beautiful article. The voice of knowledge and reason.
Just one little nit-pick. The International Court of Justice held in the case of Cameroon v Nigeria 2002 that 'treaties' entered into by the British Empire with African tribes were invalid because the latter did not meet the condition of nationhood, and only sovereign nations can enter into treaties. The same observation would apply to NZ in 1840 as the northern tribes at best represented a confederation (but without an overarching governing entity) while the south remained terra nullius. So the 1969 Vienna Convention does not apply to the ToW even retrospectively.
Very relevant point: how come the champagne Marxists always accept " colonial" titles and live in smart places? Totally contradictory. Thye are a bad joke.
Brenda, you obviously haven't had the advantage of the NZ school history curriculum, thar Maori were an advanced, enlightened society, with lots of Aroha, that knew things about whale recordings that "Western science" still hasn't caught up with. They were only pretending to be cannibals. They were like the mice in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The Waitangi Tribunal has outlived its usefulness, close it down and end the nonsense.
The government can take action on this if it chooses too.
Janine is correct and too am grateful to Richard Prebble for sticking to his principles and spelling out to this government what is so badly wrong with the tribunal (and by association much else besides). The real issue now is what is this coalition going to do about it? Tama Potaka is only interested in finding another mug to wallow along with the tribunal status quo, National in general appear dead from the neck up on anything Maori activist related, The public service is obstructing efforts to rein in the stupidity and thereby keeping He Puapua alive and kicking. Prebble has in effect told them what needs to happen with the tribunal. The public service needs to be realigned to do the governments bidding or be sacked! Registration boards of all sorts have to be stopped from the forced indoctrinations as do schools and universities! This Country could be Heaven on Earth without all the Marxist B-S.
I can't believe it.
I agree with Richard Prebble....
There I said it.
Salmond ………… Empty vessels make the most noise. You are the fool.
@anon 8:47AM in 1840 maori referred not to a specific people but meant “ordinary.” Such as it is described in the first maori dictionary which detailed the ordinary language of New Zealand and where maori is used to describe a number of ordinary everyday items.
The treaty is a common law agreement between the Queen, the Chiefs and all the Ordinary People of New Zealand. It is a modern myth that it was anything different or exclusively between Maori with a capital M and the Crown. Lawyers weren’t involved in the drafting of the treaty and the false English non-translation inserted into schedule 1 of the Waitangi Tribunal act was purposely selected because it makes no reference to the ordinary people of New Zealand. The Maori Affairs minister of the time wanted ordinary New Zealanders excluded from the Treaty.
No, a treaty is not a 'common law agreement' - it comes under the Royal Prerogative and international law. I have described the International Court of Justice's view of 19thC 'treaties' with local tribes above.
What Maori radicals and their running dogs like Salmond are really saying is that they are much smarter than any Maori who went before them, or in other words that the Maori who signed the treaty were dumber than them. That they have the temerity to try to freight in all this nonsense about the treaty on the back of 185-year contradicting history in fact illustrates that they have this dumber/smarter view of others and themselves the opposite way around to reality.
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