Barrie Davis: Better Together

We, the people of New Zealand, are being forced apart by our own representative Parliament into two groups – part-Maori and non-Maori. Here is my understanding of the situation:

The separation has not been mandated by the people as an election issue or a referendum. It is being justified with lies (partnership), arranged by cheating (He Puapua), and implemented with propaganda (PIJF). It is being implemented with the cooperation of Parliament (both Left and Right), the public service (e.g., education) and the courts (e.g., Waitangi Tribunal). The separation is not because of animosity between the two groups but to further the political, ideological and pecuniary aspirations of the ruling class – Parliament, the judiciary and the iwi leaders.

I will dip into a couple of books to show how we were together in the nineteenth century and ask, will we now tolerate being divided and controlled to further the aims of the elites?

The first is The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642-1840 by Vincent O’Malley (Second edition, 2025). O’Malley invokes a concept of the ‘middle ground’ to describe the relationship between the British and the Maoris during the time leading up to the Treaty of Waitangi and declining after 1840.

The middle ground was a time when each group was seeking benefits from the other:

“Indigenous people were in demand as sexual partners, trading partners, patrons or protectors of small groups of Europeans, and military and political allies of larger ones. Europeans were in turn sought for similar, though not identical, reasons.” (p. 8)

O’Malley does not spell it out because he is biased, but Europeans were sought for their superior more advanced philosophy, science and technology, especially goods of the Industrial Revolution which was in turn a manifestation of the Scientific Revolution. That advantage was initially balanced when the Maoris had a much larger population than the British.

But as the British population increased their capability became apparent and “the middle ground quickly disappeared once Europeans found themselves no longer reliant upon Indigenous peoples for their continued survival and once a rough balance of power, mutual need or desire for what the other possessed had faded.” (p. 9)

That is not correct, because the Maoris continued to rely on the pakeha taonga, as they still do today. Nevertheless, during the middle ground period there was an acceptance by both groups of the attributes and practices of the other as well as a spirit of cooperation. The obvious point is that we could continue on the same basis now, if we had not been dissuaded from doing so by the doctrine of Maori separatism.

The second book is Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand by Angela Wanhalla (2013) which identifies the complementary benefits of interracial marriage between mostly British men and Maori women during the middle ground period, and beyond. It began with the first arrivals of traders and sailors around 1800 and has resulted in about a million part-Maoris today, an order of magnitude more than the number of Maoris around 1840.

There were several forms of marital patterns prior to 1840, “the most common form was temporary marriage, which lasted as long as the ship was in port.” (p. 2) “Maori gained a tribal member but also the wealth and status that came with the establishment of a trading station on their land, while newcomers gained the protection of a man of mana, normally a chief, as well as access to land on which to set up in business.” (p. x)

Prior to 1840, “Marriage certainly helped some individual traders to gain an economic footing and social prominence.” (p. 11) “By 1840, when around two thousand mostly male newcomers had settled on the land and created communities, a particular marriage culture had evolved that followed Maori marriage customs, but also drew upon practices from the maritime world which were more civil than religious in form and spirit.” (p. 2)

Subsequently, after the Treaty, “a significant proportion of marriages made in the 1840s in the whaling and trading communities occurred because of the changed political status of the country and the fact that whalers and traders started to worry about the legality of their land-holdings. Couples would legitimate their relationship … in order to ensure the economic future for their children.” (p. 31)

For example, “Marlborough Sounds whalers James Heberley, Dicky Barrett, John Love and William Keenan all married high-ranking Maori women as ‘a matter of politics as well as comfort’.” (p. 12) They first had a Maori marriage (pakuwha) in the 1830s to form a relationship with the tribe for reasons of trade and subsequently had a European marriage in the 1840s to establish property rights for European purposes.

“Traders and whalers also increasingly took up Christian marriage because Maori women favoured it.” This was due to a wish to “tighten the bond as firmly as possible, so that the man cannot leave them again.” “Formal marriage also gave couples respectability in the settler world…” (p. 31)

So, due to the Europeans being predominantly male, the practice of interracial marriage demonstrates an acceptance by both groups of the attributes and practices of the other as well as a spirit of cooperation during the middle ground period. It is apparent that we can do it when we need to. Why stop now?

The outcome for us today is that there are no longer full Maoris but part-Maoris. I am struck by the early photos of Maoris in the picture books by how much darker Maoris were then. The obvious point is that it is already somewhat artificial to categorise ourselves as different groups and that the degree of difference will continue to decline until the phenomenon of race is no more. It is perverse to separate us, so why are the ruling class conspiring to do so?

The ruling class want to be able to freely determine the direction of the nation without the democratic encumbrances of the people. To do that they arrange for us to quarrel amongst ourselves by facilitating us to split into divergent groups and then encouraging opposition.

In politics the natural groups are the Left and the Right. But that has been falling out of favour with voters, I suspect because we are now sophisticated enough to realise that is a scam. Left versus Right is an innate psychological predisposition which only exists in the outside world to the extent that we put it there. Once we withdraw the projections it disappears from the phenomenal world which makes it easier to focus on actual issues, which is not what they want.

Another approach is to split us on the basis of race, which is especially favoured by iwi leaders who gain political power and wealth. We have fallen for that one on a global scale due to the advanced capabilities of European science and technology and the subsequent attempts by others to participate the benefits, giving rise to mass migration and the subsequent attempt to dominate the host nation, particularly in Europe.

But the situation in New Zealand is different. Here, we already had two races who previously came together for mutual benefit. So, the ruling class has had to intervene and ensure that we are kept apart to create a scenario for antagonism as a distraction for their clandestine activities, and they are doing so with legislation, propaganda and indoctrination.

They are rewriting history (e.g., O’Malley above), conditioning children at school, and paying the legacy media to write in favour of their cause (the PIJF). Such propaganda is used to condition us to automatically resile at the use of certain words, such as ‘racist’, ‘colonial’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’. Such terms are then levelled at any European who makes a supposed negative inference about a person or persons who are not European. Although not the reverse, mind.

To extricate ourselves from this undesirable state of affairs, I make two propositions and a conclusion. First, we cannot create an effective and efficient nation if we are divided; to be great we all need to be working together with the same fundamental goals, and with the same rights and duties. Second, democracy is the only acceptable system, however it is problematic; so, we need to participate in good faith to make it work.

Therefore, we must rid ourselves of Maori separatism, starting with abolishing the Waitangi Tribunal and the Maori seats. We need to decline the disruptive provocation to squabble amongst ourselves. We have reconciled the attributes and practices of the other group out of necessity in the past; we need to understand that it is just as necessary to do so now.

Not two groups ‘together for ti Tiriti’ of the past, but one nation together for the New Zealand of the future.

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.