David Lillis: Our Unbalanced Media

I have written several times before on New Zealand’s unbalanced media (e.g. Lillis, 2024). However, I feel that there is more to be said. Several recent articles in our mainstream media provoked considerable interest because of their left-leaning and anti-Government orientation, and I consider that they must be challenged, if only because very little countermanding material is allowed to appear in our public-funded media. Here I review very briefly a few of them and give my reactions.

Bruce Moon: Democracy at Work

Well now, perhaps the plot is thickening with that doughty veteran, Dame Anne Salmond, asserting the “breathtaking ... effrontery” of David Seymour in his “riposte” (her word) to Church leaders.

She seems to forget that Seymour is in fact a senior member of Parliament who happens to be a deputy Prime Minister and free speech being not quite dead yet in this country, he has every right to make this challenge to church leaders – or anybody else for that matter.  Equally, those church leaders have every right to reply to him should they wish to do so.  All good, surely when the topic is quite an important one.

Barrie Davis: Temerity after Temerity

Prior to Mr Tuheitia’s hui at the Turangawaewae Marae the media made a fuss about the ‘leaking’ of a draft document from the Ministry of Justice regarding a Bill by the ACT Party to update the Treaty of Waitangi. That proposal to legislate for racial equality in New Zealand had been on the ACT website for some time, however, and the ‘leak’ served only to prime the passions for the hui.

Following on from my previous post, the Temerity of Waitangi (here), the issue of sovereignty versus partnership gets more audacious still in the case of the Treaty Principles Bill.

Bruce Moon: Anne Salmond at it again!

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive” - Sir Walter Scott, “Marmion”, 1808

“The confounding of all right and wrong, in wild fury, has averted from us the gracious favour of the gods” - Catullus

Now, I am amongst the first to assert that dear Anne does not “practice to deceive”, but as the same time it is fair to say that some of what she writes has a very similar effect.

She writes in “Newsroom” for 15 December 2023 that “Maori and Pakeha think differently.”

Mike Butler: It’s a vote on co-governance

Anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond persists in claiming that ACT’s David Seymour proposes rewriting the Treaty of Waitangi from scratch while the ACT Party website actually says the referendum is on co-governance.

Dame Anne dashed off yet another column that was published by NewsHub yesterday asserting that Seymour was being “disrespectful”, “arrogant”, and “presumptuous” in the extreme.

Its ironic that Dame Anne appeared to disrespect Seymour in her characterisation of him while asking for respectful debate on the issue. She did not do what she wants others to do.

Mike Butler: Why does David wind up Moana?

Why does ACT leader David Seymour’s proposed referendum annoy television presenter Moana Maniapoto so much?

Her latest rant titled Words matter, published yesterday in E-Tangata, is a jumbled version of the current anti-referendum narrative recited by go-to “experts” on all things Maori whose writings are reproduced in Public Interest Journalism Fund publications.

Mike Butler: A vote on the treaty?

Would a referendum on the treaty of Waitangi be corrosive and unfair, as anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond wrote three days ago, and how sound is the dame’s reasoning?

With the ACT Party likely to become party of a new government, Dame Anne dashed off a column to explain why she felt giving everyone the opportunity to vote on the issue was mean and unfair.

Graham Adams: Will Māori have the whip hand for key Three Waters jobs?

The cancellation of Dame Anne Salmond is instructive about who may be eligible for influential positions.

As the mainstream media continues to propagate the myth — peddled by Nanaia Mahuta and Grant Robertson — that co-governance at the higher, strategic level of Three Waters is the only area of preferential treatment for Māori in its complicated bureaucracy, analysts on social media are discovering that is untrue.

It is now widely understood that “co-governance” means equal numbers of representatives from mana whenua and councils will form the Regional Representation Groups which will oversee the Three Waters set-up in each of the four vast regions the country’s water assets are being divided into.

Chris Trotter: We Are All Maori – With a Small ‘M’

Something very strange has happened on the left of New Zealand politics. This past week, Dame Anne Salmond has been derided on Twitter as a racist. To appreciate just how astonishing that is, it helps to know that Salmond was one of the three experts who advised the Waitangi Tribunal that the Maori chiefs gathered at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 did not concede sovereignty to the British. Politically, this makes her one of the key contributors to the currently dominant left-wing discourse of “co-governance”. What can she possibly have done to warrant the abuse to which she is now being subjected?

In a nutshell, she has argued (anne-salmond-time-to-unteach-race?) that the Treaty document itself is not a “racial” document, but a blueprint for how “ordinary people” – be they native born, or hailing from other parts of the world – can rub along together in these islands without pissing each other off too much. By pointing out that the concept of “race” is absent from both the Maori and English texts of the Treaty, however, Salmond has thrown a very large and inconvenient cat among the “co-governance” and “partnership” pigeons.

Bruce Moon: Dame Anne Gets It All Wrong

So Distinguished Professor Dame Anne Salmond, recent recipient of New Zealand’s highest award, has come up with a few more bright ideas about the Treaty of Waitangi which, one might have thought, had been done to death already, several times over.[i] 

Thus, she persists in her profound delusion – shared by many others one might add – that when the chiefs signed the Treaty “this did not amount to a cession of sovereignty” although “the rangatira gave absolutely (tuku rawa atu) all the Kāwanatanga of their lands (te Kāwanatanga katoa o ou rātou whenua) to the Queen.”  Well, what doublespeak that is! Why?  Because while it is glaringly obvious that the derivation of “kawanatanga” is from “governor” plus “-tanga”, its translation is “sovereignty”.  As we have shown by many examples, time and again,[ii] translation is not the same as derivation – too hard for her to grasp perhaps?