A.E. Thompson: Dr Duncan Webb’s Creative Reasoning Regarding Treaty Principles

I don’t agree a referendum is a sensible way of determining what, if any, principles underlie Te Tiriti or were believed to exist by the signatories. That’s a bit like voting to decide whether it rained yesterday or not. Better to find, or commission unbiased people to find, evidence and decide one way or another. Unfortunately, that wasn’t  done properly by the Waitangi Tribunal, as Ewen McQueen (author of ‘One Sun in the Sky: The Untold Story of Sovereignty and the Treaty of Waitangi’) discovered when he looked for, but was unable to find, evidence to support the Tribunal’s claims regarding principles.