The Breaking Views blog is administered by the New Zealand Centre for Political Research at NZCPR.com. The views expressed are those of the author alone.
Article 1 can be seen HERE, Article 2 HERE, Article 3 HERE, Article 4 HERE, Article 5 HERE, Article 6 HERE, Article 7 HERE.
Article 1 can be seen HERE, Article 2 HERE, Article 3 HERE, Article 4 HERE, Article 5 HERE, Article 6 HERE.
Article 1 can be seen HERE, Article 2 HERE, Article 3 HERE, Article 4 HERE, Article5 HERE.
Article 1 can be seen HERE, Article 2 HERE, Article 3 HERE, Article 4 HERE.
Article 1 can be seen HERE, Article 2 HERE, Article 3 HERE.
Article 1 can be seen HERE, Article 2 HERE.
A bold headlined in “Te Ao Maori News” for 26th July 2022, proclaims: “New Zealand Wars massacre was real – Nanaia Mahuta.”
We have Mahuta’s reported claim in this article: “What we need to do is to be revising the historical injustices and hurt and harm in a way that builds our nation, not distract us and perpetuate further division.”
For this of course, we need the truth. We need to know the facts of our own history. This enables us to separate reality from mythology. It also forces us to acknowledge that reality, rather than creating a story by revising the facts to fulfil and perpetuate the social and political ideologies of those who promulgate them.
If that were true, the Williams, father and son, would certainly have used it in their translation of Hobson’s final draft of 4th February 1840 into that much-scrutinized document, the “Treaty of Waitangi”. After all, they had been in New Zealand for seventeen years, son Edward Marsh Williams since the age of four and speaking the Ngapuhi dialect as fluently as anybody. But no! The Williams chose “Nu Tirani”, a reasonable, if not perfect, transliteration using the limited sounds of that speech.
And when their text was presented to the great assembly of chiefs and others the following day, not one word was spoken to challenge the Williams’ choice. Not once does “Aotearoa” appear in Colenso's recording of the speeches of the day, carefully checked by Busby at the time.
There was a lengthy article from one Olivia Wannan, “Climate Reporter”, beginning: “As the country grapples with the two different versions of our founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi and Te Tiriti, the Government is asserting its authority to curb greenhouse pollution ... [She] asks how our zero-carbon journey can put both at its centre.” And this when “greenhouse pollution” was quite unrecognized, if indeed it existed, when “Te Tiriti” was written!
For heaven’s sake! Please let us start, not with Ms Wannan’s fantasies, but with the actual, verifiable facts of history. Number One: There is one “Treaty of Waitangi”. I repeat: There is one “Treaty of Waitangi”, sometimes referred to as “Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.
Maori should stop posturing (yes, I have read He Puapua [1]) and take their place as equals with the rest of us. This ethnic exceptionalism is nonsensical and damaging to our New Zealand community.
Her article is headed by a display in colour of Busby’s so-called national flag[i] and the so-called “Maori sovereignty flag” with the Union Jack and New Zealand national flag conspicuously absent, so some idea of its tenor may be gained immediately though that was perhaps an editorial choice!
As the introduction states, Beausoleil's article purports to make “a case for implementing the changes recommended in the He Puapua report ‘to more fully realise the unceded authority of tangata whenua’ and give greater self-determination, equality and meaningful voice among Tiriti partners.” Her “unceded authority” and “tiriti partners” must ring the alarm bells for any alert reader. Addressed here in particular are her tales about the Treaty of Waitangi and the earlier “Declaration of Independence”. The threat implied in He Puapua is another matter.
That, was going to be ‘it’, for my contribution to the
disturbing trend of racial division which lurks latent as a menace to the
harmony of New Zealand.
However, before this week had past, Dr Don Brash drew attention to a threat with more enduring consequences than the tsunami that threatened to plunder our pastures.
In the 250th anniversary celebrations of Cook’s landing in New Zealand last year the government tried to bracket this with the Maori arrival nearly 800 years before. This is typical of the way the European discovery of NZ is downgraded now by the state and put on a par with the Maori discovery centuries before; it is all part of a state orchestrated campaign to vilify and disparage European culture in this country.
There is no comparison between the two, the sophistication of the latter being far greater than the former. The doctoring of history continues by the Maori activists and their Pakeha partisans and the dispute last year about replacing the statue of James Cook on Mt Titirangi at Gisborne was another example of it. Barney Tupara, a representative of Ngati Oenone says that the first meeting between Maori and Pakeha was violent and 9 Maoris were killed. This is another example of the rewriting of history that Maoris are engaged in where their own role is sanitised and that of the European is vilified.
