Bruce Moon: Should these books be burnt?

“The first reaction to truth is hatred.” Tertullian, ca160-225AD

In “Stuff” for 2nd July 2023 there appears a piece by one Gabrielle McCullough, entitled “Racist Propaganda; The undercover campaign to infiltrate school libraries.” Wow! “Undercover”? That’s good, since the weapons used in this alleged “campaign” were actually books!! Hard covers or soft??

These books were published by independent publisher, Tross, of Khandallah, Wellington. Librarian Julia Smith at one school was “shocked” to find that a teacher had bought a couple of Tross books which were already on her library shelves. As the Stuff article continues:

Mike Butler: Gunpoint treaty threat and other lies

Hawke's Bay elder Jerry Hapuku spoke to the Hawke’s Bay Today newspaper for a Waitangi Day story this year. Maybe the excitement of being interviewed blurred the line between fact and fiction so he told a story about his ancestor, chief Te Hapuku, being forced to sign the Treaty of Waitangi at gunpoint.

That’s news to me I thought when I saw the headline, having read a lot of regional history, so I checked historian Angela Ballara’s description Te Hapuku and the treaty in her biography of him in the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. Ballara is a current member of the Waitangi Tribunal and her writings are very pro-Maori.