Reuben Chapple: The Waitangi Tribunal - A Vote of No Confidence

It is widely believed that Waitangi Tribunal Reports issue only after rigorous historical investigation of Treaty claims.

These findings then make their way into media reports, onto Government websites, and percolate throughout our education system as apparently authoritative, objective information.

But what if Tribunal Reports were one-eyed rewrites of New Zealand history and not worth the paper they are printed on?

Reuben Chapple: Maori Land

Property rights come about in one of two ways:

1. What in a pre-legal society might be referred to as “Customary Title.” This is not ownership at all, merely a temporary right of use or occupation, lasting only until extinguished by superior force.

2. Legal ownership. This means the ability to exclude others by the force of law. The underlying requirement is a universally recognised, settled form of civil government that protects property owners against violent dispossession, and provides for ongoing security of tenure, i.e. “time without end in the land.”

Reuben Chapple: "Rednecks" and their discontents

“Redneck” is an imported American term that has no place in New Zealand’s public discourse. 

It refers to “poor Southern white trash”, who before the American Civil War, were the overseer class on the estates owned by rich planters. They’d sat on horses toting whips and guns, overseeing black slaves as they went about their work in the cotton fields.

Reuben Chapple: No English language Treaty of Waitangi

Several weeks after the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed in Northland, the Crown dispatched Captain William Cornwallis Symonds to seek the aid of various local missionaries in collecting signatures from Maori chiefs residing at the South Head of the Manukau Harbour, at Port Waikato, at Kawhia, and further south down to Taranaki.

Captain Symonds arrived at Port Waikato to find Reverend Maunsell had already taken advantage of a hui convened for another purpose to present the Treaty to local chiefs. That meeting had been held on 11 April 1840, before a large Maori assembly of approximately 1500.

Reuben Chapple: Illegal Immigration

Socialists are not nationalists, they’re internationalists. And they know that the nation state operates as a prophylactic against the “world-mindedness” they mean to encourage. 

Their underlying agenda is to collapse the nation state into a global multi-culture, then argue that since we’re all one world now anyway, a one-world government is “for the best.”

Reuben Chapple: Rent Controls Rebutted

It's an unfortunate fact of life that during periods of expanded market demand, tenants looking for housing may have to spend weeks or months in an often vain search for a suitable place to live. 

They might end up renting something smaller than they might like, and/or in a less desirable location. Some have reportedly even resorted to bribes to get landlords to move them to the top of waiting lists.  Meanwhile, they may double up with relatives, sleep in garages, or use other makeshift living arrangements.

Reuben Chapple: Taranaki Toffee

It has become a revisionist article of faith that the Waitara land purchase which sparked the Taranaki War (and in some measure ignited the subsequent Waikato War) is a primary example of white settler wrongdoing to Maori. The facts of the matter are quite different. In 1827, a number of Taranaki Maori had migrated south to Waikanae, hoping to take advantage of the increased opportunities to trade with Europeans that would come from residing nearer to Cook Strait.

In 1834, the Taranaki was invaded by musket-toting Tainui, who defeated and killed most of the Taranaki Maori still living there. Tainui then returned to the Waikato, taking with them a number of captives to eat on the way or use as slaves and concubines. Small rump groups of Taranaki Maori fled to the offshore islands or to their relations at Waikanae and even as far south as the Nelson-Golden Bay area to escape death or captivity.

Reuben Chapple: Immigration Concretes

Current immigration debate refers to immigrants in general as if they were abstract people in an abstract world. But concrete differences between immigrants from different countries allow us to make a fair stab at determining whether their coming here is good or bad for New Zealand.

Reuben Chapple: All ideas have a pedigree

Dr Elizabeth Rata’s recent article (“Democracy and Diversity”) makes some excellent points about why equality in citizenship and one law for all must always trump identity politics in the public square. However, she seems to have skated somewhat lightly over how it is that “liberals of both the Left and the Right embraced biculturalism with such religious-like commitment.” All ideas have a pedigree.

Reuben Chapple: Gross Impudence

“In the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King. And he that does not know his own history is at the mercy of every lying windbag.” – outgoing Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe, in his 1922 farewell address

 New Zealand is increasingly being referred to in the public square as “Aotearoa” or “Aotearoa New Zealand.” This fiction deserves to be mercilessly deconstructed.

Reuben Chapple: Partnership? What Partnership

Only in the last 25 years has anyone considered it an established fact that the Treaty of Waitangi created a partnership between Maori and the Crown. For almost 150 years, this view was largely unheard of. Moreover, there is not a shred of evidence that the British authorities intended to establish such a partnership, nor that the chiefs saw this as the Treaty’s object.

Reuben Chapple: Poverty Pimps

The usual bunch of economically illiterate poverty pimps recently hit the headlines demanding an $18 - $20 per hour “living wage” based on what they claim people “ought” to be paid. They do not say how this is to be accomplished, but above-market wages can only be achieved by government intervention: either legislating a higher minimum wage, or by raising taxes on those who have earned their money, in order to transfer it to those who have not.

Reuben Chapple: Maori Seats

The Maori Party wants the Maori Parliamentary seats entrenched forever in law. In a manner chillingly redolent of apartheid-era South Africa, it also wants every New Zealander classified by ethnicity (presumably on the basis of boxes ticked on the census form), and all 18 year olds of even remotely Maori descent placed automatically onto the Maori electoral roll. Yet there is no such thing as an ethnic Maori. Today, anyone claiming to be “Maori” is actually of mixed European-Maori descent, but has rejected one group of ancestors for the cultural identity of another. The Maori Party’s half-American Tariana Turia is a case in point.

Reuben Chapple: Eyes Wide Open

The Waitangi Tribunal’s recent finding that Northland’s Ngapuhi tribes did not cede sovereignty to the Crown by signing the Treaty of Waitangi is arrant nonsense that deserves to be mercilessly deconstructed.

It appears the Tribunal uncritically accepted Ngapuhi’s assertion their ancestors believed Governor Hobson’s authority would apply only to white settlers, and that Maori would continue to be ruled, tribal-style, by their chiefs.

These claims are not borne out by the historical record. As outgoing Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe, observed in his 1922 farewell address: "In the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King, and he that does not know his own history is at the mercy of every lying windbag."