Roger Childs: On Karakia

Bless’ em all – karakia for the public

The demand for authentic welcomes and blessings is increasing and people want someone who can bring cultures together but also take them on a journey of understanding to help encourage better engagement with Te Ao Māori. –Take Tuia

The long, the short and the tall

Roger Childs: A well-paid Chief Maori Officer at Wellington City Council

Well compensated bureaucrats in Wellington—33 employees on the Wellington City Council Rich List earn $200,000.or more

The Wellington Ratepayers’ Alliance put a full-page advertisement in The Post on Wednesday May 20 listing the rich list. All 33 bureaucrats earn more than Mayor Andrew Little starting with Town Clerk Matt Prosser on $531,616. Most are called “Chiefs” or “Managers”. At number 34, the Mayor gets 201,947.

Roger Childs: Tribute to Cartoonist Garrick Tremain

I think of how fortunate I was to be born in this country at this time – Garrick Tremain

Roger Childs: Scott Watson Is Still Innocent

In December 2023 in the lead up to Watson’s most recent appeal police decided to go back to the hairs that had been collected from the tiger blanket 25 years previously and DNA test them in an effort to futherlink Watson to Hope or Smart.. The following year the Instutue of Environmental Science and Research began testing 30 hairs from the blanket. Results showed that none of the hairs contained any DNA from Hope or Smart. Mike Wilson, The Post September 3 2025

Roger Childs: The passing of leading historian Bruce Moon

Of all the fake history with which New Zealand is swamped today, nothing is more blatant than the claim that “Aotearoa” is, or was, the Maori name for our country. –Bruce Moon

Sadly I never met Bruce Moon face to face, but we did exchange scores of e-mails. Like Waikanae’s John Robinson, Bruce was a Mathematician and Scientist who came to History later in life. Like many of us, he couldn’t believe how many so called “respected historians”, like Anne Salmond, Jock Phillips and Vincent O’Malley twisted elements of our country’s story, notably the history of Maori – Settler/Colonist relations and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Roger Childs: Aotearoa was not Used in Centuries Gone By

“Of all the fake history with which New Zealand is swamped today, nothing is more blatant than the claim that “Aotearoa” is, or was, the Maori name for our country.” Distinguished Historian Bruce Moon

Apparently it’s trendy to use Aotearoa

In the 15 March TV3 News the item on the Auckland Infrastructure Conference was introduced with the words SELLING AOTEAROA; fortunately at the venue it had “New Zealand Infrastructure Conference” plastered on the walls behind the rostrum. 

Roger Childs: More incorrect Parihaka history in this Kapiti College theatre piece?

This production — article — played at the Performing Arts Centre in Raumati a few years back. I didn’t go, but I gather it was a very one-sided view of what happened at Parihaka. Nicola Easthope is a good lady but she has been indoctrinated by Paora Trim who is Head of Maori at Kapiti College. I guess people have to make up their own minds.

Roger Childs: The wokeist ‘Post’ newspaper won’t comment on the real issues

It is very sad that the Legacy media will not cover many topics that affect our democracy and the interests of all New Zealanders. They seem terrified of commenting on Māori issues, presumably because they fear being called “racist.”

Below is a letter to the editor I sent off a week ago. Do readers feel that it is unreasonable and insulting to people who call themselves Māori?

Roger Childs: Are Māori statistics pointless?

Today the vast majority of those involved in research on human variation would agree that biological races do not exist among humans… –Robert Wald Sussman, author of “The Myth of Race: The troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea”

Roger Childs: The One Treaty of Waitangi - Te Tiriti

He iwi tahi tatou – We are now one nation. Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson to each chief after he had signed the Treaty of Waitangi

What it meant at the time

It was 6 February 1840 and the location was an elevated area above the Bay of Islands known as Waitangi. The British government’s envoy, Captain William Hobson, represented the British Crown, and he had called local tribal and settler leaders together to sign a treaty.

Roger Childs: Tariana Turia – Tribes First, Country Second

Her … backward-looking negativism is driving a wedge between New Zealanders, regardless of their ethnic origin, and it’s time it ceased. –United Party leader, Peter Dunne in 1997

A controversial figure

Roger Childs: Freedom of the press includes freedom of cartooning

Jeff Bezos can’t handle the criticism

I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.’ –Cartoonist/journalist Ann Telnaes

Roger Childs: Te Pati Māori fears the Treaty Principles Bill

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. –Article 1, United Nations Declaration of Human Rights

Small but noisy

As the Hikoi grinds its way on to Parliament, the Maori Party claims that it has a key leadership role. But this is a group with a single focus: to speak with a strong, independent and united voice for Maori. They are just a small party with a loud voice having garnered only 3.08% of the popular vote in last year’s election. However, they have six seats in the House of Representatives courtesy of the undemocratic special Maori seats.

Roger Childs: Today is the birthday of one of the greatest explorers in history

Most people see James Cook as an iconic figure whose legacy in New Zealand is a modern, progressive, multi-cultural society. However, a small number of Maori extremists see him as a negative influence and claim he committed many crimes against the Polynesian inhabitants of the time. They do not disclose any evidence or sources and their case is flimsy at best.

Roger Childs: More nonsense from the former Kapiti Mayor

Highly inaccurate pro-Maori advocacy penned by Gurunathan for the Stuffers

The previous Kapiti District Mayor has taken up the mantle of Stuffer Joel Maxwell in writing dishonest pro-Maori articles for The Post and other Stuff papers.

“In What Maori need more than their own Parliament is a Maori Economy” (The Post Monday 10 June 2024), Guru promotes Catherine Comyn’s book The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa. (In pre-colonial times the Natives never had a concept of New Zealand as one nation, and the Maori never had called the country Aotearoa until the late 20th century.)

Roger Childs: Book Review - Who Really Broke the Treaty?

This movement (kotahitanga /mana motuhake) to break up the country, moving towards a new form of ‘indigenous’ apartheid, is spearheaded by absurd claims of special rights supposedly set down in the Treaty of Waitangi, and false stories of harm done to Maori by colonization. John Robinson

The answer to the book’s title question has huge implications for New Zealand.

Roger Childs: Anzac Day - Origins, Changes, Controversy

Anzac commemorations suited political purposes right from 1916 when the first Anzac Day marches was held in London, Australia and New Zealand, which were very much around trying to get more people to sign up to the war in 1916–1918. –Australian historian Martin Crotty

The first day of remembrance

The first Anzac Day was on 25 April 1916. This was exactly one year after New Zealand and Australian troops landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey in a joint Anglo-French invasion designed to capture Constantinople and take the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War, The first service in New Zealand, and the World, was held in the small Wairarapa town of Tinui where patriotic citizens dragged a large cross to the top of a local hill to remember the fallen.

Roger Childs: A Law unto Itself – the Waitangi Tribunal

This process (decision making by the Waitangi Tribunal) has no checks and balances, no accountability to anyone, and there is no recourse to appeal. –Piers Seed

Showing up the Tribunal for what it is

In his second history book, Christchurch writer Piers Seed provides a fascinating and highly perceptive analysis of what’s wrong with the Waitangi Tribunal process. Entitled Taonga and Contra Proferentem, the author examines how the crucial Maori word taonga has evolved from meaning “property” and all that entails, in the early 19th century. Today in making judgements on claimants’ cases, the Tribunal allows taonga to mean “anything you care to name” in the guise of the wonderfully vague word “treasure”.

Roger Childs: Across the Tasman

We definitely need a fearless media

…. in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. Edmund Burke

One of the joys of visiting Australia is their free press and independent television channels. The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age are good papers and in The Spectator they have a genuine main-stream media (MSM) right wing paper. Top New Zealand journalists - Amy Brooke and Karl du Fresne - periodically feature, telling the truth of what is really happening in the “Shaky Isles”. And NZCPR’s Muriel Newman features occasionally on Fox News providing accurate and balanced coverage on the New Zealand political scene.

Roger Childs: ‘Honour the Treaty!’ But which one?

There is only one

As readers know the so-called “Treaty in English” was recently graffitied at Te Papa. One thing I am in agreement with the protest group Te Waka Hourua on is that there is only one Treaty – Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

So why do the Waitangi Tribunal, some historians and many Maori activists claim that there is an English text of the Treaty? If there was such a thing, it would be an exact English version of the Maori text.