Barrie Davis: Global Women

An article in the Sunday Star-Times, “Global Women adds Treaty bill to heavy workload” by Dita De Boni, 29 September (here), makes two specious claims which I shall critique. I will first show that Global Women is irrational and second that it is mistaken in its two main claims.

The article introduces Global Women as a group of influential and high powered political and business women representing diversity and inclusion in New Zealand. They had a hui at Waitangi in June of this year and according to the article “they came away from the event more determined than ever to f... shit up”. Let’s take a peek at how they intend to do that.

Professor Ananish Chaudhuri: Debate around ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill essential for a multi-ethnic nation

I support the Treaty Principles Bill introduced by ACT. I believe the debate around this bill is fundamentally important if New Zealand is to remain a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nation.

Here is the way I see it. While I fully acknowledge the discrepancies between the Maori and English versions of Te Tiriti Waitangi, the debate on whether Maori ceded sovereignty to the British Crown is sublimated by a long list of subsequent acts (and laws) that hold New Zealand to be an independent sovereign state. Parliamentary sovereignty has long been considered a foundational constitutional rule.

Ele Ludemann: Stopping debate won’t stop division

Reasons both for and against the Bill to define the Treaty principles vary in their worth.

One of the worst against it is that it will cause division.

Damien Grant: Church leaders wrong over Treaty debate risks

The proposition to be assessed; The sun is the centre of the world and completely devoid of motion. On one side we have the troublesome Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. On the other was a commission of the most respected theologians in the Catholic Church; the Qualifiers.

Their conclusion? You know their conclusion. “ All said that this proposition is foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts many places the sense of Holy Scripture…”

Barrie Davis: The Revised Treaty Principles Bill

The ACT Party Treaty Principles Bill promising equality for all New Zealanders has been eagerly anticipated by some. It has been suppressed by the National Party and New Zealand first, and vilified in the press which is always a good sign. But then it went terribly wrong and reinstated exclusive race based privileges – or institutionalized racism as I prefer to call it. What can we do to correct the problem?

Chris Trotter: Judge Not.

FOUR HUNDRED AND FORTY men and women professing the Christian faith would appear to have imperilled their immortal souls. The second of the Ten Commandments could hardly be clearer: Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image. And yet, in their open letter to the nation’s legislators, these 440 clerics have made it equally clear that, by their adoration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, idolatry is precisely what they are guilty of. Worse still, by publicly bowing down before te Tiriti, and serving it so aggressively, they have called down upon their heads the wrath of a self-confessed “Jealous God”, whose punishments extend – even unto the fourth generation.

Then again, citing the Old Testament probably cuts little ice with these Christians. They do, after all, introduce their attack on Act leader David Seymour’s, Treaty Principles Bill with a quote from the Gospel of Matthew:

John Porter: Does no-one care?

Does no-one care that a minority of our population is being supported, encouraged and abetted by publicly elected politicians and public servants in their quest to impose tribal rule in New Zealand?

Does no-one care that, arguably, one of the world’s best ways of life is being ruined? Ruined for all people of New Zealand.

Does no-one care that one of the world longest existing democracies is being undermined and eroded at an ever-increasing speed?

It certainly seems like it to me. 

Ele Ludemann: Why fear debate?

Even before the draft Bill seeking a referendum on the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi was made public critics were calling for it to be scrapped.

One of the reasons for given for stopping the Bill before it started was that Act which is behind it, got such a small proportion of the vote.

That is irrelevant. Act is part of the coalition government, it campaigned on this policy and won the support to take it to a first reading in coalition negotiations.

JC: Our Rights Must Be Protected

Since Covid appeared, democracy seems to be increasingly the domain of the right.

Since the arrival of the Covid pandemic there appears to have been a marked erosion in Western democracies of citizens’ rights. Governments in power at the time, particularly those on the left, appeared to seize it as an opportunity to create an experiment to force ideology upon us to see how much we were prepared to put up with. Leading the pack was our very own Jacinda Ardern, along with her partners in crime Justin Trudeau and other likeminded leaders.

Sean Plunket: National weak on Treaty issues.

Sean Plunket talks about National's woke stance on Treaty issues and in particular the Treaty Principles Bill on The Platform

Click to view

Peter Williams: Waitangi Tribunal Report Predictable

Seymour's courageous but who will support him?

That the Waitangi Tribunal was highly critical of the Act party’s proposed, although currently undrafted, Treaty Principles Bill was as predictable as the sun rising in the east.

The timing is not surprising either. The Tribunal has become an extraordinarily political body, one that in this instance has deliberately set out to fire many shots across the bow not just of Act, but of the entire governing Coalition before the Bill is presented to parliament in November.

Dr Peter Winsley: Tikanga, law and information asymmetry

Justice Joe Williams in his 2013 paper Lex Aoteoroa made a case for Māori tikanga being recognized as New Zealand’s “first law”. Tikanga existed prior to New Zealand’s development of a legal system based on the British model. Without written language pre-European Māori tikanga is not well documented. However, its customs and norms governed, for example, relationships between people and the environment, property ownership, and conflict resolution.