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”.

Mike Butler: Tribunal’s wobbly house of cards

Forty years of Waitangi Tribunal decisions have been built on a “very wobbly” house of cards, according to Piers Seed in his new book Taonga and Contra Proferentem – thoughts on the Waitangi Tribunal Process.

With a Bachelor of Engineering in electronics, this is the second book in which Seed applies the disciplines of the hard sciences to what passes as history in New Zealand.

Two years ago, he used such analysis to debunk myths around the clash between government troops and insurgents at Rangiaowhia on February 21, 1864, in Hoani’s Last Stand.

Seed’s new book shows that the Waitangi Tribunal has built its empire on a word and a concept to create its wobbly house of cards.