Mike Butler: Picton tribe’s $11.7m queried

Gone are the days when New Zealanders of Maori ancestry could fax in a claim noting an historical grievance allegedly suffered and wait for the payment to arrive. One such claim has produced a settlement worth $11.7-million negotiated between the Crown and the Picton tribe, Te Atiawa Manawhenua Ki Te Tau Ihu. This deal prompted a series of questions from reader Doug Howard.

While such settlements are publicly notified by cursory press release, details can be difficult to dig out if you don’t know where to look. It is helpful for the public to know what the claim was.

Ron Smith: On Constitutions

The proposed constitution for Egypt contains a good deal of contentious material and it will be interesting to see how it fares in the referendum, scheduled for this weekend.  As readers of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research know, there are also constitutional projects afoot here in New Zealand.  There are interesting parallels between the two.

In the Egyptian case, and in the context of a ‘virtuous revolution which has unified all Egyptians’, there is an early affirmation of the object of the exercise.  This is to ‘build a modern democratic state’, in which, ‘Equality and equal opportunities are established for all citizens, men and women’.  But all is not as it seems.  As in Orwell’s celebrated story, some (animals) are more equal than others.  In this case the ‘more equal’ are specifically Islamic and masculine.  On the face of it, there is to be ‘no discrimination’ between men and women (this is in the Preamble); but what are we to make of Article 10, ‘The State shall ….enable the reconciliation between the duties of a women toward her family and her work’?  This seems clearly to envisage a restricted status for women, of a kind that, lamentably, is to be found around much of the Islamic world.  More generally, there is limited constitutional protection (and much threat) for minorities such as the Coptic Christians, and any who desire to live in a modern, secular state.

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."

Bruce Moon: Ngapuhi did cede sovereignty

A claim that Far North tribe Ngapuhi never ceded either sovereignty or government is contradicted by the fact that a number of the 27 Ngapuhi chiefs attending the greatest assembly of chiefs ever – the 1860 Kohimarama Conference – confirmed the sovereignty of the Queen.

A report commissioned by grievance specialist Titewhai Harawira and released last month claimed that that Ngapuhi did not sign away their sovereignty to the British Crown and did not cede governance to the Crown either. The report says chiefs wanted the Crown to provide a governor who would take charge of its unruly British subjects living here.

Mike Butler: Mokomoko, murder, and money

The saying "give someone an inch (and they'll take a mile)"used to mean that if you allow some people a small amount of freedom or power they will see you as weak and try to take a lot more. The Mokomoko (Restoration of Character, Mana, and Reputation) Bill that is currently winding its way through parliament shows why this saying is used.

The interesting thing about this bill is that the1992 pardon of Mokomoko, a Bay of Plenty chief executed for his role in the killing of a Lutheran minister, is now being used as evidence of a treaty breach and a basis for compensation.

Simon Cowan: Will taxes on the super-rich solve budget woes?

Governments around the world are being dragged, in some cases kicking and screaming, into doing something about their budget deficits. The difficulty is that the public will neither pay more tax nor countenance any cuts to entitlements and services. Hence, recent state budgets have been using euphemisms such as ‘efficiency dividends’ and ‘trimming the fat,’ while senior politicians rush to reassure electorates that public service job losses will not affect frontline services.

However, such cloak-and-dagger methods can take you only so far, especially if (like the United States) you’ve got a trillion-dollar hole to fill. Perhaps, the thinking goes, where dissembling fails envy might succeed. After all, everyone knows that the super-rich are rorting the tax system; all we need to do is raise their taxes so they pay ‘their fair share’ and everything will be OK, right?

Steve Baron: Fighting violence with violence

Some people smoke, others debauch themselves with alcohol, drugs and gambling; my indulgence is for cafés. I enjoy the chance to read the newspapers, to get that quick fix of caffeine and a chance to chat with all sorts of interesting people from time to time. The eternally effervescent girl with the dragon tattoo and cheeky smile always has something to say when I bump into her in the café. Something she said to me today, about a moment in her life she considered ‘not one of her finer moments’, got me thinking. We all have times like this when we make mistakes and do and say things we regret. 

Unfortunately Christmas is a time when stress levels often become elevated, dangerous situations arise and physical abuse eventuates. Oh of course he didn’t mean to do it and he promises never to do it again and after all it’s really out of character for him. Yes, its amazing how people can often justify almost anything—even murder. The abuse of women and children should never be brushed aside because these instances usually have a tendency to escalate. If a guy will hit you once, he will hit you again and it will probably be worse next time because he knows he got away with it last time.

Steve Baron: Income inequality & child poverty

I’ll be blunt and say straight up front, I’m a dirty, stinking, money loving capitalist. I’ve speculated in real estate, the stock market, even foreign currency and I've been lucky enough to do very well from it too. However, I’m also a capitalist that has a social conscience. I believe in justice, fairness and equal opportunity. That is why income inequality and child poverty concern me greatly.

I started hearing about income inequality a few years ago in the main stream media, after a book called 'The Spirit Level' was published. It was mainly left wing commentators that were banging on about it and my first thoughts were… "here we go again, rob from the rich to give to the poor, bloody socialists".

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Ritual action and the religious freedom argument

It’s not very often that Jews and Muslims present a united front, but they did so in Germany recently when a court held that the circumcision of baby boys for reasons other than medical was illegal. It’s not very often that Muslims and Christians sing from the same song-sheet either, but they did so in their submissions to the Select Committee on the Marriage Amendment Bill, when both the Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ and various Christian groups presented submissions that in some instances would have looked like carbon copies. But we are more accustomed to hearing about Muslims getting in hot water in Western countries over such things as the female veil and forced marriages. And then there were the Sydney riots. Jews too occasionally find themselves falling foul of Western norms, such as the debate over shechita (ritual animal slaughter) in NZ not long ago.

A common defence is that of the freedom of religion. But freedom of religious expression is a qualified right, not an absolute right. It does not confer any right to break the laws of the country in which one lives. As with all rights, clear legal boundaries need to be put around religious freedom. And this is where the basic problem lies: which law is to define those boundaries?

Ron Smith: Terrorist rules

A commentator on my previous posting (of 19 November) explicitly makes the argument anticipated but dismissed there, that weaker parties in these irregular wars will tend to see themselves as not bound by humanitarian law.  He says: “Having and obeying the rules of warfare tends to be something that only the strong can do. Without supporting one side or the other it is obvious that Hamas or the PLO is not militarily able to take on the IDF in the open.  To do so would be suicidal.  Were I a freedom fighter (which in their eyes they are) I’d use the means I had available and stuff the rules.” (emphasis added).

It is easy to understand the sentiment that lies behind this kind of observation, and the commentator is right to observe that Hamas cannot take on the Israeli Defence Forces in conventional conflict, with any prospect of success.  But it is a long way from this observation to justifying killing arbitrary Israeli citizens (not members of the military forces), which is the dominant Hamas tactic.  This, as noted earlier, is simply terrorism and has been universally condemned (in United Nations resolutions, international conventions and humanitarian law) and it doesn’t matter whose ‘eyes’ we are using.

Karl du Fresne: Shafted by their own council

So this is what it has come to. The Kapiti Coast District Council, according to today's Dominion Post, has identified 40 "sacred" Maori sites on which owners will not be allowed to subdivide, alter existing buildings, or disturb the land.

As I write this, I'm fervently hoping the citizens of the Kapiti Coast will be laying siege to the council offices and that the mayor, the councillors and the council functionaries (who I suspect are the real villains of the piece, because that's usually the case) will be cowering in terror in a basement panic room.

Muriel Newman: Bicultural constitution threatens race relations

As a result of MMP politics, a new ‘written’ Constitution based on the Treaty of Waitangi as superior law, may well be imposed on New Zealand. Such a bicultural constitution would enshrine Maori privilege, turning non-Maori New Zealanders into second class citizens in their own land. It would give un-elected Judges supreme power over our elected Members of Parliament, ensuring that no future Parliament could ever remove the Treaty from our constitution. New Zealand would forever be locked into a divisive race-based future.

This plan to give the Treaty of Waitangi constitutional status is being driven by the Maori Party representing the tribal elite. After the 2008 election, they not only demanded ownership rights to New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed - in return for supporting a National-led government - but they set in train a constitutional review as well.

Mike Butler: Deeds, half-truths, water rights

Waters, rivers, lakes, and streams were included in the sale and purchase of the Upper Waikato on September 15, 1864, as well as trees, minerals, and all appertaining to the land or beneath the surface, according to the deed that is freely available on a Victoria University of Wellington website. Ownership of water is the latest “gimme” demanded by the New Zealand Maori Council and was at the root of the Maori legal challenge to the government's partial asset sale that was heard at the High Court in Wellington this week.

Justice Ronald Young reserved his decision, on Wednesday, on the challenge by the New Zealand Maori Council and Waikato River tribes at the end of a three-day hearing in the High Court in Wellington, saying he would have a ruling by Christmas. The Maori Council and river tribes argued partial privatisation of energy companies Mighty River Power, Meridian, Genesis Energy and Solid Energy would compromise Maori water interests and could affect Treaty of Waitangi claims.

Mike Butler: Execution site called sacred

A spot on Auckland’s Queen St where the first Maori was executed by the British should be registered as a sacred site, says Ngapuhi leader David Rankin. A 17-year-old named Maketu was executed on the corner of Queen St and Victoria St West on March 7, 1842, the location of one of the biggest commercial buildings in New Zealand – the Phillips Fox Tower.

Rankin said: “He was a rangatira, or chief, and his execution at this spot makes it sacred to Maori – the spot where any rangatira is killed is extremely tapu”. Rankin will be seeking the support of the Auckland Council’s Maori Statutory Board in his application, to have the location officially designated as a waahi tapu.

Mike Butler: Same-sex marriage in Canada

Canada’s 10 years of same-sex civil marriage has brought restrictions on free speech, restrictions on parental rights in education, and restrictions on religious institutions, according to Bradley Miller, who is an associate professor of law at the University of Western Ontario.

When same-sex relationships became the equivalent of traditional marriage, he wrote, a new orthodoxy was adopted. Therefore, “anyone who rejects the new orthodoxy must be acting on the basis of bigotry and animus toward gays and lesbians.”

Matt Ridley: Mad Biomass Dash

Never has an undercover video sting delighted its victims more. A Greenpeace investigation has caught some Tory MPs scheming to save the countryside from wind farms and cut ordinary people's energy bills while Lib Dems, Guardian writers and Greenpeace activists defend subsidies for fat-cat capitalists and rich landowners with their snouts in the wind-farm trough. Said Tories will be inundated with fan mail.

Yet, for all the furore wind power generates, the bald truth is that it is an irrelevance. Its contribution to cutting carbon dioxide emissions is at best a statistical asterisk. As Professor Gordon Hughes, of the University of Edinburgh, has shown, if wind ever does make a significant contribution to energy capacity its intermittent nature would require a wasteful "spinning" back-up of gas-fired power stations, so it would still make no difference to emissions or might make them worse.

Richard Epstein: The Flat Tax Solution

To step back from the fiscal cliff, we need to simplify our tax policy.

This past Friday, I gave the “Presidential Address” at the Southern Economic Association (SEA) in New Orleans, on the topic of what President Obama’s reelection means for the future of liberty in the United States. As a classical liberal, my outlook is best captured in one simple proposition: a system of sound governance needs to promote a mixture of individual liberty and private property in order to allow individuals to maximize the gains from individual effort and social cooperation.

Ron Smith: A kind of terrorism

I am looking at the picture on the front page of the ‘World’ section of this week’s Weekend Herald.  It shows the vapour trails of missiles departing in the direction of Israel.  Around the picture and on the following page, there is extensive reporting of the human consequences.  You fire on your adversary from amongst the buildings of your own down-town (Gaza City, in this case) and then you protest when your adversary fires back.  What sort of nonsense is this?  And the media dutifully reports on it: “Innocents pay cruel price in conflict!”

If the people of Gaza are really concerned about this loss of innocent life, they should be protesting that their militia is firing from the cover of a civilian area, and thus exposing their civilian population to harm, when the inevitable retaliation occurs.  As a matter of fact, using civilian cover for military operations in this way, is explicitly forbidden by humanitarian law.  Both Geneva Convention No IV and the Statute of the International Criminal Court refer to utilising ‘the presence of protected persons (civilians), to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations’.

Mike Butler: Flaky Ngati Whatua report fisked

Sometimes, light-weight bleeding-heart commentary needs to be taken to task. Today, Brian Rudman of the New Zealand Herald is in the gun for his article “Joe Hawke gains victory”. A “fisking”, according to the Urban Dictionary, is where a commentator is beaten through his words, often interspersing criticisms with the original article's text. The term is named after Robert Fisk, a reporter known for anti-western writings.

Rudman: Yesterday in Parliament, the long struggle for justice, reignited by Joe Hawke and his fellow squatters in the 1970s, finally came to an end with an apology from the Crown, and ritual compensation by way of cash and land.

Mike Butler: Fudged treaty push, part 2

Here is one article that shows the meaning of the Maori text of the Treaty of Waitangi, the three exact differences between the Maori text and the so-called Littlewood Treaty as a document written by British Resident James Busby on February 4, 1840, has come to be known. By reading the official English text and the Kawharu redefined treaty, reproduced below, every reader of this article will be able to cut through a lot of the fog around the treaty.

The treaty is a three-paragraph agreement with a preamble and a post-script signed by Governor William Hobson on behalf of Queen Victoria of Great Britain and 512 chiefs at 34 locations around New Zealand between February 6 and May 21, 1840. All but 39 chiefs signed the Maori language text.