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NZCPR CAMPAIGNS
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David Round
To speak of the Waitangi Tribunal’s agenda is no exaggeration. It is now nothing but a grandly-titled taxpayer-funded Maori lobby group, whose continued existence is increasingly perilous to the country and indefensible on any rational grounds.
Privilege! If there is one thing we all hate, it is privilege. Especially if it is unearned privilege, although even earned privilege may irritate.
This book contains a dozen essays on aspects of Treaty of Waitangi settlements. The fourteen contributors are all, in one sense anyway, eminently qualified to write on the subject. This book is a political tract masquerading as an academic treatise.
Equality, more than anything else, has always been our country’s ruling principle. But there was no more to the Treaty than that. No equality of Maori and the Crown in governing our country was envisaged. Partnership is an obvious absurdity. The Queen’s subjects cannot be her partners.
"A House Divided" is a new report by the Independent Constitutional Review Panel, that examines New Zealand's constitutional arrangements, and highlights the threat to race relations posed by the Maori Party's constitutional conversation. We urge every concerned New Zealander to read our report.
We write this open letter to you to express our dismay at recent remarks by Sir Tipene O’Regan, the co-chair of your government’s Constitutional Advisory Panel, as reported in the Otago Daily Times, and to ask what your attitude can be to an official panel which displays the predetermination and partiality which a good number of panel members clearly hold.
A constitution is an agreement which a people has about some fundamental things ~ about how they are to be governed, and the principles on which they base their government and society.There has to be agreement ~ and the very fact that we are holding this debate is proof that the Treaty and its so-called principles should not be in our constitution, because on that matter there is no agreement.
New Zealand’s constitution is working perfectly adequately. Nothing is broken; nothing requires fixing. But the government, at the Maori Party’s behest, established a ‘Constitutional Advisory Panel’ to consider (as well as a number of obvious political non-starters) ‘the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in our constitution, and how our legal and political systems can reflect tikanga Maori’
The latest round of full and final settlements was supposed to put an end to racial issues and let us get on with the serious business of living together and surviving as one people, planning for the future. At the very least, the settlements should surely have given us a breathing space of a few years, before our local Mafiosi turned up again for the next instalment of the protection money. But no.
Christmas and New Year! It is a time for relaxation and celebration; a time, too, to reflect on the past year, and wonder about and plan for the days to come. So let us gaze, if not into a crystal ball, at least into the clouds of the future. Perhaps through the clouds we may glimpse the land below occasionally, and sense, however haphazardly, the terrain that awaits us. When I last wrote I imagined the easy steps by which, if we did not rapidly acquire some gumption, we could have a written Treatyist constitution imposed on us without our consent. Let us go further today. Once we had been saddled with such a burden, what would that mean for New Zealand?
