Category: Maori Issues
With the September 20 election less than three months away, and voters increasingly tuning into politics, we should expect to see a range of political advocacy groups promoting their causes. A particular target will be the 800,000 registered voters who failed to vote in 2011, since this voting bloc could affect the outcome of the election.
The main political news over the last week was the formal announcement of the marriage of convenience between Hone Harawira’s Mana Party and Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party. The merger of a party based on a reserved Maori seat, that claims to represent disadvantaged Maori, with a party founded by a foreign multi-millionaire fraudster, reeks of hypocrisy.
All around the country corporate iwi are moving in on local government to protect their assets and progress their power sharing 50:50 co-governance goal. Last month it was New Plymouth, where a plan to appoint six iwi representatives with full voting rights was defeated by a council vote. This month, it is Rotorua, where the Mayor has been planning to establish a new iwi board with voting rights - without the knowledge of the community.
The issue of Maori seats around Council tables has certainly come to the fore in recent years, largely as a result of the fact that with Treaty settlements coming to an end, Iwi are casting their eyes around for what other resources or political power they can now accumulate. This is in fact the case with Te Arawa right now, under the guise of improving relationships with the Rotorua District Council.
Maoridom’s elite have persuaded politicians that their genetic inheritance guarantees them superior status to all other citizens. Dressed up as bogus claims of Treaty partnership and sovereignty rights, successive governments have knowingly compromised the rule of law by granting special privileges based on superior race demands.
The Rule of Law embodies the notion that freedoms are protected not by the dicktat of any person or collection of people, but by the Law to which all, high or low born, are subject. This notion is so central to the way we order our society that it is now little discussed, and one suspects no longer widely understood. It is a safeguard of great antiquity.
An analysis of submissions to the Constitutional Advisory Panel obtained under the Official Information Act reveal a deep opposition to treaty politics that was obscured in the panel’s report to government in December.
We say not only is any suggestion that social dysfunction is a Treaty matter preposterous, but it is an admission that the multi-million dollar race-based “by-Maori, for-Maori” social service experiment - that has been operating since the eighties - is a failure and should be scrapped.
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.
Last year Peter and Diana Standen of Otaki decided to trim rotten trees in a patch of bush on their new property. As a result of their actions, the Standens, and their arborist separately, have been charged with contravening the District Plan and face up to two years in prison or a fine of $300,000 for breaches of the Resource Management Act!
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