Category: Maori Issues
One unchanging political reality is that review panels are set up to get the outcomes of the interested party. I suggest that the current constitutional advisory panel has been carefully set up with focussed terms of reference, and carefully vetted panel members, to achieve the Maori Party goal of ensuring that the review gives effect to the treaty, and entrenching separate Maori seats.
There is a growing consensus amongst western leaders that policies and practices that divide citizens along ethnic and cultural lines are immensely damaging to societies and nations. British Prime Minister David Cameron, along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and former Prime Ministers - John Howard of Australia, Jose Aznar of Spain, and Yves Leterme of Belgium - have all condemned multiculturalism as a failed policy that undermines national identity, promoting separatism and extremism
I have been thinking about ‘culture’, my friends, and am trying to get a handle on this most important matter. Culture is jolly important. We hear a lot about Maori culture, and hear all the time that we are a ‘bicultural nation’, although this is of course disputed by those who insist that we are actually multicultural.
A half page advertisement promoting our Citizens Initiated Referendum (CIR) to restore Crown ownership of the foreshore and seabed will appear in community newspapers throughout the country this week. The ad asks those people who believe that our coastline out to the 22km edge of the Territorial Sea belongs to all New Zealanders equally regardless of race, to sign our petition for a nation-wide referendum. If we can gather the support of 320,000 registered voters by the end of June, this will become only the fifth CIR petition to ever succeed in triggering a citizens’ referendum.
The Coastal Coalition was set up in May 2010 to support public ownership of New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed, for all New Zealanders. But John Key with Maori Party support, passed the Marine and Coastal Area Act last April. This removes Crown ownership, and allows iwi Customary Marine Title, in spite of 90 percent of public submissions opposing it.
By agreeing to the Maori Party’s demand for a Constitutional Review, as part of their 2008 and 2011 Confidence and Supply Agreements, the National Party is advancing the agenda of radical forces determined to change our constitutional arrangements in their favour. Their goal is to elevate the Treaty of Waitangi into ‘supreme’ law to give tribal members superior rights and privileges that would forever be outside the reach of elected Members of Parliament who might want to change it in the future.
Control over the interpretation and symbolism of the Treaty of Waitangi was one of the most effective of the brokerage mechanisms used by the emergent neotribal elite. It enabled a strategic march through the institutions of a democratic society by nondemocratic neotraditionalist forces.
The matter of children and the benefit system has long concerned me. It began with the death of Wairarapa toddler Lillybing (Hinewaoriki Karaitiana-Matiaha) in 2000....
Revelations that the Maori Council has lodged a new Waitangi Tribunal claim for the ownership of the country’s fresh water supplies has been greeted with widespread concern. At a time when no new historic Treaty grievances are meant to be able to be lodged, the public are asking whether such claims will ever stop.
The Waitangi Tribunal claims just announced by the New Zealand Maori Council are unapologetically an attempt at legal mugging. Though purportedly based on the deep wounds Maoridom will feel if SOE shares are sold before the ownership of water is settled, the NZMC has made it plain that they will go away if they get some soothing free shares. The claims have little apparent legal merit. But on form to date I predict a reasonable chance they will succeed in levering shares out of an easy-touch government.
Loading ...
