Post by Kiwi Frontline on Oct 19, 2018 4:18:56 GMT 12
NGAPUHI AND THE TREATY
On Waitangi Day 2014, Prime Minister John Key, publicly offered an upfront payment in an unspecified amount to facilitate settlement of the Ngapuhi/Muriwheua Treaty grievance. The iwi has indicated it wants up to $600 million, which would eclipse all previous settlements and possibly trigger the renegotiation of some.
In dealing with any Treaty matter today, one should be mindful of the prescient words of outgoing Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe 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.”
Key’s offer to settle was presumable on advice from people who have read the Waitangi Tribunal’s Muriwhenua Report, then accepted its bogus premises without further inquiry.
The Muriwhenua Report is a 478 page doorstop riddled with assertions in search of a supporting fact. Facts that weaken Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua’s case are buried, glossed over, or omitted altogether.
In short, like all Waitangi Tribunal reports, it represents a marathon piece of special pleading on behalf of the claimants. If one has only read the Tribunal’s account of events, the catalogue of wrongs [sic] suffered by Ngapuhi/Muriewhenua seems extensive and crying out for redress.
The historical record tells a different story.
Shorn of its excess verbiage, the Muriwhenua Report mythologises assorted subgroups of Rousseauian noble savages living in peace and amity with one another, who failed to understand that in signing the Treaty of Waitangi, they were ceding sovereignty in perpetuity to the Crown. Instead, they thought they were getting a co-governance arrangement under which the Crown would exercise authority only over Europeans, and that Maori would continue to be ruled in tribal style by chiefs.
Yet the words of the chiefs on the lawn at Waitangi and elsewhere make it abundantly clear Maori were well-aware that their acceptance of Captain Hobson as Governor would place him in authority over them, and that above Hobson sat Queen Victoria.
Furthermore, these noble savages were too stupid to understand what a land sale meant, believing instead that they were granting some kind of temporary occupancy right, so as to benefit economically from the presence of white men living alongside them.
In drawing these conclusions, the Tribunal has applied a number of false premises and selectively ignored the historical record.
As usual, the principle applied by the Waitangi Tribunal in its Muriwhenua Report seems to be the one that says you can have your cake and eat it too. It accuses the Crown of not ensuring the iwi’s pre-European way of life remained intact, and on the other hand of failing to ensure that it enjoyed all the advantages of the white man’s world. Ngapuhi were entitled to keep their old hunting and fishing grounds, and to have thousands of acres set aside too for the time it would pay to go dairy farming.
Such assertions are based on Lord Normanby’s 1839 written instructions to Captain Hobson that: “The acquisition of land by the Crown for the future settlement of British subjects must be confined to such districts as the natives can alienate without distress or serious inconvenience to themselves.”
This directive was captured in the Treaty by the Article II pre-emption clause giving the Crown sole right to purchase land from Maori tribes and thus to be applied by subsequent Governors and Parliaments as they saw fit. Maori tribes were afforded the same right as any other British subject to sell land they “owned,” but were disbarred for their own protection from selling privately.
Reinterpreting the Treaty on the basis of correspondence and discussions that took place before it was signed is analogous to construing an Act of Parliament on the basis of the Select Committee Report to the House and the Parliamentary Debates that took place before it was passed and ratified. Not to put too fine a construction on it: arrant nonsense.
The Treaty of Waitangi is what its black letter clauses say that it is. There are no “principles” to be distilled out of it. To admit of this possibility is to open a Pandora’s box to anything Maori claimants might wish to demand, for as long as New Zealanders are prepared to accept European-Maori (with an ever-declining portion of Maori blood) asserting that they are “Maori” for unearned financial gain.
The Treaty’s black letter clauses are:
Article I
The Crown would henceforth be sovereign over the entire land area of New Zealand.
Article II
The Crown would guarantee to all the people of New Zealand (not just to Maori tribes) that existing private property arrangements would be respected.
Article III
As British subjects under Article I, all Maori (not just the chiefs) would enjoy all the rights and privileges of British subjects.
Another example of Tribunal revisionism is the canard that the Crown was obliged to protect the Maori way of life in its entirety. The source of this claim is a pre-Treaty korero that took place at Hokianga, where Bishop Pompallier had established a Roman Catholic mission. Primed by their spiritual advisers -- who feared that the Church of England wanted them run off -- Maori Catholics asked if the Crown, as incoming sovereign, could guarantee freedom of religion. Hobson replied that all religions, including “Maori customs,” would be protected.
Freedom of religion was captured in Article III of the Treaty, which accords individual Maori “all the rights and privileges of British subjects.”
Again, the Tribunal starts out by reinterpreting the Treaty for the benefit of the claimants on the basis of prior discussions, rather than its black letter clauses. In drawing its conclusions, the Tribunal also wilfully disconnects the Hokianga discussion from the context in which it occurred, so as to give it an unintended wider meaning considerably more favourable not just to Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua, but to any and all claimants.
With respect to land sales, even a small child knows the difference between giving something away and allowing someone to use it for a period of time. The Ngapuhi/Muriwhena chiefs knew full well the difference between a permanent alienation and a temporary occupancy right.
They were well aware that if one sold a pig or a bundle of flax to a ship’s captain or trader, accepting the trade goods offered in exchange meant it was gone for good.
The chiefs also clearly understood that a customs or berthage charge levied against a ship anchoring at the Bay of Islands conveyed just a temporary occupancy right, and that each time the ship departed and returned, a fresh impost became payable.
Nor does it seem to have eluded them a ship girl wasn’t sold, only rented.
The Tribunal itself admits that the permanent nature of pre-Treaty land sales was recorded in deeds, all written in Maori, and all stressing the permanent nature of the alienation. It then does its unsuccessful best to argue this down.
Historically, Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua had raised issues about a handful of specific land sales, all long since resolved by the Courts. These mostly related to disputes about the actual boundaries of the land sold and the exclusion of areas not intended to be included.
It is only since the Tribunal was created and empowered to measure the actions of past white settler governments against a modern-day set of Tribunal-fabricated “principles,” which those governments and Maori alive at that time had never heard of, and would have dismissed as absurd if they had, that a claim of the magnitude and impertinence of the one submitted by Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua could achieve any oxygen.
As Richard Prebble always said: “If you haven’t known about a claim for 150 years, that’s probably because it doesn’t exist.”
Anahera Herbert-Graves, chief executive at Te Runanga-a-Iwi o Ngati Kahu, told Northland Age readers on June 3 that the Crown supported the "theft of almost all of Ngati Kahu’s lands by 1865" by using "sanitised terms like pre-treaty transactions or old land claims, surplus lands, Crown grants, scrip awards and purchases."
First up, the land was sold, not “stolen.” Nor was Ngapuhi land ever confiscated like that of tribes in the centre of the North Island who’d waged war on the Crown.
Ms Herbert-Graves relies on the fact that most of her audience don’t know their own history and thus the meaning of the terms she’s using. From 1842, land claims commissioners investigated all “pre-Treaty transactions” by white settlers aka “old land claims.” If a purchase was invalid, as many were ruled to be, it was voided.
If the commissioners concluded that a purchase was made in good faith, they could validate it and award a Crown Grant of up to 4 square miles (1037 ha). But since the Governor at that time had no war chest to purchase land from Maori tribes, the Crown arbitrarily decided that if a legitimate purchase was of a greater size, the excess (or “surplus”) land would become Crown land.
And if the Crown wanted a particular parcel of such land, they’d take it from the settler who’d bought it, and give him a “scrip award” which he could use to purchase an equivalent acreage at a future Crown land sale elsewhere in the colony.
Those who got ripped off in the above process were not the original Maori sellers, but the legitimate European purchasers, who ended up with less land than they had properly paid for, or who had to wait a decade or more for replacement Crown land to become available for purchase.
Another thing John Key appears to have overlooked is that effectively admitting the full Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua claim as set out in the Muriwhenua Report -- without this matter being debated in Parliament and without any apparent awareness that the assertion sovereignty wasn’t ceded is unsustainable -- is likely to have profound and far-reaching Constitutional implications in terms of the co-governance agenda of Maori Sovereignty activists.
Key has effectively acknowledged that the Treaty created a Crown-Iwi partnership, when it in fact did nothing of the sort.
The Reverend John Warren, a Wesleyan missionary and an eyewitness to events surrounding the signing of the Treaty in Northland, wrote: "I was present at the great meeting at Waitangi when the celebrated treaty was signed, and also at a meeting which took place subsequently on the same subject at Hokianga. There was a great deal of talk by the natives, principally on the subject of securing their proprietary right in the land, and their personal liberty. Everything else they were only too happy to yield to the Queen, as they said repeatedly, because they knew they could only be saved from the rule of other nations by sitting under the shadow of the Queen of England.
“In my hearing they frequently remarked, ‘Let us be one people. We had the Gospel from England, let us have the law from England.’ My impression at the time was that the natives perfectly understood that by signing the treaty they became British subjects, and though I lived among them more than fifteen years after that event, and often conversed with them on the subject, I never saw the slightest reason to change my opinion.”
End of story, really.
ENDS
By Peter Hemmingson
On Waitangi Day 2014, Prime Minister John Key, publicly offered an upfront payment in an unspecified amount to facilitate settlement of the Ngapuhi/Muriwheua Treaty grievance. The iwi has indicated it wants up to $600 million, which would eclipse all previous settlements and possibly trigger the renegotiation of some.
In dealing with any Treaty matter today, one should be mindful of the prescient words of outgoing Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe 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.”
Key’s offer to settle was presumable on advice from people who have read the Waitangi Tribunal’s Muriwhenua Report, then accepted its bogus premises without further inquiry.
The Muriwhenua Report is a 478 page doorstop riddled with assertions in search of a supporting fact. Facts that weaken Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua’s case are buried, glossed over, or omitted altogether.
In short, like all Waitangi Tribunal reports, it represents a marathon piece of special pleading on behalf of the claimants. If one has only read the Tribunal’s account of events, the catalogue of wrongs [sic] suffered by Ngapuhi/Muriewhenua seems extensive and crying out for redress.
The historical record tells a different story.
Shorn of its excess verbiage, the Muriwhenua Report mythologises assorted subgroups of Rousseauian noble savages living in peace and amity with one another, who failed to understand that in signing the Treaty of Waitangi, they were ceding sovereignty in perpetuity to the Crown. Instead, they thought they were getting a co-governance arrangement under which the Crown would exercise authority only over Europeans, and that Maori would continue to be ruled in tribal style by chiefs.
Yet the words of the chiefs on the lawn at Waitangi and elsewhere make it abundantly clear Maori were well-aware that their acceptance of Captain Hobson as Governor would place him in authority over them, and that above Hobson sat Queen Victoria.
Furthermore, these noble savages were too stupid to understand what a land sale meant, believing instead that they were granting some kind of temporary occupancy right, so as to benefit economically from the presence of white men living alongside them.
In drawing these conclusions, the Tribunal has applied a number of false premises and selectively ignored the historical record.
As usual, the principle applied by the Waitangi Tribunal in its Muriwhenua Report seems to be the one that says you can have your cake and eat it too. It accuses the Crown of not ensuring the iwi’s pre-European way of life remained intact, and on the other hand of failing to ensure that it enjoyed all the advantages of the white man’s world. Ngapuhi were entitled to keep their old hunting and fishing grounds, and to have thousands of acres set aside too for the time it would pay to go dairy farming.
Such assertions are based on Lord Normanby’s 1839 written instructions to Captain Hobson that: “The acquisition of land by the Crown for the future settlement of British subjects must be confined to such districts as the natives can alienate without distress or serious inconvenience to themselves.”
This directive was captured in the Treaty by the Article II pre-emption clause giving the Crown sole right to purchase land from Maori tribes and thus to be applied by subsequent Governors and Parliaments as they saw fit. Maori tribes were afforded the same right as any other British subject to sell land they “owned,” but were disbarred for their own protection from selling privately.
Reinterpreting the Treaty on the basis of correspondence and discussions that took place before it was signed is analogous to construing an Act of Parliament on the basis of the Select Committee Report to the House and the Parliamentary Debates that took place before it was passed and ratified. Not to put too fine a construction on it: arrant nonsense.
The Treaty of Waitangi is what its black letter clauses say that it is. There are no “principles” to be distilled out of it. To admit of this possibility is to open a Pandora’s box to anything Maori claimants might wish to demand, for as long as New Zealanders are prepared to accept European-Maori (with an ever-declining portion of Maori blood) asserting that they are “Maori” for unearned financial gain.
The Treaty’s black letter clauses are:
Article I
The Crown would henceforth be sovereign over the entire land area of New Zealand.
Article II
The Crown would guarantee to all the people of New Zealand (not just to Maori tribes) that existing private property arrangements would be respected.
Article III
As British subjects under Article I, all Maori (not just the chiefs) would enjoy all the rights and privileges of British subjects.
Another example of Tribunal revisionism is the canard that the Crown was obliged to protect the Maori way of life in its entirety. The source of this claim is a pre-Treaty korero that took place at Hokianga, where Bishop Pompallier had established a Roman Catholic mission. Primed by their spiritual advisers -- who feared that the Church of England wanted them run off -- Maori Catholics asked if the Crown, as incoming sovereign, could guarantee freedom of religion. Hobson replied that all religions, including “Maori customs,” would be protected.
Freedom of religion was captured in Article III of the Treaty, which accords individual Maori “all the rights and privileges of British subjects.”
Again, the Tribunal starts out by reinterpreting the Treaty for the benefit of the claimants on the basis of prior discussions, rather than its black letter clauses. In drawing its conclusions, the Tribunal also wilfully disconnects the Hokianga discussion from the context in which it occurred, so as to give it an unintended wider meaning considerably more favourable not just to Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua, but to any and all claimants.
With respect to land sales, even a small child knows the difference between giving something away and allowing someone to use it for a period of time. The Ngapuhi/Muriwhena chiefs knew full well the difference between a permanent alienation and a temporary occupancy right.
They were well aware that if one sold a pig or a bundle of flax to a ship’s captain or trader, accepting the trade goods offered in exchange meant it was gone for good.
The chiefs also clearly understood that a customs or berthage charge levied against a ship anchoring at the Bay of Islands conveyed just a temporary occupancy right, and that each time the ship departed and returned, a fresh impost became payable.
Nor does it seem to have eluded them a ship girl wasn’t sold, only rented.
The Tribunal itself admits that the permanent nature of pre-Treaty land sales was recorded in deeds, all written in Maori, and all stressing the permanent nature of the alienation. It then does its unsuccessful best to argue this down.
Historically, Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua had raised issues about a handful of specific land sales, all long since resolved by the Courts. These mostly related to disputes about the actual boundaries of the land sold and the exclusion of areas not intended to be included.
It is only since the Tribunal was created and empowered to measure the actions of past white settler governments against a modern-day set of Tribunal-fabricated “principles,” which those governments and Maori alive at that time had never heard of, and would have dismissed as absurd if they had, that a claim of the magnitude and impertinence of the one submitted by Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua could achieve any oxygen.
As Richard Prebble always said: “If you haven’t known about a claim for 150 years, that’s probably because it doesn’t exist.”
Anahera Herbert-Graves, chief executive at Te Runanga-a-Iwi o Ngati Kahu, told Northland Age readers on June 3 that the Crown supported the "theft of almost all of Ngati Kahu’s lands by 1865" by using "sanitised terms like pre-treaty transactions or old land claims, surplus lands, Crown grants, scrip awards and purchases."
First up, the land was sold, not “stolen.” Nor was Ngapuhi land ever confiscated like that of tribes in the centre of the North Island who’d waged war on the Crown.
Ms Herbert-Graves relies on the fact that most of her audience don’t know their own history and thus the meaning of the terms she’s using. From 1842, land claims commissioners investigated all “pre-Treaty transactions” by white settlers aka “old land claims.” If a purchase was invalid, as many were ruled to be, it was voided.
If the commissioners concluded that a purchase was made in good faith, they could validate it and award a Crown Grant of up to 4 square miles (1037 ha). But since the Governor at that time had no war chest to purchase land from Maori tribes, the Crown arbitrarily decided that if a legitimate purchase was of a greater size, the excess (or “surplus”) land would become Crown land.
And if the Crown wanted a particular parcel of such land, they’d take it from the settler who’d bought it, and give him a “scrip award” which he could use to purchase an equivalent acreage at a future Crown land sale elsewhere in the colony.
Those who got ripped off in the above process were not the original Maori sellers, but the legitimate European purchasers, who ended up with less land than they had properly paid for, or who had to wait a decade or more for replacement Crown land to become available for purchase.
Another thing John Key appears to have overlooked is that effectively admitting the full Ngapuhi/Muriwhenua claim as set out in the Muriwhenua Report -- without this matter being debated in Parliament and without any apparent awareness that the assertion sovereignty wasn’t ceded is unsustainable -- is likely to have profound and far-reaching Constitutional implications in terms of the co-governance agenda of Maori Sovereignty activists.
Key has effectively acknowledged that the Treaty created a Crown-Iwi partnership, when it in fact did nothing of the sort.
The Reverend John Warren, a Wesleyan missionary and an eyewitness to events surrounding the signing of the Treaty in Northland, wrote: "I was present at the great meeting at Waitangi when the celebrated treaty was signed, and also at a meeting which took place subsequently on the same subject at Hokianga. There was a great deal of talk by the natives, principally on the subject of securing their proprietary right in the land, and their personal liberty. Everything else they were only too happy to yield to the Queen, as they said repeatedly, because they knew they could only be saved from the rule of other nations by sitting under the shadow of the Queen of England.
“In my hearing they frequently remarked, ‘Let us be one people. We had the Gospel from England, let us have the law from England.’ My impression at the time was that the natives perfectly understood that by signing the treaty they became British subjects, and though I lived among them more than fifteen years after that event, and often conversed with them on the subject, I never saw the slightest reason to change my opinion.”
End of story, really.
ENDS
By Peter Hemmingson