He māngai o ngā whairawa whakahihi a David Seymour - David Seymour is a spokesman for the rich.
Act leader David Seymour is a mouthpiece for wealth and arrogance.
His vision of New Zealand begins in the present, as though there were no past. It is a handicap race for wealth in which the disadvantaged are weighted down and the already wealthy carry no handicap. Those advantaged by intergenerational wealth and therefore superior education are bound to win.
Seymour is the voice of those who voted for the acts of enclosure. He has no time for the commons and pushes individual property ownership relentlessly, failing to acknowledge that Polynesian land ownership was - and still is in many cases - communal.
That’s because he is also the voice for assimilation.
He repeats endlessly the notion that democracy is the only successful form of government, implying that honouring the Treaty would bring about some form of communism.
In this he is a spokesman for the tyranny of the majority, blind to that majority being the result of repeated Treaty breaches and uncontrolled Pākehā immigration.
For instance, Ngāi Tūhoe never signed the Treaty, yet their best, most fertile land was seized on tenuous grounds by the Crown. If you haven’t done so, read the Tūhoe settlement. They can never be compensated for what happened.
Seymour fails to acknowledge such injustices, in fact, he appears to ignore history almost entirely.
But the inconvenient fact is that hardly any iwi signed the English version of the Treaty, in which Māori surrendered tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty) to the English Crown.
Seymour’s plan is to entrench the English version in law and to reinterpret tino rangatiratanga as “individual rights”.
James Mahoney.
His is a vision without those things that have made New Zealand - among them manaakitanga (hospitality, respect), whanaungatanga (kinship) and kotahitanga (unity).
It is a vision of a level playing field - levelled by bulldozing the smaller side which has been made smaller by stealth and brutality. Honour the Treaty.
PS, wake up David, you’re not in England. Who says forms of co-governance won’t work?
James Mahoney is Ngāti Pākeha who speaks te reo, and is an award-winning journalist who retired to Waiheke Island, where he drives a taxi.
