Letters: Racist all right

Don Brash

On Don Brash's advice I had a look at his Hobson's pledge website, actually www.hobsonpledge.nz- with an 's' - and yes it's racist all right.

It promulgates the continuation of the institutional racism upon which colonisation is founded, and promotes legitimacy for race-based, prejudicial, separatist- by majority rule Maori extinction and/or assimilation policies established after 1840 by Pakeha repeatedly dishonouring Te Tiriti O Waitangi.

That's when it isn't spreading contemporary misinformation and fostering unnecessary, politically-motivated racial discord and unjustified fear panic.

Brash's assertion that "New Zealand does not belong to one race. It belongs to all of us", is incompatible with his websites assertion Te Tiriti "established some important points", vis "the crown would protect the property rights of all New Zealanders", because he's referring to Pakeha private property rights, and the Crown clearly didn't protect Maori communal property rights.

Don Brash and his cronies might acquaint themselves with modern scholarship and jurisprudence and the subject of Te Tiriti, rather than re-writing history in their own privileged pakeha image. For instance, Ngapuhi scholar Manuka Henare's 2010 testimony before the Waitangi Tribunal, "that Maori who signed the treaty expected the British to help them build a state, rather than seize power".

They (chiefs) told the bishop (Pompallier) they thought of their fledging nation as a ship and wanted helmsmen to help steer it, but in signing the treaty they did not sell the ship.
In Transition from tradition to modernity, Colin James writes of the Treaty in Maori Law Review June 2013.

"It is, first, the founding document of the constitutional government, through Article 1. That is not seriously contestable now."

So why do Brash and a handful of right wing zealots continue to contest it?

Second, through Article 2, the Treaty is "the guarantor of certain rights to iwi and hapu of control of their properties and taonga and of a place in the control of some national and local resources. There is much to discuss and resolve yet in that sphere..."

Most important, the Treaty is, third, through Article 3, a guarantor of wider rights of full citizenship, both to Maori and... (non-Maori). That requires attention to cultural and other inequalities, in some cases through Article 2-type initiatives (for example whanau ora) and to the impacts of history on the capacity for citizenship".

Brash's annus horribilis, 1975 - the year of Waitangi Day and the Waitangi Day and the Waitangi tribunal - is but one milestone amid 170 years of hapu/iwi struggle, recovery and restitution from unquestionably racist governance imposed by successive waves of Pakeha settlers.

We are very much in a redress and rebuilding stage, constructing a true, uniquely Aotearoan multicultural society upon indisputably bicultural, power-sharing foundations.
The ship sailed 42 years ago Don, get on board, to paraphrase Sir James Henare: We have come too far to not go further: done too much not to do more.

WALLY HICKS
Kohukohu