ONE LAW FOR ALL

In the lead up to the 2014 election campaign, certain political parties are again calling for the removal of all race-based legal privileges which have historically advantaged Maori and made us the contemporary envy of all those who cry, “One Law for All!”

Ironically, we back that call 100%.  For example, why shouldn't all other races in this country get the same historical privileging that Maori got under the 1847 Education Ordinance whereby ours is still the only race in this country to have had our children forced to learn in a ‘foreign’ language in order to receive less government education subsidies than their English counterparts.  Let everyone, regardless of race, experience that historical privilege and its contemporary legacy.

There’s more.  Why should ours be the only race in this nation to have enjoyed, under the Maori Prisoners Trials Act 1879 and the Maori Prisoners Detention Act 1880, the historical privileging of being indefinitely imprisoned without trial?  The impact of those legal privileges continues to resonate to this day.  Would it not be fair to ensure all other races get to enjoy how it feels?

Maori are also happy to forego our historical privileging as the only race, under the Crown and Native Lands Rating Act 1882, to have had all our lands within five miles of a road specially rated to build more roads that we didn’t ask for, want or use?  All land owners in these shaky isles should be similarly privileged under their own specially named race-based laws.

And why should only Maori have been historically privileged, under the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1967, to have had large tracts of our remaining lands declared ‘uneconomic’ and compulsorily converted into Crown land?  That’s another privilege to which every race should have equal access.

It’s not just historical privileging Maori are happy to relinquish.  One contemporary race-based legal privilege we’re keen to share is that of being legally limited to selling our lands to ‘preferred classes of alienees’ as per Te Ture Whenua Maori Act 1993. 

We’re also happy to share the race-based legal privilege we enjoy, under the Treaty of Waitangi Act, of getting a maximum of 3% of the value of our stolen property returned to us.  And we especially urge the removal of all laws privileging us as the only race in New Zealand able to receive exactly $0 in compensation for our stolen property.  Why wouldn’t every property owner in this fair land want to enjoy these, as well as a myriad of other similar race-based legal privileges? 

 

All irony aside, at the core of the 1law4all call is a marrow-deep terror amongst its inventors that, as Maori rise from beneath their colonising thumb, we will have the power to do to them what they did to us.

I think they fear that even more than they fear the boogieman of contemporary Chinese colonisation and what that might mean for them in terms of ‘one law for all.’

BE ALERT

Kia mataara is the call to be alert, especially in times of danger.  The big āwhā last month was one of those times.

Although Ngāti Kahu came through without any drownings, deaths or major injuries amongst our own, with more bad weather forecast for this month, we’re reminding everyone to stay alert and get ready.

KAI AND WAI:  Have enough non-perishables like canned or powdered goods, rice and pasta to feed everyone in the whare for at least three to four days.  Every time you empty any 3 litre bottle of milk, juice or even bleach, scrub it out, fill with water and store it.  And if you know there's a big blow coming, fill the bath so you can use it like an inside tank.

MAHANA AND MAROKE:  Even though we live in Te Hiku, we should have a stock of warm blankets, gloves, mittens, socks, beanies, hoodies, raincoats, oilskins and gumboots. 

TAONGIA AND TĀMAHANA:  A generator is handy to have, but a fireplace with a grill or a wood stove and plenty of wood are ideal in a power cut.  Otherwise a camping stove, BBQ or primus will do.  But make sure there’s plenty of ventilation to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning, and have plenty of backup gas and waterproof matches handy.  Don't just rely on lighters.

WHAKAWHITIWHITI KORERO AND WHAKAPIRIPIRI:  Stay in touch with what’s going on by having a battery or motion operated radio in the whare, or a cellphone with cord and car charger.  Also, know where everyone is and agree how to get in touch if you’re separated, like a text every twelve hours, or a prearranged meeting place.  And take special care of our kuia kaumātua, tamariki mokopuna.

RONGOA AND KOPE:  If anyone in the whānau is on prescription medicines, have enough to last a few days and keep them in a container with at least a sharp pair of scissors, a pair of tweezers, sterile bandages, disinfectant, antibiotic ointment, and over-the-counter painkillers. Also have a supply of anything else vital to your particular whānau like nappies and sanitary supplies. 

NGĀMAHI AND NGAHAU:  Have things to do that stop the whanau from going pōrangi with boredom; a deck of playing cards, board games, books, mahi toi, handcrafts.  Use the time to kōrero, write, draw, plan a future event or just stay in bed and chill.  Engari kia tūpato; it’s no accident that the birth rate often goes up nine months after an emergency. 

WHATINGA AND WHAKAORA:  In case you do have to leave in a hurry, make sure your waka is full of gas.  And make sure you have tools on hand to help you leave, like a shovel in the boot to dig yourself or others out at any time. 

NGĀ MEA ERA ATU:  After any emergency is over, check your whānau whanui, whare and whenua for any damage, fix what you can, call in help for what you can’t, then restock your supplies.

Runga ake i ngā wā katoa, kia mataara.

POLLS AND PUNDITS

Last week I looked at how pollsters try to get a representative sample of the population so they can more accurately gauge how the wider population might vote in the upcoming general election.  This week I’ll try to demystify ‘margins of error’ in a poll by looking at the latest one.

Released just two days ago on Sunday 27^th July, the latest ONE News/Colmar Brunton poll reckons that National is still out on its own and has climbed to 52%, while Labour has dropped, they're down to 28%, as have the Greens who are down to 10%.  It also reckons that New Zealand First is steady on 4% as is Internet/MANA on 2%, while the Conservatives have risen to 2%.  And at the tail end ACT is steady on 1%, while the Maori Party have dropped to 1%. 

Do the math and that all adds up to a neat 100% of the representative sample, which in this poll was 1000 eligible voters who live in a house with a landline phone. 

Straightaway we can see that these mainstream polls are practically meaningless for many, if not most, Maori; especially the majority aged between 18 and 25.  Land lines? Pfft. 

Engari, even if those little peccadillos mean nothing to eligible Pakeha voters over 25 years of age, they might still want to know – how accurate is the poll?  This is where the margin of error comes in.

This latest poll took place last week from Saturday 19^th to Wednesday 23^rd July, and it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1% at 95% accuracy.   

Simply put, 95% accuracy with a 3.1% margin of error means that if the same poll was conducted again a number of times during that same period, but with a different 1000 people, Colmar Brunton reckons that 95% of the time the results would be the same – plus or minus 3.1%. 

That also means the initial 52% support for National could be anywhere between 48.9% and 55.1% in subsequent polls.  That will be no comfort to Labour whose initial 28% could be anywhere between 24.9% and 31.1%, which is still not enough to cobble together any kind of government at all. 

Most mainstream pundits are doling out predictions of a National win, backed by Labour’s poor polling.  But our own pundits see it differently.  As one of our whanau from Te Paatu puts it – "only 2 wite guyz repping 4 us – 1 whairawa-as 1 pohara-as lol."  

Straightaway every Maori knows which two ‘guyz’ she’s talking about, and their names aren’t John or David.

So in summary, for Maori the mainstream polls mainly exist to give us an indication of how the majority of non-Maori people might vote.  They also give the mainstream media something to talk about.

However, ultimately, the important thing for all of us in this particular game is to enrol, then vote by ticking our preferred candidate and party.  We can do that, regardless of what either the polls or the pundits might say.

POLLS DON'T TELL THE REAL STORY

“Public opinion polls,” said J B Priestley, “are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing.” 

Love or hate them, the odds are that you will remember having heard about at least one, if not all, of these polls in recent times; One News Colmar Brunton, 3 News Reid Research, Herald-Digipoll, Fairfax Media Ipsos, Roy Morgan Research.  Ring a bell with you?  That’s because in New Zealand these are the big five, and they’ve been polling weekly since the 2011 election on everything from Party Vote to Preferred Prime Minister. 

But how accurate are they, and how much faith should Maori put in them? 

When done right, political polling is a social science with strict rules about representative sample size, random selection of participants and margins of error. 

It isn't always so scientific of course.  A straw poll alludes to the ancient farming practice of tossing straw in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.  Such polls are run regularly by different media, including this newspaper.  They give a very rough idea of which way the wind of public opinion is blowing on an issue. 

However the big five polling companies in New Zealand use mathematical methods and computer analysis to get the most representative sample of the New Zealand voting public they can get, in order to gauge the political opinion of the entire country.  That means the sample group has to represent the larger population and has to be selected as randomly as possible.

The most popular method for doing that is through random digit dialing (RDD) using a continually updated database of all listed landline numbers in the country.  Engari, if pollsters only called the numbers in the database, then they'd exclude all unlisted numbers, which would muck up the randomness of the sample. So they also programme their computers to randomly dial every possible number combination of all area codes, exchanges and numbers in active use.

To randomise the sample even further, pollsters not only dial random numbers, they also try to choose random respondents. To do that they may ask to speak to the voting-aged member in the whare with the most recent birthday. 

Next week we’ll cut through some of the mystery around ‘margins of error’ in polls.

In the meantime, if you are one of those (un)fortunate enough to be called by a pollster, you no longer have to wonder how they got your number.  But you might want to keep in mind that there is always a ‘but’ to these polls. 

For example, they include landline numbers, but exclude mobiles; so much for representativeness.  And as Helen Clark and the last Labour Government can attest, the polls can be devastatingly accurate.  But as Iwi Insiders, Ipurangi MANA and Winitana know, the ‘polls don’t tell the real story.”

DO WHAT IS RIGHT

Do what is right, the shackles are falling,

Chains of the bondsman no longer are bright.

Lightened by hope soon they’ll cease to be galling,

Truth goeth onward, then do what is right.

This hymn always reminds me of our beloved kaumatua, McCully Matiu, who in 1984 lodged the first Ngāti Kahu claim in the Waitangi Tribunal. In 1986 the fisheries part of his and other Te Hiku o Te Ika claims were heard, and the Tribunal upheld them all in 1988.

Between 1990 and 1994 the lands part of McCully’s claim up to 1865 was heard along with others for the period. The Tribunal upheld them in 1997 indicating that they would make binding recommendations for the transfer of lands and compensation.

McCully passed away in 2001 after leading Ngāti Kahu for more than 40 years. Since then we have returned to the Tribunal twice to have that body implement the recommendations it made in respect of his claims.

To date the Tribunal has refused to exercise its powers. Instead it has urged the Government as the representative of the Crown to restore its honour by putting right the harm it has caused to Ngāti Kahu. In 2013 it went as far as providing lengthy and detailed listings of some of the stolen lands and assets the Government should relinquish as a partial settlement.

Shortly before he died McCully reminded us that the only way to hold on to our lands and put right the thefts committed against us by those acting under the authority of the English Crown was for us to do what is right.

Doing what is right includes giving the Crown every opportunity to atone for its crimes against Ngāti Kahu so that it can restore its honour. Only then will it be in a position to enter into a process of reconciliation with us.

True and meaningful reconciliation will take time, and it will necessarily involve cultural and constitutional transformations alongside the attitudinal changes. That includes changing the current English and western European orientation of the Government’s thinking into a more logical and appropriate Māori and Pacific thinking to reflect the fact that we all live in the Pacific, not Europe.

My generation has now worked steadily for more than thirty years towards true and meaningful reconciliation, and the next generation has worked alongside us in the same way we worked with our kaumatua. 

To date representatives of the Government have been unwilling to embark in any sustained way on the journey towards restoring the Crown’s honour.  In fact quite the opposite.

Nevertheless we say to our rangatahi, as McCully often and cheerfully said to us, “Haere tōnū. Mahia ngā mahi i runga i te tika me te pono, e kore koe e hē.”  In other words;

Do what is right let the consequence follow,

Battle for freedom in spirit and might.

And with stout heart look ye forth till tomorrow,

God will protect you; then do what is right.

4TH OF JULY

Mataariki is for me a great season, not least because it includes my own birthday.  It also includes the 4^th of July which is the anniversary of the successful escape of 300 souls, led by Te Kooti Arikirangi Turuki, from Wharekauri where the government had imprisoned them for the crime of fighting for their whenua and their mana motuhake. 

This year I was invited to spend the 4^th of July up at Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Rangianiwaniwa to commemorate its 21^st anniversary and to tell the Board, the faculty and the student body what Ngati Kahu want for the future, in terms of the education of our tamariki.  Here is what I said.

We want our children to be self-aware; both as individuals and as a part of our collective Ngati Kahu whakapapa and history.  When they are self-aware, they will understand themselves, and that awareness will help them understand the people around them. 

Teach them the power of paradox.  For example, your Kura is built on land stolen from the Popata whanau of Ngai Tohianga and from Kataraina Matenga of Patu Koraha and her Tarara husband Ante Erstich.  The power of this particular paradox is that from the unrectified thefts of the Government and its allies, Ngati Kahu may still manage to squeeze some good.

Help our children to learn that there is no genuine safety in numbers.  They are not a sheep running away from a wolf, they are Ngati Kahu.  As such they need to know that in the long run it’s always safer to stand alone in truth rather than try to hide in a crowd of liars.

Ngati Kahu children must understand that there is just as much honour in being on the edge of the universe as there is in being at its centre.  While it is true that without the centre, the universe might go who knows where, it is also true that without the edges, there is no centre.  Teach them that in many ways the identity and role of Ngati Kahu is based on that truth.

Ngati Kahu want our children to be taught to recognise the defining moments of their lives, because these are what will shape them and the choices they make.  Some of those moments will have already happened, others have yet to arrive, but it is only the self-aware who will recognise them for what they are. 

One thing more I should have said; if it doesn’t already have them within its library, the Kura must get copies (written, audio and video) of every piece of evidence given by Ngati Kahu to the Waitangi Tribunal.

In the end, we don’t mind what our tamariki choose to do, as long as they learn and grow the specific strengths that will support, advance and uphold te mana motukahe o Ngati Kahu. 

Hari huritau ki Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Rangianiwaniwa.  Hari Mataariki kia tatou katoa.  And happy 4^th of July to the descendants of Te Kooti.  He wasn’t Ngati Kahu, but he could have been.

ON THE GROUND

Given it had failed to militarily conquer our tupuna and that hardly any of its immigrant subjects were living on the ground during the period 1840 – 1865, how did the Government get away with stealing more than 302,000 acres from the hapu of Ngati Kahu before 1865?

The answer lies in the fact that during that period, and for some time after, our tupuna simply did not know their lands had been stolen.  Why would they have?  On the ground, nothing changed.  Their land was still being jointly used as per the law of tuku whenua; there was nothing to show that so-called ‘scrip’ or ‘surplus land’ existed; and there was no evidence that either those lands or the so-called ‘Crown grant’ and ‘Crown purchase’ lands had passed to anyone else. 

In fact it was not until decades later that the full scale of Government deceit and thievery was realised on the ground by Ngati Kahu, at which point the fight back began.  To illustrate, we will consider just one case this week.

Tangonge was part of the Ōtararau pre-treaty tuku whenua. Te Paatu whanau lived there as did whanau from Te Uri o Hina and Patu Koraha.  In 1857, Joseph Matthews, who had a Governor’s piece of paper for the Kaitaia tuku whenua, acknowledged that Tangonge was theirs exclusively and estimated the area to be a rather small 685 acres.

Regardless of Matthews’ support for the whanau living there, the Government stole Tangonge anyway, using the ‘surplus land’ technique.  But nothing happened on the ground to cause the whanau to think this land was no longer theirs.

It wasn’t until 1890 (after it was zoned as a Kauri gum reserve) that they found out the Government had stolen it when Timoti Te Ripi, believing it was still Māori land, demanded royalties for the gum extraction and was told the land belonged to the Government.

Te Ripi and 23 others immediately petitioned Parliament, but no hearing was granted.  However they did not give up.  Four more petitions followed and finally, in 1907, the Houston Commission investigated and reported that “otherwise landless” Maori were still living there, and urged the government to make the land available to them.

But the Government stalled and instead referred the matter to two further commissions (McCormack in 1925 and Sim in 1927), neither of which was privy to evidence that the Kaitāia tuku whenua had only been affirmed by the hapu on the condition that Tangonge remained theirs exclusively.

In any event neither of those Commissions resolved the matter and the Government declared it owned Tangonge.  Te Paatu resisted that theft longer than all others, and still does. 

It was not until the late 1960s, more than a century after its theft, that the Government physically forced the last seven Te Paatu families off Tangonge.  

The children of those families are still alive, and they have taught their uri how to fight back and to never give up until they are once again standing on the ground. 

A TSUNAMI OF THEFT

After 1856 the Government was no longer able to get away with simply writing ‘Crown grant’ and ‘scrip’ lies on pieces of paper to steal Ngati Kahu lands for its favoured citizens.  Nor was it able to maintain the practice of merely declaring our lands to be ‘surplus’ in order to steal them for later disposal.  So it came up with a new theft mechanism euphemistically called ‘Crown purchases’.

In reality ‘Crown purchases’ were only a variation on the ‘scrip’ and ‘surplus land’ theft techniques in that, for the first time, the Government actually paid token amounts of money to try and disguise its crimes as ‘sales’.  As such, Ngati Kahu refer to this money as guilt money, even though often as not it was paid to the wrong people, or never paid at all.  Either way it confirmed the mana whenua of our hapu and recognised that we, and not the Crown, owned our lands. 

The sheer scale of ‘Crown purchase’ thefts from Ngati Kahu cannot be covered in one column, so we will consider only one such series which took place between 1862 to 1865 when the Government went after the fertile Mangataiore/Victoria Valley and adjacent area; lands that belong to Ngati Taranga, Te Paatu, Pikaahu and Matakairiri.

It began in 1862 with the Mangatete south block of 11,125 acres.  The guilt money was just £509. Only four reserves were set aside for Ngati Kahu: Ōtarapoko (206 acres), Whiwhero (178 acres), Hauturu (144 acres) and Te Rangirangina (176 acres). Apart from tiny remnants, all four had also been stolen by 1947.

Maungataniwha East, an area of 8,649 acres, was also stolen in 1862 with guilt money of £388. Four small blocks, Ahitahi, Ōtaharoa, Haumapu and Te Awapuku, were acknowledged as exclusively for the hapū but were not formally reserved, and all of them were later stolen between 1867 and 1885. 

Maungataniwha West No 1, an area of 12,940 acres, was stolen in 1863. The guilt money was £647. An area of 1,130 acres was cut out as the Pēria block, and 566 acres of that was also later stolen.

Maungataniwha West No 2, an area of 11,002 acres, was also stolen in 1863. The guilt money was £560. There were two reserves: Tāheke (79 acres), which was later stolen in 1877, and Mangataiore (381 acres), 191 acres of which were also later stolen.

Taunoke, an area of 44 acres, was stolen in 1864. The guilt money was £5.

Kaiaka, an area of 7,367 acres was stolen in 1865.  The guilt money was £1,114. The four reserves, Tāheke, Te Hororoa, Whakapapa and Waimamaku, were all stolen by 1941. 

By 1865, for guilt money totalling £7,204 2s 6d, the Government had used ‘Crown purchases’ to steal almost 230,000 additional acres from Ngati Kahu’s hapu. 

Indeed, what had begun after 1840 as a series of Crown-led crime waves had, by 1865, truly transformed into a tsunami of theft.

FURTHER FLASH TERMS FOR THEFT

In the early years after signing the 1840 Te Tiriti o Waitangi with our tupuna, the Crown and its Governments used three different but inter-related pieces of paper to steal Ngati Kahu lands. 

Last week we looked at ‘Crown grants’.  This week we look at ‘surplus land’ and ‘scrip’ which were two further flash terms for theft.  To understand what they were in reality we need to again consider the background and the work of the Government-appointed Old Land Claims Commissioners; Edward Godfrey in 1843, and Francis Dillon Bell in 1856. 

In reality, ‘scrip’ was a piece of paper that the Government gave to a European who had wrongly claimed Ngati Kahu land. It promised that he could have some of Ngāti Whātua’s lands in the new town of Auckland instead.   

There isn't space enough in this article to cover every instance of the Crown’s ‘scrip’ thefts in Ngati Kahu, so one representative case will have to do.

At Kaimaumau, land which belongs to Te Paatu and Patukoraha, the Government paid out the European claimant, William Macky, in ‘scrip’ that entitled him to 225 acres in Auckland.  It then took over the original false claim to more than 1000 acres in Kaimaumau, and that land was later included in the Government’s theft of the 13,555 acre Wharemaru block.

Now we turn to ‘surplus lands’.  In 1856, the Government’s Land Claims Settlement Act set up a further Commission under Francis Dillon Bell to survey the original tuku whenua.  The surveys identified how much land the European ‘grantees’ could keep, when in fact it still belonged to the hapū who had allocated it.

In reality, ‘surplus’ land was any additional land over and above what the European had wrongfully claimed.  But instead of returning or leaving it to the hapu owners, the Government instead called it ‘surplus’ and stole it.  

Again this article cannot cover every instance of ‘surplus land’ thefts in Ngati Kahu, so the following representative cases must do.  

At Kauhoehoe, which belongs to Te Whānau Moana and Te Rorohuri, the Government gave the European politician, Walter Brodie, a piece of paper which recorded 947.5 acres, and then Bell stole a further 378.5 acres as ‘surplus’. At Mangatete, land which belongs to Patukōraha, the Government gave the European missionary, James Davis, a piece of paper which recorded 466 acres, and Bell then stole a massive 4,880 acres as ‘surplus’.

All in all, between 1840 and 1865, the Government is known to have stolen 25,096 acres from Ngati Kahu using ‘Crown grants’, plus a further 47,534 acres using ‘scrip’ and ‘surplus lands’.  It then either fenced or gave away some of those stolen land to European immigrants, and kept the rest for later disposal.

Ironically, under its own Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009, thieves who are successfully prosecuted stand to be jailed and stripped of any assets they've gained as a result of their crimes and, arguably, under its own Crimes Act 1961 the Government’s use of ‘Crown grants’, ‘scrip’ and ‘surplus lands’ meets the definition of theft.  

However, as bad as they were, those crimes were just the first waves of what was to become a tsunami of further flash terms for theft by the Government.

TOOK YOUR WHENUA

‘Crown grants’ was one of the first flash terms applied by the Crown to its thefts of Ngati Kahu lands.  So what were Crown grants in reality?  To answer that we need to look at the background and the dealings of the Old Land Claims Commissions. 

Set up by the Government under the New Zealand Land Claims Ordinance 1841, the first Commission heard the claims of European immigrants to Ngati Kahu lands which various rangatira had granted for their use in pre-treaty tuku whenua. 

Tuku whenua were not ‘sales’.  Their nearest English equivalent in 1840 and since would be the transaction-based concept of a ‘lease’.  But even that does not fully describe the deeper, relationship-based concept of tuku whenua.

In any event, the main purpose of the New Zealand Land Claims Ordinance was not to protect Ngāti Kahu interests under Te Tiriti o Waitangi.  Instead it was to provide a legal beard to disguise the illegal theft of our lands and their distribution amongst Europeans.

The ordinance stemmed from the racist European presumption of superiority, and the wrong European assumption that pre-treaty tuku whenua were English custom land ‘sales’.    

Based on that flawed ordinance, which breached Te Tiriti, and on the lies told by many of the European claimants that the rangatira had ‘sold’ lands to them, Commissioner Edward Godfrey reported to Governor Robert Fitzroy who then wrote and gave those claimants pieces of paper of different kinds.  That included the mechanisms of theft called ‘scrip’ and ‘Crown grants’.

In reality ‘Crown grants’ were nothing more than pieces of paper on which the Governor of the day endorsed the lies told about certain Ngati Kahu lands and expressed his desire that the Crown had magically become the owner of those lands, so that he could give them to his favoured subjects.

Thus we see that many Europeans of that time were active parties to the initial thefts of our lands, and to the lies told since to make them look legal.

That includes the lie that all tuku whenua in Muriwhenua were fully investigated, first by Godfrey in 1843, and then by Bell in 1856. 

In fact, of the 62 European land claims lodged for pre-treaty tuku whenua in all Muriwhenua, only 14 were ever investigated, and in none of those cases were any Ngati Kahu rangatira present let alone examined. Te Rarawa’s Panakareao was visited by Godfrey, but neither Panakareao nor his Ngapuhi rival Pororua represented Ngati Kahu. 

Yet, even though an examination of the historical record (written and oral) proves them to be fictitious, many Europeans of that time and since have tried to pretend that ‘Crown grants’ were real and to convince Ngāti Kahu that means other people, rather than us, now own our lands.

Ngati Kahu have never believed the lies those thieves seem to like making up.  We know that our 'tuku whenua' generosity never meant the same as their 'took your whenua' greed.