In Print

A Letter to the Editor

This morning's local newspaper (Daily News) carries a "letter to the editor" from me. If you look back a couple of posts to the one headed The Blindness Epidemic you can read it, because the letter I sent them is the same except that I left out the last two paragraphs.

The paper gave the letter a new heading: "Culture when it Suits", which we quite liked. Along with my offering were three other letters, all on the same topic, one from a Maori leader expressing a point of view that I could sum up as "What's different?" Another was very anti-Mayor and anti-Maori, and the last was supportive of the goal of the Mayor, but very critical of his tactics. Altogether quite a range of opinions.

I hope the Mayor feels some support from my effort. He has been very courageous at sticking his neck above the parapet and taking a lot of flak, some of it very venomous, as a result, in order to follow his strongly-felt principles. I have already had a phone call from a friend expressing support
for my letter and for the Mayor.

My basic position in all this starts from the premise that pakeha like me, who have no whakapapa to Maori ancestry, are able to live as citizens of New Zealand under the constitutional protection of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which allowed for the establishment of a system of government, especially law and order, under the mana of Queen Victoria.

Once here, it is our moral and legal obligation to uphold that Treaty in order to maintain the validity of that arrangement. Which means we need to hold our governments to account that they follow the spirit and words of the Treaty all the time.

The alternative is to reject the Treaty, in which case we remain here only by individual arrangement  with one or other of the Maori iwi, and under their absolute jurisdiction, as was the case before 1840.

That is the deal our parents undertook for us when they registered our births with the New Zealand Government, and the deal we undertook when we applied for a New Zealand passport, or a New Zealand Marriage Certificate, or a Driver's Licence, or a school qualification, and so on.

So the Treaty and its integrity is really far more valuable and important to non-Maori citizens than it ever has been for Maori: tangata whenua have an absolute right to live here from before the Treaty and after it. I hope my fellow-citizens all come eventually to realise this key point!