Treaties True and False – a short story The ACT party has recently publicly remarked "over the last 40 years a combination of the Waitangi Tribunal, the courts, and successive Labour and National governments have quietly but progressively changed the definition of what the Treaty means." This is not widely known, much less understood, by most New Zealanders.
Waitangi Tribunal In 1975, the then Labour government established the Waitangi Tribunal 1, ignoring that full and final settlements for unresolved Treaty grievances were completed by the Fraser government in the period 1944-19472. The Tribunal was corrupt from its beginning when the Waitangi Tribunal Bill drafters and their advisors reconstructed from initial draft notes the “official” English language Treaty version that was released as a Schedule to the establishing Act.3. Copies of the original 1840 final English draft were known to exist overseas but no apparent effort was made to obtain a copy of any of these documents 4. The Treaty of Waitangi version that is used today is based upon a composite English text, originally created by Hobson’s secretary, James Stuart Freeman, from the early rough notes of the treaty. Following the signing of the Treaty at Waitangi, Freeman concocted a variety of “Royal Style” versions, earmarked solely for despatch to overseas capitals. This is evident in the verbose and pompous style as seen below. Since then the Tribunal, Maori extremists, and activist judges have relied on these false English Treaty versions, at various times denying that sovereignty was ceded, enabling the invention of new Maori rights, pursuing unjustified and endlessly extended financial settlements that ignore previous “full and final” resolutions, transfers of land based on dubious claims, and unelected iwi-led race-based power in increasingly broad spheres, with co-governance now routinely the default mechanism for pacifying activists’ demands. Democracy is under threat. The “official” cobbled together English version of the Treaty was impossible to reconcile in translation with the true Treaty in Maori, which is easily understood when considering the very different sources and the motives of the Tribunal members, yet Justice Minister Geoffrey Palmer set up a unit within the Justice Department that created a 15-page booklet titled “The Principles for Crown Action on the Treaty of Waitangi” which was adopted by Cabinet and published on July 4, 1989. It includes and supports the nonsense of “partnership”. Sadly for New Zealand, only four months earlier the Littlewood draft Treaty had been found, as described below. Initially the Waitangi Tribunal only heard claims against the Crown for breaches of the Treaty after 1975, but a subsequent amendment in 1985 extended the time period back to 1840, which opened the floodgates creating a “grievance industry” with endless taxpayer funding for all participants. As a tribunal not a court, the quality of evidence accepted is lower and much of it is oral not written. The Waitangi Tribunal and our legislators are knowingly using a rejected and discarded early rough draft version when fashioning and interpreting our laws, which should have been replaced by the Littlewood final English draft, its existence becoming widely known in 1992. That alone justifies a review of all prior decisions back to 1975. To compound the deceit, the Maori language version has never been used officially.
Various political parties have over time proposed the disestablishment of the Waitangi Tribunal but none has delivered. The simple act of passing legislation to recognise the Littlewood draft Treaty as the only entirely accurate English version should be sufficient to justify the winding up of the Waitangi Tribunal.