Don Brash
Hobson’s Pledge
Two taxpayer-funded bodies. One week. Both working against you.
Mike Hosking nailed it on Newstalk ZB last week, and the Taxpayers’ Union is right to back him up: the Human Rights Commission has completely lost the plot.
The commission’s job is straightforward: defend the universal, equal rights of every single New Zealander. Instead, it has degenerated into a taxpayer-funded activist group, picking and choosing which ‘rights’ it defends based on ideology, not principle.
When the government announced plans to clean up and remove bloated ‘Treaty obligations’ clauses from 19 separate pieces of legislation, what did the Human Rights Commission do? Exactly what you’d expect. It cried foul, claiming that removing race-based distinctions “fails to respect indigenous human rights”.
That is nonsense – and it’s worth spelling out why.
Human rights are universal. By definition, they belong to everyone, equally. The moment a taxpayer-funded body starts arguing one group deserves more, better, or bigger rights because of birth or ancestry, you don’t have human rights any more. You have division, dressed up in human rights language to make it harder to criticise.
Our Human Rights Commission has a long history of this picking and choosing between groups rather than promoting the human rights of all. When it comes to the Treaty of Waitangi, it has never taken a human rights’ lens and never sought to express what the rights of all New Zealanders are. Instead, whenever the Treaty of Waitangi is being discussed or so-called indigenous rights, it has firmly and consistently gone against the rights of all Kiwis and prioritised the activism of a few.
So we have to ask this question – why are we forced to fund a commission that acts as a cheerleader for separatism?
And the Waitangi Tribunal is no better
Last week the Waitangi Tribunal handed down yet another entirely predictable “urgent report”, declaring the government’s Treaty clause review a “breach”.
Of course it did. Ask yourself: in 50 years of hearings, when has the Waitangi Tribunal ever found against a claimant and for the Crown? I can’t think of one. It has become a permanent, taxpayer-funded advocate for one side – sitting in judgment on its own side’s grievances, rubber-stamping separatist claims, and undermining the government New Zealanders actually elected.
To be fair, the tribunal does not strictly work like other courts. It instead determines whether a claim is ‘well founded’ or not, and if so, this means the Crown has breached – in their view – the principles of the Treaty.
A further irony in all of this, of course, is that the left-wing of politics and others have fought very hard against ever having the New Zealand Parliament clearly define these principles, as David Seymour and the ACT Party sought to do recently.
When the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, it was meant to establish one rule of law and equal citizenship for every New Zealander. Today, both the tribunal and the commission distort that founding promise – carving the country into two classes of citizen, and sending you, the taxpayer, the bill for the privilege.
It’s time to pull the plug
Taxpayer money must never be weaponised to push a separatist agenda that works against what’s good for all New Zealanders. That’s why we’re not asking for ‘reform’. It’s time to abolish both the Human Rights Commission and the Waitangi Tribunal.
As you may know, we have been running a petition calling for the end of the Waitangi Tribunal. We want to continue collecting signatures for this, and while specifically about the tribunal, we are expanding this call to also include ending the Human Rights Commission.
Together, we can bring back commonsense, equal citizenship, and one law for all.
This article was originally published by Hobson’s Pledge.
