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Forgive me. I am no historian, certainly not an expert on New Zealand history. But having grown up and been educated in the UK and studied European history during my secondary school days, I do have a reasonable understanding of the deeds and actions of kings and queens throughout the ages, and I am completely convinced that the Treaty of Waitangi is not, and was never intended to be, a partnership between the Crown (Queen Victoria) and Maori.
First and foremost, let us take a look at the definition of the word ‘sovereignty’. Sovereignty these days is mostly used to describe the power of a nation to govern itself without interference, but that is not what defined it in the 1840s. Back then, the definition of sovereignty was more like this:
Sovereignty is authority to govern a state or a state that is self governing.
An example of sovereignty is the power of a king to rule his people.
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In other words, the people of New Zealand, Maori and British settlers, ceded complete sovereignty to Queen Victoria, in return for her protection of the newly-formed state as part of her empire.
Here is a quote from the original document.
The Chiefs of the Confederation of the United Tribes of New Zealand and the separate and independent Chiefs who have not become members of the Confederation cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty which the said Confederation or Individual Chiefs respectively exercise or possess, or may be supposed to exercise or to possess over their respective Territories as the sole sovereigns thereof.
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I am not sure that it could be made any clearer than that.
The partnership, if there is one, was between the Maori chiefs and the British settlers, giving them both equal rights in the new state. This would have been groundbreaking at the time, although the Treaty makes no specific mention of partnerships at all. Kings and queens never entered into partnerships; they were either sovereign or nothing. Even nowadays, as countries of the empire have become countries of the Commonwealth, the Queen is still the head of state. If Jacinda goes too far with her meddling with the rights of New Zealanders, the Queen could step in. She has that right. After all, that is what ‘sovereignty’ means.
If Queen Victoria had intended to enter into a partnership with the indigenous people of New Zealand (fondly referred to as ‘aboriginal’ in the Treaty documents) then why did she not do that with other countries? Nigeria became part of the British Empire during her reign. So did Botswana, Ghana, Malawi, Brunei, Singapore, India, Canada and Hong Kong. Why did she not offer similar conditions to the people of already existing Empire countries, such as Jamaica, Mauritius or Australia? It seems, according to New Zealand historians, that only the New Zealand Maori were given such special treatment and granted a ‘partnership’ with Queen Victoria herself, meaning that Maori outranked the British settlers in New Zealand.
Would the queen give rights to unknown aboriginals over those of her own people who had settled in the new province? Hardly. She would have relied on the settlers to establish British governing and administration systems, of which the local aborigines would have known nothing.
And yet, for almost 200 years now, we have all laboured under the misapprehension that New Zealand was treated in the same way as all Empire and now Commonwealth countries, and the Queen (both Victoria and now Elizabeth II) has sovereignty over New Zealand in the same way as all other Empire countries. There are no documents to prove otherwise, and no one alive at the time is alive today, but we are all meant to believe that this was the ‘intent’ of the Treaty at the time.
Of course not. That was never the intention, and everyone knows it.
The only way to make this ‘partnership’ concept stick is to rewrite history. That, of course, is exactly what this government is doing, with assistance from its left wing academics and teachers, all of whom should be ashamed. But as we always say on The BFD, the truth is still out there. So are the original documents, which gave Maori and the British settlers equal rights in a country governed by the British sovereign. Anything else is an Orwellian distortion of the truth – something that we have become used to seeing from this dystopian government.
