RICHARD PREBBLE: Abolish the Tribunal, Preserve the Treaty
ACT will complete the historical Treaty claims filed before 1 September 2008, end the Waitangi Tribunal’s contemporary jurisdiction, and wind it up once its historical work is finished, announced ACT Leader David Seymour.
I was a member of the Lange Government that extended the Tribunal’s jurisdiction back to 1840. Despite the difficulties that decision created, on balance I think it was the right decision.
We should be proud that New Zealand was founded not by conquest, but by treaty.
For a naval officer, it is a good statement of our founding principles.
The Crown — today, all of us — is sovereign. Property rights are protected. And the people of New Zealand enjoy the rights of British citizens: access to the courts and equality before the law.
I was later appointed to the Tribunal. I read its decisions and its strategic plan.
The Tribunal has reinterpreted the Treaty in ways that Hobson and the chiefs would not recognise. The Tribunal is heading towards constructing a radical new constitution, in which unaccountable iwi leaders would become permanent partners in the government of New Zealand.
I was not willing to lend my name to that project. I resigned.
I have given a great deal of thought to how the Tribunal might be reformed. It should always have been headed by a High Court judge.
I have come to the conclusion that David Seymour is right: the Tribunal is now unreformable.
That does not mean that Māori and non-Māori should lose the ability to hold the Government of the day to the Crown’s Treaty undertakings.
Here is my suggestion.
Abolish the Waitangi Tribunal. Make it clear that Parliament is sovereign, and that no Tribunal ruling which has not been accepted by the Crown is a legal precedent.
Preserve the right of any citizen to take a Treaty-related case to the High Court and seek a declaration as to whether the Crown has honoured its Treaty obligations.
That would preserve the Treaty as our founding document without allowing our constitution to be rewritten by a body that has no democratic mandate.
Richard Prebble is a former Minister and ACT Party leader. He writes at I've Been Thinking
The way the Treaty is presented and used it would seem there was only one side that was to obtain any benefit from it - Maori, with the other side - the Crown, shouldering all the duties and obligations. A totally lopsided an unrealistic arrangement, surely???
With Maori politicians like Willie Jackson and every TPM MP loudly playing the broken record that Maori did not cede sovereignty, what chance do you think there is of your idea working? Despite ample evidence to the contrary, they continue with their mantra, and I'm sure many impressionable young Maori now believe it. They exhort us to honour the treaty, but by hypocritically denying the fact that they did cede sovereignty, they dishonour the treaty themselves. They demand more and more racial advantages in the name of honouring the treaty, and openly seek their own government, and a stranglehold on local government decision-making. The racist separatist movement is blatantly open and obvious, and extortion of vast sums of money fro…
concur with this approach... those with snouts in the trough like salmond have done an immense amount of damage to race relations in this country with their fantastical re-interpretation of all things maori...
Richard,
The courts have twisted the intention of laws passed by Parliament to allow pro Maori decisions to emerge. - eg no conviction for destruction of a display in Te Papa , allowing amalgamation of interests to be valid for the Foreshore and Sea bed, tikanga over -riding common law without parliamentary approval.
I see that trust in the judicial is down to 47% in a recent pole and it will continue to fall .
Your solution will not work and I don't believe that you trust the courts to be a neutral judge in Maori vs New Zealander matters.
If treaty claims become a court process, principles will be replaced by precedents .