From the Kapiti News 22/6/16
(All New Zealanders should read this)

In his June 15 letter, entitled “Confusing”, Fred Te Maro made a number of errors that require correction. He labelled me as being anti Maori. This is completely untrue, I am most definitely pro Maori. I am standing up for the ones who have no voice, the ones I grew up with in Cannons Creek and are forgotten in the money scramble they call Treaty settlements.

But I am anti Maori leaders. They have done nothing for their people except create an atmosphere of entitlement based around false interpretations of our history and Fred’s letter is the perfect example of it. He starts out by painting a dark picture of colonisation and calls his people victims, yet they have come from the Stone Age to the space age in a little over 150 years. They have a preferential status in New Zealand and more than equal opportunity to be whatever they want to be. Something unheard of before colonisation.

However, Fred tells his people this is what it feels like to be a victim. He then states that because initially only individual land owners could vote, this dispossessed Maori of their land. However, voting was something no Maori was able to do before colonisation. He forgot to mention or doesn’t know that greedy chiefs had sold over two thirds of New Zealand’s land mass to speculators before 1840. It was the colonisers land courts which nullified these deeds and returned the land to the chiefs, incidentally without them having to give back the purchase price.

Post the Treaty the chiefs promptly set about selling it all over again. Only about four percent of the land in New Zealand was confiscated because of acts of war, most of which was soon returned. Maori chiefs sold the rest. He forgot to mention that in 1853 European men and all women who didn’t own land could not vote either, not just Maori. He also forgot to mention that in 1867 all Maori men aged 21 or over were eligible to vote, Maori men achieved universal suffrage 12 years before European men. I don’t hear European men crying out as victims though.

Wi Parata was claiming back land gifted to the Anglican Church, not the Crown. He was using the Treaty as a means to try to get it back and quite rightly he was told the Treaty was a legal nullity, which it remains today. The Treaty has no independent legal status and the government are not legally bound to do any-thing because of the Treaty. It chooses to, usually in return for Maori votes, this is scandalous.

Fred has the opportunity to read the same history as me, be positive and encourage his people to be proud of their achievements. He can project himself as a role model, particularly for the poor that need his obvious standing in the community. Alas, he prefers to look at the dark side, project it through our papers and hold his hand out because of the apparent “many breaches”, thinking that this will help his people. Statistics show it hasn’t in the past, it won’t in the future and his people will continue to be the major part our underclass if their leaders do not change their dark and greedy sense of entitlement.

Until they do I stand as an advocate for positive Maori who are proud of their achievements, don’t have their hand out and love their country, many of whom are my friends and family.
ANDY OAKLEY
Raumati Beach