Bugger! If you haven't seen the news, former Labour Minister and ACT Party leader Richard Prebble has resigned from the Waitangi Tribunal.

Appointed in October last year, Prebble was a controversial pick but one that brought hope to those of us who want to see the radicalisation of the Waitangi Tribunal tempered. 

It is precisely that radicalisation that led to Prebble's resignation. 

In a searing rebuke of the Tribunal and successive governments that have enabled its extremist turn, Richard Prebble announced his resignation via a column in the New Zealand Herald. 

The line that stood out most for me was:

"I will not participate in turning the Treaty into a socialist manifesto."

Prebble's opinion piece is spot on. It is a real shame that the Herald have chosen to place it behind a paywall. He calls out the ludicrousness of the modern idea that Māori never ceded sovereignty and his succinct reasoning should be repeated for all to hear:

"There were chiefs who had been to Australia and England. Chiefs who signed the English text. Chiefs who did not sign because they said they would not cede sovereignty.

No chief, including Hone Heke, who may have regretted signing, ever said that sovereignty had not been ceded.

Letters written by chiefs who signed the Treaty to governors complaining the Treaty was not being honoured never denied that sovereignty had been ceded.

Partnership is a 20th-century invention."

The former Labour Minister and ACT Party leader's assessment of the state of the Waitangi Tribunal is, in my view, painfully accurate. We are dealing with activists who have not only rejected New Zealand's history, they have rewritten their own.

The Tribunal has "declared it is not bound by previous tribunal rulings that sovereignty was ceded or by decisions of the courts." This means they have freed themselves up to deviate from historical rulings to change the narrative completely.   

Even more important than his evisceration of the Tribunal is the righteous disdain he has for successive Labour and National governments and their failure to address the rapid radicalisation of the Tribunal and its proxies. He says:

"Parliament, by empowering the tribunal to make recommendations based on the principles of the Treaty, has allowed the tribunal to create Treaty principles.

The tribunal’s rulings only have legal effect when the Crown adopts them. The Labour Government and now National have failed to respond to the tribunal’s radical ruling.

The Minister of Justice should have upheld earlier tribunal decisions that sovereignty was ceded."

Prebble calls on our current Government to enact the New Zealand First coalition agreement that says:

“Amend the Waitangi Tribunal legislation to refocus the scope, purpose and nature of its inquiries back to the original intent of that legislation.”

We must echo Prebble's call. We are at a dangerous crossroads in our nation's history, and if our elected leaders do not take action to stabilise our country and halt the radical destruction of democracy being advanced, we are in very big trouble indeed.

I'll leave you with the final sentence of Prebble's article because it is the most important of all:

"It is time for the Prime Minister to lead and uphold that there is one Treaty, one country and one citizenship."