I can only assume that ministers have not seen the outrageous new Prosecution Guidelines released quietly at the beginning of this month. They cannot possibly have seen them because they contradict both Coalition Agreements and the promises the Government has made to end race-based policies.

David Farrar of Kiwiblog alerted me to the matter via a reader who wrote in to his blog about it. The reader is a defence lawyer and expressed surprise at the blatant race discrimination.

The new guidelines quite literally provide a 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card to New Zealanders with at least one Māori ancestor.

The justification of this is that there are a disproportionate number of Māori in the criminal justice system:

“Research over many years has consistently found that Māori are significantly overrepresented in the criminal justice system at every stage, including as victims, and we recognised at the start of the project that the discretion to prosecute may contribute to that."

The authors of the two-tiered guidelines treat the New Zealand people as if we are a bunch of idiots. They claim, "this does not promote different treatment based on ethnicity or membership of a particular group; it instead alerts prosecutors to situations and factors that may deliver inequitable outcomes."

Which is totally contradicted by the instruction to consider not charging someone simply because of their Māori heritage: "The guidelines ask prosecutors to think carefully about particular decisions where a person (whether the victim or the defendant) is Māori."

The defence lawyer who wrote to David Farrar provided the following analysis:

Essentially the new guidelines require prosecutors to take into account race when deciding whether to prosecute someone, or withdraw charges against them. Despite the claim that "this does not promote different treatment based on ethnicity", it is clearly designed to do exactly that.

As a defence lawyer, when advocating for my clients it will now be logical for me to include in my emails to the prosecution something like "I note that my client is Māori and therefore consideration must be given to the new Solicitor-General's guidelines when deciding whether it is appropriate to continue with this prosecution."

I am not ordinarily foul-mouthed, but let me tell you, a few choice words came to mind reading about this. It is outrageous, to say the least.

The Hobson's Pledge team want to make as many people aware of this as quickly as possible, so we have come to our supporters in the hope you will raise the roof with us. 

If you use social media, please consider contacting the following ministers to ask if they are aware of the prosecution guidelines and to let them know you are in complete opposition to them and will consider this a broken election promise if they do not do something about it.

Minister of Justice Paul Goldsmith (Facebook)	Attorney General Judith Collins (Facebook)	Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (Facebook)	Leader of NZ First Winston Peters (Facebook)	Leader of the ACT Party David Seymour (Facebook)
Minister of Justice Paul Goldsmith (X/Twitter)	Attorney General Judith Collins (X/Twitter)	Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (X/Twitter)	Leader of NZ First Winston Peters (X/Twitter)	Leader of the ACT Party David Seymour (X/Twitter)
Minister of Justice Paul Goldsmith (Instagram)	Attorney General Judith Collins (Instagram)	Prime Minister Christopher Luxon (Instagram)	Leader of NZ First Winston Peters (Instagram)	Leader of the ACT Party David Seymour (Instagram)
Email	Email	Email	Email	Email

The guidelines were sent to lawyers on 3 October, but we are yet to see any reporting on it. You could also track down our media companies on social and email and send them a note.

These guidelines must be swiftly thrown in the bin before they come into force on 1 January 2025.

Ethnicity or whether or not one has a Māori ancestor should not be a factor in deciding to charge someone who has committed a crime. That is a separatist system. A two-tiered system. We cannot accept that our justice system is to work on the premise of "do the crime, do the time...except if you have Māori ancestry."

This is blatant discrimination. Why should a Chinese New Zealander, Samoan New Zealander, and an Irish New Zealander be charged for a burglary, but the 4th accomplice gets off scot-free by virtue of one of his great-grandparents being Māori?

We must make a racket. I can't imagine many New Zealanders would be happy about this, and that is probably precisely why the media aren't reporting on it.

So get out there and post on your own social media. Send emails. Spread the word. Tell the five decision-makers above how wrong this is and tell them on every platform possible. We will be doing the same.

Remember, this is our best chance to defeat these appalling policies, and we must not waste it.

The media, Opposition parties, the public service, and academics - also known as the Lanyard Wearers - are doing their best to make it taboo to state the truth that Māori did indeed cede sovereignty in 1840.

They repeat their assertion that Māori did not cede sovereignty ad nauseam presumably in the hope that if they say it enough times it will become true. New Zealanders are exposed to this propaganda on a daily basis.

We, at Hobson's Pledge, have been wondering what New Zealanders really think about it all when we came across a post on David Farrar's Patreon, which shared the results of a poll that asked New Zealanders just that.

Farrar's polling company Curia Research asked respondents:

Recently, a number of political leaders were asked if they believed Māori ceded sovereignty to the British Crown when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, with different political leaders expressing different views. Do you believe Māori did or did not cede sovereignty to the British Crown?

The results are very interesting.

With the barrage of rewritten history and mistruths New Zealanders are pelted with on a daily basis, by Lanyard Wearers, you might expect that a majority would agree with the powers that be and say Māori did not cede sovereignty in 1840.

That is not the case.

The largest segment - 38% of respondents - answered that they 'don't know'. 

The next largest segment - 35% - answered 'yes' they do believe Māori ceded sovereignty. While the smallest segment - 27% - said 'no'.

It is a pretty even split three ways, but despite having the most airtime for their perspective, those who argue that Māori didn't cede sovereignty in 1840 have failed to convince most of the population. 

Predictably this issue is divided along political lines with the governing parties' voters saying 'yes' and the left wing Opposition parties' voters saying 'no'.

And in news that should shock no one, respondents from Wellington were the only geographic group that had a plurality who thought sovereignty was not ceded. 

This poll tells us that New Zealanders need more information on the subject. They aren't buying that sovereignty wasn't ceded but aren't confident to argue the alternative.

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I wrote an article this week about the matter of sovereignty and in it listed some of the key arguments for the position that Māori did cede sovereignty in 1840. Below is a distilled list of points from the article that you might find useful when discussing the matter:

1. Article I in the official English-language version of the Treaty makes it unambiguously clear that in signing the Treaty the chiefs were accepting the sovereignty of the British Crown. We have known since its discovery in 1989 what the English text given to Henry Williams to translate into te reo Māori required, and while that text differs somewhat from the official English text it is absolutely consistent in making it unambiguously clear that chiefs were being asked to surrender ultimate authority to the British Crown.

2. We know, from the many speeches made by the chiefs on 5 February 1840and recorded by Colenso at the time, that they understood they were being asked to surrender to a higher authority. Many chiefs objected strongly, pointing out that signing implied that the British authorities would be entitled to hang them.

3. Speeches made at the very large meeting of chiefs at Kohimarama in 1860again made it clear that they knew that Queen Victoria was sovereign and had authority above them. 

4. When one of the greatest of the Ngāpuhi chiefs who signed the Treaty in 1840 died in 1871, his gravestone carried the words “In memory of Tamati Waka Nene, Chief of Ngapuhi, the first to welcome the Queen’s sovereignty in New Zealand”.

5. Is it plausible that the chiefs who heavily outnumbered the British in 1840 would have been willing to surrender to some distant authority?  Yes, the previous four decades had seen extraordinary inter-tribal warfare, with tens of thousands of men, women and children slaughtered – more dead, it is believed, than all the New Zealand deaths in all wars since 1840. The chiefs would have seen British authority as a way of ending that inter-tribal slaughter and perhaps protecting them from French forces.

6. Great Māori leaders of the past, like Sir Āpirana Ngata, clearly accepted that in signing the Treaty the chiefs had effectively handed authority to the British Crown.

7. The most recent authoritative translation of the Māori language version of the Treaty, by Sir Hugh Kawharu in 1989, translates the first article of the Treaty as “the chiefs of the Confederation and all the Chiefs who have not joined the Confederation give absolutely to the Queen of England forever the complete government over their land.”

Debating what the Treaty provided in 1840 is an interesting academic exercise, but the reality is that for some 180 years all of us have behaved as if the Crown issovereign. We’ve paid taxes, been employed by the state, received benefits from the state, carried passports issued by the state, obeyed laws made by the state. In other words, we have accepted that the Government has the right to govern all of us, Māori and all other New Zealanders.

We have the facts to back up our assertions, but we do not have the institutional or cultural power that our opponents do. The best thing each of us can do is to take those facts and share them with those around us.

Because as silly as it may seem to argue about this when the Crown clearly exercises sovereignty now, the radicals whose goal it is to install co-governance and race-based rights use sovereignty as a foundation on which to lay their claims.

Thank you for your support across the many campaigns we have live at the moment.

I'm sure you've been wondering what is happening with Hobson's Pledge's legal defence of Don.

First, I want to say thank you! Your contribution to Don's Defence fund has ensured that we could assure lawyers of support to take the next steps.

Letters have been going back and forth with Matthew Hooton's lawyers. True to form Hooton attempted to dodge accountability by posting a partial and barbed apology on his Patreon account (but not to his mailing list) and palming it off to Martyn "Bomber" Bradbury to read aloud at the end of a podcast episode.

Not good enough. He tried to frame up his rant as just part of a 'debate' with Don, when he has not bothered to engage on the real isues with Don for many years.

As it has been so vital to the go-ahead for this important action, we’re sharing with supporters who have helped make it happen, the letter that went to Hooton's lawyers today. You can also see the 'Statement of Claim' to be filed next week, if he continues to fudge.

You can read the letter here.

And the Statement of Claim here.

Money matters:

There has been some discussion of remedies and costs to be paid if Hooton is to avoid a law-suit. We’ve redacted those aspects from the letter and Statement of Claim because those negotiations are live. Defamation action in New Zealand is notoriously expensive. Defamation liability is a vital part of society’s defences against the pollution of public discourse with coldly calculated lies – the true ‘disinformation’. So the compensation awards have to be large now. That is the only way to ensure that even winners are not losers. They get vindicated when the court establishes that lies have been spread about them. But they need to win both compensation and a legal cost award, to cover the costs and the risks of the action. Don has made it clear that when he gets vindication, anything left over will go to Hobson's Pledge. 

Next steps:

Hopefully, my next update to you will be that Hooton has made a full apology and delivered it in appropriate forums. We would love to see this resolved without having things escalate further. But, if Hooton is determined to drag this on, we will lodge the Statement of Claim on Monday.

The ability for us to bring lawyers on board to defend Don is important not only because he has dedicated decades to arguing for equality and unity in New Zealand in measured ways, but because the same slurs Hooton so appallingly threw out about Don get used against all of us who share Don's vision for New Zealand.

We should be able to have discussions about the future of our country and object to different rights based on who one's ancestors were without being attacked and called names. 

We have all taken so much on the chin, especially over the last few years, and we shouldn't have to. This legal action represents us standing up and refusing to be demeaned, demonised, and silenced by bullies. 

It means the world to Don and to all of us at Hobson's Pledge that you are standing with us. 

Time is short! Submissions on the Marine and Coastal Area Amendment Bill (MACA) are now open, but not for long.

SUBMISSIONS CLOSE AT MIDNIGHT ON 15 OCTOBER

Making things even more challenging is the fact that the Justice Committee is doing its best to prevent your submission. They will not accept email submissions and are saying that everyone has to use their webform. This would prevent you from being able to use our easy tool.

We create these tools because of how onerous it can be to use the Parliamentary process. We provide the points that we think are important and you can pick and choose those that you agree with as well as enter your own text. 

We are facilitating more New Zealanders to have their say.

It is almost like the Justice Committee doesn't want submissions on the Bill. They certainly want to place roadblocks in the way.

We offered to provide them with one file containing all submissions but they said that was too much of an administrative burden. Our alternative is simply to collect all of the submissions and then print every single one... I suspect that will be more of an administrative burden for the select committee staff.

And won't someone think of the trees!

We will get your submissions in to the Justice Committee. Leave that with us. You just need to head to our website and put together your submission in a few short minutes.

This is important. Every submission counts. We have made the process simple and quick for you so please head to our submission tool and have your say.

We encourage you to support the passing of the Bill but there are some significant improvements that the Justice Committee needs to be urged to implement.

It is good news that the Government intends to return the law back to the original 2011 intention, but we are still wanting more – first and foremost that the Crown resumes ownership of all foreshore and seabed for all New Zealanders as it did under the Foreshore and Seabed Act in 2004.

We’ve analysed the bill for you, and got some legal advice too. There are a lot of good aspects to it. For example, the Government is reigning in the increasingly activist courts, returning the law back to what Parliament intended in 2011. Criteria are being tightened up with iwi needing to prove exclusive and ongoing use since 1840.

But there are some problems too. Chief among those is the fact that for those who are successful in their claims there are substantial special rights awarded. These include the ability to apply wāhi tapu (sacred areas) and rahui (bans); veto over most resource consents and conservation activities; involvement in coastal planning and policy development; the ability to charge commercial operators; the ability to restrict public access through wāhi tapu; and ownership rights to all non-nationalised minerals – including royalties from existing mining operations, back-dated to when the application was first submitted.

You can dress up customary titles however you want, but it is still a type of ownership and other than ‘a promise we won’t’, there is little to stop iwi exercising considerable control.

Like all of the matters we tackle, equality is at the heart of how we view this bill. This is about equal ownership rights, equal access to beaches, equal and fair processes for resource consents and planning. 

New Zealanders who care about the future of our country must speak up now. It is now or never. If this Government doesn't succeed in putting us on a pathway to a future where who one's ancestors were has no relevance to what our political rights are today, there may never be another opportunity to achieve that goal. Submitting on bills like this is a key way you can do your bit to fight for this future. 

Make sure to add your own thoughts to the submission and emphasise that New Zealand is big trouble if we continue along the route Jacinda Ardern and the Labour Māori Caucus charted. We need to course correct and head towards equality of citizenry.

Do pass this email or the link to our submission tool on to any New Zealanders who share our vision of New Zealand where we are all treated equally under the law. The more voices heard the better.

Don't forget that the submission period is woefully short so you only have until the 15th of October to have your say. It only takes a few minutes so why not do your submission now?     

Thank you for your ongoing support and please submit today!