We aren't short on matters to update you on! The previous Government has left a legacy of race-based policies and legislation that the Coalition Government is having to unpick. Unfortunately, this racialised way of thinking has bled into social and cultural life also and it is largely up to organisations like ours to tackle those problems.

Segregation at University of Auckland

We filled you in about the photo that was taken of a racially exclusive room at the UoA Business School last week. Naturally the media found lots of defenders of the Māori-and-Pasifika-only room, but despite overwhelmingly negative responses online they opted not to talk to any opposers. Anyone watching and reading the reporting would reasonably deduce that only awful extremists would oppose such a thing, but the opposite is true.

The University of Auckland's Pro Vice-Chancellor Māori has since informed the media that the university won't be scrapping the segregated study spaces. At Hobson'sPledge we think the sign belongs in Apartheid South Africa or pre-Civil Rights Movement America, not New Zealand.

Māori Wards: ask the people or disestablish them!

Local Government Minister Simeon Brown has announced:

““The Coalition Government’s view is that any decision to establish or disestablish a Māori ward is one that should remain with communities."

In practice, that means that any councils who have implemented Māori wards without going to a binding referendum will have to do so at the 2025 local elections. Any councils who do not want to hold a referendum must disestablish their Māori wards. The Coalition Government will introduce a Bill to achieve this in time for councils to prepare for their elections.

This is excellent news for local democracy. 

"Vague, unclear, inconsistent" - Education Minister

The new New Zealand History Curriculum the previous Government introduced has been thoroughly panned by historians and experts. It is ahistorical at best and deliberately politicised at worst.

Last week, Education Minister Erica Stanford didn't mince words when she called the history curriculum "vague, unclear, inconsistent" and promised it would undergo a "rebalance".

Labour MP Willie Jackson took a different position on the matter. He said: "why do we want to talk about everybody when we haven't even talked about Māori?...let's prioritise indigenous people to start off with."

Extremists piggyback kids' events

Whatever your opinion on the School Strike for Climate protests, they were at least in the beginning run by students and focused on their environmental concerns. This year, we saw a drastic shift away from this. 

Suddenly, the protests were being promoted as a kind of pick-n-mix of political causes including pro-Palestine, lowering the voting age, and the Te Pati Māori / Green Party view of the Treaty. Videos were popping up online of adults attempting to whip up a frenzy before the strikes. I am of course assuming that the man I saw in the video with a full beard and tattoos was not still in school!

Green and Te Pati Māori MPs were vocal in telling kids to take part in the protests and to focus on Treaty issues. The rhetoric was markedly more aggressive than previous years too. 

I can't help wondering how many parents allowed their kids to head off to an environmental protest without realising they were going to be pulled in to a number of other issues. 

Fast Track Approvals Bill

Watch out for our open letter in the New Zealand Herald this Friday. We were shocked to realise that there are some nasty fish hooks in the new Fast Track Approvals legislation.

I personally welcome the legislation in order to speed up the process of consenting important infrastructure projects, but unfortunately it has continued along the same vein as governments past by racialising certain aspects. 

Marine and Coastal Areas Act (MACA)

The Marine and Coastal Areas Act was National's replacement for the Foreshore Seabed legislation when John Key was Prime Minister. John Key and Chris Finlayson (then Attorney General and Minister for Treaty Settlements) both swore at the time that the law would not result in many claims at all. We now know that was either wishful thinking or a load of crock.

With hundreds of outstanding claims and huge lengths of coastline already awarded to iwi, the reality is that MACA is enabling an enormous landgrab (coastgrab).

Both coalition agreements pledge to do something about the legislation and New Zealand First have been clear that they expect a reversal of the Act. 

We are developing a campaign to drive this issue and ensure it doesn't fall off the Government's radar. Chip in to support an end to the carve up of New Zealand's coast.

Treaty Principles Bill

Despite the wild and ever-increasing assertions from the Opposition, the media, and the Wellington bureaucracy, the Treaty Principles Bill has not yet been made public.

We can make an educated guess about what it will contain based on Minister-responsible David Seymour's comments, but the complete picture remains a mystery. Seymour and his ACT colleagues have been clear that any claims that the Bill will seek to somehow erase the Treaty are ridiculous. 

Answering the question 'what will the Bill do?' ACT says:

"The Bill will define the ‘principles’ of the Treaty. The Treaty principles are often mentioned in legislation, but they have never actually been defined in law. Instead, the task has been left to the unelected judiciary to interpret the principles in an ad hoc manner without input from New Zealanders."

This Bill has the potential to bring certainty to all New Zealanders and to halt the creative interpretation of the so-called Treaty Principles by members of the judiciary. New and more extreme reinterpretations of the Treaty are proving to be increasingly divisive and in order to move forward as a cohesive multicultural society, New Zealanders need certainty that we are all equal under the law. 

Hobson's Pledge are preparing to support the Bill, but we won't be able to do so without your support. ACT need us all to get in behind them and show Christopher Luxon and the National Party that New Zealanders want this sorted out. We must make enough of a wave in the select committee process that they cannot ignore us.

We'll keep you posted on this as we learn more.

In case you missed it: a photo has been doing the rounds on social media this week. Check it out:

You can watch my full reaction on the Hobson'sPledge Facebook page, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts with you here too.

To have a room where only people of certain races are welcome is incredibly divisive, very racist, and shows just how dysfunctional our universities have become. 

The way I see it, segregation like this says two things:

1. That the university thinks brown people are weak and are unable to handle interacting in the real world.

2. That the university is holding certain races as special or higher up than the rest.

What makes this worse is that our taxes go toward funding the University of Auckland and policies like this. 

I find this offensive.

I stand with New Zealanders of any race in defending democracy and equality. 

We have to return to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. That famous saying that came to encapsulate the civil rights movement in America:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Hobson's Pledge will be writing to the University of Auckland to express our opposition to this regressive racist policy. If you would like to do the same you can email the media manager for the University of Auckland here.

Universities should be places where people of all races and backgrounds come together to share and debate ideas. They should not be places of racism and divisiveness.

He iwi tahi tatou. We are one people.

Really quick note - Janet has had another victory!

The Real Estate Authority's application for an order that Janet Dickson put up $15,000 in security to pay the REA’s costs if they win has been DENIED by Justice Grau in the High Court.

The REA tried to argue that Janet Dickson doesn't have the means to pay costs should the case go against her and suggested that Hobson’s Pledge’s fundraising efforts indicated this.

Thankfully, the judge disagreed.

The REA have badly underestimated the frustrations of not only their own licensees, but also the strength of feeling on the matter in wider New Zealand. We saw in the response to our emails just how fed up supporters like you are with the forced indoctrination going on in workplaces.

On a personal note, I was really pleased to see that Hobson's Pledge is making a difference and has ensured that Janet is able to fight off these spurious litigious attempts to outspend her by an REA that has clearly lost its way.

This judgement demonstrates just how much merit there is in pursuing this judicial review. It is in the public interest and engages issues of rights protected under the Bill of Rights.

Of huge interest to us was the revelation in the judgement that there are 92 other real estate agents objecting to the imposition of the Te Kakano cultural training course! Incredibly, the REA tried to persuade the judge that this was not relevant because it is only “a small number”.

Janet is not alone as the REA would like her to think. This information should give confidence to any other real estate agents who would like to speak out but have been suppressed by the threat of job and licence loss. Please don't hesitate to get in touch if that is you. 

New Zealanders should be able to go to work without having highly politicised cultural ideas forced on them. No one should fear losing their livelihood because they don't agree with their employer's Treaty politics.

The fight goes on!

 

Just a quick update on Janet's situation.

As I shared with you previously, the Real Estate Authority (REA) said they were going to cancel real estate agent Janet Dickson's licence for five years because she would not take a compulsory Māori culture course. 

Then, the real estate company she worked for decided to terminate her contract. We couldn’t share this with you at the time because it was important for Janet’s lawyers to try to save her ability to earn a living. Thankfully, they were successful and she has been offered her role back.

Her legal team have also ensured that Janet will remain licensed until the outcome of the High Court proceedings. The hearing will be in June so she can keep working at least until the decision.

Hobson’s Pledge supporters like you got in behind Janet. You’ve ensured that she wasn’t forced to cave in the face of the REA’s decision to go down the track of expensive litigation. Janet could not be more grateful to her lawyers, and to you who made it possible.

The REA isn’t making things easy for Janet though. They’ve applied for what is called "security for costs". This says they think that Janet won’t be able to pay up if she loses. They claim that only Janet benefits from winning the case, dismissing the great public interest in the case, including public support from the Deputy Prime Minister. They are also ignoring the many other real estate agents in the same boat. We’ve heard from a number of them.

We cannot understand how the REA can think that it is serving its proper purposes, or helping real estate customers and agents, in using its powers and funds to suppress dissent, instead of welcoming a chance to have the court decide who is right on the proper scope of its powers.

The next phase for the legal team is preparing for her judicial review. Meanwhile, Hobson’s Pledge is looking to find out if other Kiwis are experiencing similarly outrageous situations with their employers and licensing bodies. We are hearing that this goes far beyond the real estate field and that professions of all kinds are abusing their powers to force licencees into brain-washing with ideological cultural training.  

We’ve been told that lawyers, teachers, doctors, nurses, and public service workers are all under this kind of pressure.

Send me a message if you have an experience that you would be willing to share with us. We can redact names and identifying details if need be.

As you can see, without the backing of our supporters Janet would not have had the excellent legal representation. It has proven its value already.

It makes me proud to see how Hobson’s Pledge can contribute to not only influencing policy and legislation, but also can actively protect democratic freedoms for a Kiwi who is standing up against the racialised politics we fight to resist.

Thanks for your ongoing support,

Don Brash
Trustee
Hobson’s Pledge

P.S. if you would like to join the fight for a New Zealand where laws and policy aren’t based on race, you can chip in to our fund here