As I write this I still can't believe this has happened to us. We hear of political interference happening overseas, but today Hobson's Pledge has been the target.

Facebook has deleted all of our posts that sent supporters to submit on the Fast Track Approvals Bill including paid advertising we were running. 

At first our team thought there must have been an error and attempted to post again. It became clear that anytime we used the link to the Government website to make a submission on the Bill, Facebook either blocked us or removed the post minutes after it went up.

As we were aware that the Māori Party were also promoting submitting on the Bill, we checked out one of their posts and found that there we could access the Government submissions page with no problem at all. 

This is discrimination and political interference. Will you stand with us against it?

For a start Facebook should not be able to block links to the Government website and impede democratic engagement.

They certainly shouldn't be able to pick and choosewhich organisation can help their supporters to access the submissions page.

It is nearly impossible to reach an actual person at Facebook to ask what on earth is going on.

Are they taking stances on all political issues? Or is this something an individual staff member has taken it upon themselves to do? Maybe it is simply that their systems are vulnerable to bad faith activists overwhelming them?

We would love to know. 

We will be doing our best to follow up and ensure that this kind of thing doesn't continue to happen.

Every New Zealander should be free to encourage submissions and indeed to submit. We would never dream of attempting to prevent Māori Party supporters from having their say. We live in a democracy!

Don't let political interference get in the way of you having your say on the Fast Track Approvals Bill and opposing special rights for iwi when it comes to consultation and decision making.

CLICK HERE FOR THE BANNED GOVT SUBMISSION PAGE!

I cannot overstate how much of a political intrusion this is. Hobson's Pledge already experiences significant hostility from the media and we use emails and social media as a way to go around the patronising so-called fourth estate to reach New Zealanders.

For our ability to use social media to be threatened is truly concerning. In today's online world, it is an attack on our right to freely engage in politics. 

I will keep you updated on where this goes. If there is any action we can all take, you can expect an email straight away.

 

I have received several emails asking what Elliot and I wrote on behalf of Hobson's Pledge in our submission on the Fast Track Approvals Bill. I thought you might be interested too!

It is short and to the point and we will elaborate when we get a chance to speak to the select committee.

Submission on the Fast-track Approvals Bill by the Hobson’s Pledge Trust

• The Hobson’s Pledge Trust was founded in 2016 to promote the fundamental principle that all New Zealanders have equal political rights, as acknowledged in Article III of the Treaty of Waitangi. We named the organisation after Governor Hobson, who is understood to have said, as each chief signed the Treaty, “He iwi tahi tatou” (“We are now one people”).  We are convinced that acknowledging that equality of rights is the only way forward for a peaceful and harmonious New Zealand.

• From small beginnings, Hobson’s Pledge has grown to the point where some 130,000 people receive our regular emails.

• As an organisation, we take no position on the need for the Fast-track Approvals Bill. There is no doubt a wide range of strongly felt views on the Bill among our supporters.

• We respect the effort which the Bill makes to ensure that property rights are respected.

• But we are dismayed that the Bill gives a much greater priority to the rights of iwi than to the rights of other New Zealanders. The word “iwi” appears 56 times in the Bill, and the proposed four-person panels by which projects are to be evaluated are to include one person nominated by the relevant local authority and one person nominated by the relevant iwi. This apparent equivalence between local authorities and iwi authorities seems to us totally inappropriate, and is likely to result in the concerns of Maori New Zealanders being given much greater weight than the concerns of other New Zealanders.

• This not only causes us dismay: it also causes us surprise. During the election campaign, both the ACT Party and the New Zealand First Party made much of their commitment to equal citizenship.  In the coalition agreements which both parties signed with the National Party in the process of forming a Government, there were numerous quite specific promises to eliminate the racial preferences which have crept into New Zealand law in recent years.  The National Party’s constitution includes a specific commitment to “equal citizenship”, and of course it too was a party to the two coalition agreements which enabled the formation of the new Government.

• Clearly, in approving any new investment project under this Fast-track Approvals Bill Ministers must be mindful of the property rights of those New Zealanders who could be affected by the new project. But this principle should surely apply to all New Zealanders, whatever their ethnicity.  As drafted, the Bill fails to acknowledge that principle.

• We wish to appear before the Committee to present this submission.

I urge you to take a few minutes to send in your thoughts on the Fast Track Approvals Bill. You don't need to address every aspect of the Bill - if you're like me you may be in favour of it overall. Just make it clear that special powers and representation for iwi will slow approvals down and do not reflect the mandate given to the Government at the election to end race-based law and policy.

>>> CLICK HERE TO MAKE A SUBMISSION <<<

You only have until Friday the 19th April 2024 to submit! Don't miss out!

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.