I have a lot to update you on today, so bear with me. This is more of a newsletter than my usual style. Some good news and some not so good, but either way we are busy at Hobson's Pledge HQ!

The ASA Decision

You may have seen media reports that the 600+ complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority about our advertisement on the front cover of the NZ Herald have been reviewed and the ASA Complaints Board has made a decision.

We were pleased to see that the majority of complaints about the advertisement were not upheld. However, the one small part that was upheld appears to tie itself in knots in its attempt to make something misleading out of the advertisement. We are considering our options and whether to appeal.

It is astounding that even though a majority ruled in our favour on most matters, a minority on the Advertising Standards Authority Board consistently held that statements unwelcome to Māori should be suppressed, irrespective of truth.

The tendency for amateur authoritarians to paint those whom they disagree with as ‘evil’ rather than just holding a differing viewpoint has been cancerous to our ability to debate important and difficult subjects. It was pleasing to see the following decisions in relation to nonsense complaints that sought to paint Hobson's Pledge as evil:

A majority of the Complaints Board said the advertisement did not reach the threshold to breach the ‘Decency and Offensiveness’ rule in the context of advocacy advertising.

A majority of the Complaints Board said the advertisement did not reach the threshold to cause fear or distress without justification.

We also note that the Complaints Board said they ‘accepted the source for the map and the factual claim that almost the entire coastline is under application for customary marine title.’ This was central to our advertisement and to have that validated is important.

MACA Submissions

As we shared with you a while back, we were having some real trouble with getting the Select Committee to accept your submissions if they didn't go through the special government web form.

We saw right through their objections. This is about control and deterring New Zealanders from exercising their right to submit on bills. They hate when groups such as ours work together to make having our say easier. 

We offered to send submissions through in one file - their choice of type - and let them know that if we weren't able to do this we would print out every single submission and hand deliver them to Parliament.

I guess they didn't take us seriously.

On Tuesday we delivered 5166 submissions to Parliament on behalf of Hobson's Pledge supporters. 

Update on defamation action

I have been touched by the level of support I have received thus far on this matter. Sometimes we just have to take a stand and refuse to let the usual suspects tell lies about us.

Here are some excerpts from the press release we sent out earlier this week:

Don Brash has today filed a defamation claim with the High Court in Auckland against Matthew Hooton after several attempts to resolve the matter privately.

Specialist defamation lawyers, Peter McKnight and Ali Romanos, have been retained as counsel for Dr Brash. Dr Brash received a delaying response from Mr Hooton’s lawyers just ninety minutes before the requested deadline and has been left with no choice but to file proceedings.

Mr Hooton seriously defamed Don Brash including suggesting he is profoundly dishonest, lacks integrity, and is corrupt. This goes far beyond disagreeing with what Dr Brash has said on any given matter and impugns his character in a very serious way.

In any case, debates relating to the Treaty cannot be allowed to deteriorate into personal attacks. It should not be beyond public figures to argue the facts and their beliefs without resorting to smearing reputations.

Outrageous new Prosecution Guidelines released by Solicitor General

If you haven't seen them already, prepare to be dismayed. Or furious, perhaps.

The guidelines quite literally call for a two-tiered approach to charging alleged criminals.

As the NZ Herald's Audrey Young wrote:

It is astonishing that the seasoned Solicitor-General, Una Jagose, KC, has got herself into political difficulty over the latest revision of the Prosecution Guidelines in which she asks prosecutors to “think carefully about particular decisions... where a person is Māori”.

...

She is clearly including guidance to think carefully about prosecuting when the offender is Māori.

That is problematic at any time, let alone for a Government that is united on one thing if nothing else – equal treatment of citizens.

As you might expect, Hobson's Pledge is horrified by this. We are in the process of pulling together a response. We are writing to each and every minister with a connection to this matter and pulling together a campaign to stop this race-based rubbish in its tracks.

Watch this space.

Gary Judd KC takes on regulations

Gary Judd KC has proven himself to be a heroic champion of common sense and equality. This week he brought another fight to the Parliament's Regulations Review Committee - the compulsory completion of Tikanga Māori courses for all law students. 

Gary argues that tikanga is different from law and that if the compulsory courses go ahead "they will essentially be seen to be giving the green light to what is really just political activism."

Gary has also said:

“For a custom to be accepted as law, it had to be certain, consistent, reasonable, and it had to be not repugnant to justice and morality.

“If judges were doing their job properly, they would have said, ‘tikanga cannot satisfy these requirements, therefore we reject the notion of tikanga being part of the law’.”

He is correct. Tikanga is variable from whānau to hapū to iwi. It cannot be treated as law. 

We will be keeping a close eye on this and will keep you in the loop.

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Phew! Quite a download of information for you.

Thank you for all your support on these issues and the many more that have come our way this year.

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.