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.