A race-based discount for iwi businesses built into the proposed capital gains tax released yesterday shows that the Tax Working Group believes that Maori can’t achieve without a tax break, Hobson’s Pledge spokesman Don Brash said today.

Maori and the Crown are not partners in any sense of the word yet an ideology of Treaty partnership has hijacked the Treaty of Waitangi, Don Brash will explain at a public lecture on Saturday.

The message that violence is not OK apparently hasn’t got through to former MP Hone Harawira, who called for vigilante justice after seeing images of people participating in a Taranaki A&P parade in blackface

You have until December 14 to put in your submission against Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene’s bill that would require a 75 percent majority in Parliament to scrap the Maori seats.

A Crown-Maori Partnership portfolio and a new agency to support the Crown to be a better Treaty partner, announced yesterday, is fraught with danger because it entrenches the notion that the Crown and Maori somehow exist as separate groups.

A big thank you to all who spoke out and generously supported Hobson’s Pledge spokesman Don Brash after vice chancellor Jan Thomas declared he could not address students at Massey University.

Talk of a referendum on Maori seats was revived, briefly, last week when Acting Prime Minister and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters called for a two-pronged referendum on whether they should be entrenched or should go altogether.

Crown-Maori relations are in need of repair, according to Kelvin Davis, who is the Minister of the new Crown-Maori Relations portfolio.

For those following the long-running shambles to do with tribal claims for the coast, Friday is the deadline for submissions on the Nga Rohe Moana o Nga Hapu o Ngati Porou Bill (No. 2), which gives effect to a deed of agreement between Ngati Porou and the Crown for around 200 km of the East Coast coastline north of Gisborne.

By Michael Coote

Over recent years the people of New Zealand have repeatedly spoken through binding polls held under the auspices of the Local Electoral Act 2001 (LEA, see link appendix 1) concerning establishment of separate Maori representation in their local governments. As of May 19, 2018, results are in for no fewer than five LEA binding polls, wherein local electors decisively vetoed Maori wards that elected representatives on their local councils tried to foist upon them.