Monday 17 February 2020

New Zealand's Butcher's Bill



REFERENCES & NOTES:
[1] Inter-tribal Wars: Professor J. Rutherford estimates “the old-style, pre-musket-era tribal wars appear to have destroyed not less than 2,000 people in each five-year period, or say 400 a year, a rate of lass which presumably the Maoris could withstand without appreciable diminution of their total population.”  Additionally, scholars suggest 16,000 warriors took part in the Battle of Hingakaka, (approx. 1790) in which “many thousand” were killed in the Tainui alliance’s utter defeat of the 7-10,000 invading force. [Ref: Pei Te Hurinui (aka P. Jones), King Potatau, Huia Press, 2010 [1960]] Since the Hingakaka battle absorbed so many of the country’s warriors, and so much of that decade’s fighting, a doubling of the otherwise steady attrition rate seems conservative.
[2]  Musket Wars: Figures from Rutherford, J.D. Note on Maori casualties in their tribal wars 1801-1840, James Rutherford Papers. 1926-1963. MSS & Archives A-42, Box 16, Folder 6, Special Collections, The University of Auckland Library. "Rutherford suggests that the minimum Maori death roll in battle, 1801-1840, is 16 per cent, probably 20 per cent. These figures would represent about one-fifth to one-quarter of the male fighting population." [Judith Binney, 'Christianity & the Maoris to 1840', New Zealand Journal of History, v. 3, no. 2, 1969; p. 149, n. 30]
[3] Sovereignty Wars:
Ref: 'End of the New Zealand Wars', URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/new-zealand-wars/end, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 30-Oct-2019
[4] Te Kooti’s skirmishes have been included in the 1870s decade
[5] The Second Boer War was fought from 11 October 1899 until 31 May 1902, so all casualties have been included in the decade 1900. Seventy New Zealanders died in the war as the result of action; 25 were accidentally killed; 133 died of disease” - 'WARS – BOER (SOUTH AFRICAN) WAR, 1899–1902', [An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A. H. McLintock, originally published in 1966. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealandhttp://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/1966/wars-boer (accessed 14 Feb 2020)]
[6] WWI: 16,697 New Zealanders were killed (640 in Sinai and Palestine; 2779 at Gallipoli; 1560 at the Somme; 850 at Passchendaele) and 41,317 were wounded during the war – a 58 percent casualty rate. Approximately a further thousand men died within five years of the war's end, as a result of injuries sustained, and 507 died whilst training in New Zealand between 1914 and 1918 ['First World War by the numbers', URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/first-world-war-by-numbers, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 27-Mar-2019]
[7] All WWII figures included in decades of the 1940s:11,928 killed, a ratio of 6,684 dead per million in the population which was the highest rate in the Commonwealth (Britain suffered 5,123 and Australia 3,232 per million population). (671 at Crete; 2989 in North Africa) ['Counting the cost', URL: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/second-world-war/counting-the-cost, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 17-May-2017]
[8] 1950s: 3 killed in the Malayan Emergency due to enemy action; 33 in the Korean War
[9] 2000s: Five killed on peacekeeping operations in East Timor [https://teara.govt.nz/en/peacekeeping/page-4]; 8 killed in Afghanistan [Cooke, Henry (17 September 2018). "New Zealand extends Iraq and Afghanistan deployments". Stuff. Retrieved 31 August 2019]

Tuesday 4 February 2020

It's the chieftainship, stupid [revised]


The Government goes to Waitangi this week expecting to be challenged on water, on Ihumatao, and on Whanau Ora. That is to say, they expect tribal leaders to challenge them on the issues of tribal control of water, the tribal control of land, and the direction of government welfare payments and welfare services through Maori tribal hands.


Ever wondered why, in a world that's said to be about individuals and individual achievement, we still seem to have government support of a tribal system?

What happened?

Thousand of years ago Polynesian voyagers set out into the vast blue seas to explore and occupy the South-eastern Pacific. Several eventually discovered and settled in New Zealand. And then for just over five-hundred years, isolated from the rest of the world, they developed their own culture. They became Maori.
So in that great migration "out of Africa," New Zealand was the world's last great land-mass to be settled by human beings. And then almost the last to be brought back into the worldwide division-of-labour.

This should be something to celebrate, no? Yet if the headlines are to be believed, the descendants of these former adventurers see their own great conquest as creeping tribal capture of the government chequebook.

Tribal life


Those early New Zealanders were welcomed into the worldwide division-of-labour by whalers, sealers, timber-traders and assorted wanderers and adventurers who offered Maori things for their labour they's never seen before. And in return for tools, technology and new foods, they sold trees and flax and kumara, and crewed ships, built houses and travelled the world.


The treaty signed at Waitangi by tribal chiefs and a recently-arrived Royal Naval captain promised all these New Zealanders their own Emancipation Proclamation, and held out hope of liberating tribal serfs from tribalism. Instead, 180 years later, here we are barrelling down a path back to tribalism. Something Elizabeth Rata has called neo-tribalism: the intentional production of a neo-tribal elite who are busily "marching through the institutions," in which they play "a decisive and self-interested role in controlling shifts in the interpretation of the treaty of Waitangi." [1]

The result: the empowerment of a neo-tribal elite, in which tribal leaders have the upper hand again. And instead of the hope and optimism of those early adventurers, the predominant emotions now are shame and guilt -- shame as a necessary precursor to this tribal shakedown.

Something clearly went wrong.

One reason is the way that treaty was written: hastily. It was written in just a few days by folk wholly unqualified to write a thing that some erroneously call the country's "founding document." It's not that, and never has been. And nor does it contain enough to merit that description.

But what it does have is the material which the neotribalists have been able to exploit. One of which is the problem of 'chieftainship.'

The problem of chieftainship

The problem is this: that instead of the treaty being written to protect individual Maori, it promised instead to placate tribal chiefs. It's right there in the wording and in all the arguments today about rangatiratanga. It's understandable. After all, it was their signatures the British Colonial Office was after before allowing colonisation here to receive their imprimatur. "Alive to the record of native extinction that had come with settlement in Tasmania and the Caribbean, and was threatened in Australia," the treaty's aim was to "recognise the rights of the Maori as subject in the agreement, with rights and interests to protect." [2] But in placating those chiefs of the 1840s, instead of promoting individualism and recognising real individual rights, the document has helped promote the neotribalism of today.

It's been argued -- and I've been one of those doing the arguing -- that the Treaty of Waitangi liberates individual Maori. It should have done -- it should have treated all Maori as individuals instead of as members of a tribe. But it really does nothing of the sort except by implication.

Instead, as written, it cemented in and buttressed the tribal leadership and communal structures that already existed here -- encouraging the survival of this wreck of a system until it morphing, as it has today, into this mongrelised sub-group of pseudo-aristocracy: of Neotribal Cronyism.

The problem was there from the start. Maori in 1840 paid more attention to oral discussion than to written documents, and there's enough evidence to suggest those wily old chiefs knew what they were talking about;  what they discussed and what was read to them in 1840 was this [3]:
The treaty's preamble states the "concern to protect the chiefs and the subtribes of New Zealand" and the "desire to preserve their chieftainship." Nothing in that to promote or protect individualism. Everything to preserve "chieftainship" and to protect the chiefs in their rule.
  • In Clause 1 the chiefs grant the Queen governorship -- kawanatanga -- over these islands. Non-chiefs, i.e., individual Maori, are neither asked nor recognised. Because they are not part of this agreement. 
  • In Clause 2 it's there again: protecting chiefs in their land, forests and fisheries. Specifically, protecting "the chiefs, the subtribes and all the people of New Zealand in the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship [their tino rangatiratanga]" over all their various treasures -- while prohibiting their sale to anyone but the government. (Note that this does not protect or recognise full ownership or real property rights except by implication: after all, Maori of 1840 had no such concept, except perhaps for small personal possessions; no words for "owner," so difficult for a translator to find one. But they could express ownership for these small things at least -- the preposition na for example (or sometimes no), meaning 'belonging to.' [4] But this was not used. Instead, the agreement promised to protect only the unqualified exercise of chieftainship, something not available to "all the people of New Zealand," even if they do get a mention, but only to those of that status. Only chiefs
  • Clause 3, however, does promise to "protect all the ordinary people of New Zealand," and to "give them" the "same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England." Not recognise rights, which is how it should have been written, but give them, which makes them a political gift -- the gift of those who do exercise sovereignty by this treaty: the governor and the chiefs. So by then, the damage is done -- and those with "a decisive and self-interested role in controlling shifts in the interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi" are now able to interpret this not as a promise of individual rights (since earlier clauses and the preamble take precedence), but instead as the chiefs essentially holding the rights of their people in trust, with the governor "being or becoming a 'father' for the Māori people." And "this attitude has been held towards the person of the Crown down to the present day, shaping (according to the self-interested neotribalists who now interpret these things) "the continued expectations and commitments entailed in the Treaty." [2] 

It's evident from documents of the time that the Colonial Office in London had not intended to lock Maori up into that pre-existing tribal structure. Their intention was, as that last clause almost says, to recognise the same rights in every Maori as were enjoyed by all British citizens. But the treaty's wording and practice has essentially limited those rights while elevating chiefly status. It's the chieftainship, stupid. In other words: the problem is failing to properly recognise and to protect individual rights -- and instead to protect and nurture the status of those tribal leaders.

Is it any wonder today's tribal leaders favour the perpetuation of the tribal structure? Any surprise that the feudal structure continues? Or that today's neotribalists wish to continue benefiting from their feudal privileges of the past? With the government as "father" and taxpayer as today's serf ...

Poor drafting, poor treatment

Without a doubt, government and settlers often treated Maori poorly in those early days. But the biggest structural harm was the failure to properly recognise them as individuals instead of as part of a tribe. By treating all Maori as part of a collective, there were few chances offered to change this trajectory. The poor draftsmanship of this treaty is reflected in the poor treatment of Maori in those early days.

As a rights-respecting commentator says of the treatment of native Americans in the United States of America, "it could have been done in a more rational way, a much more rights-respecting way, and in a way that would have led to a lot less violence at the end of the day." (Later quotes are from this same source.) It could have been done here in a way that recognised Maori as individuals, with individual lives, rights and choices. But for the most part, it didn't.

Yes, colonisation here was far less violent here than in Australia, or in the Americas. And thank goodness for that: It was still not entirely peaceful, but in the Americas and Australia it was savage -- particularly if you think of how the British treated the Aboriginals in Tasmania, or the Spaniards treated the natives of South America. And in the case of America itself, "the American government made treaties with the Indians and then reneged on them whenever it was convenient to do so." [5]

Not so much here, at least. The treaty signed here was offered with the best of intentions, but the poorest of drafting. It barely lived up to the intention, and the neotribalists now exploit the drafting.

But the biggest mistake, the biggest ongoing tragedy -- there, as here -- is that the respective governments did not treat either Indians or Maori as individuals possessing rights. They treated them instead just as members of a tribe. Of a collective. Not as individuals with their own individual rights demanding recognition and protection, but as members of a tribe whose chief no longer held the power fo life and death, but still held the power of property, and of making choices for them all.

And therefore [in the United States] all the deals, all the negotiations, were between the U.S. Government and a tribe -- a tribe who was fundamentally a collectivistic unit that was oppressing its individual members. And what the American government in my view should have done was in a sense annex the Indians into America, recognised their innate individual rights (the fact that every Indian like every human being on the planet has individual rights), protected those individual rights under the law, divvied up the property of the tribe among individuals (let American Indians own their own land, not just give it and have the tribes own reservations; the whole idea of reservations was a horrific idea). 
They should have basically integrated Indians into American society: by treating them as individuals, by endorsing individualism among the Indians.
And then, if the Indians then wanted to get together and live in a commune, then so be it.  But the American government's position should have been: "We are dealing with you as individuals. Here is your land; here is John Smith's land; here is somebody else's land... If you want to now unite those lands and do some collective-type stuff then that's your problem. But here's the benchmark: 'We're a country of individuals. That's the principle'." 
And instead, they didn't do that. There was a lot of racism and there was a lot of just treating them as a collective and, as a consequence, slaughtering whole villages and so on. 
Now, that is not to say that there weren't a lot of American Indians (and a lot of indigenous people around the Americas) who were very violent and needed to be dealt with violently. I'm not criticizing violence when it was motivated by self-defense.
    I am however criticizing violence when it was not necessary for the defense of the European immigrants or settlers, and there was basically an attempt just to you know annihilate certain indigenous peoples. 
And again that happened more in Latin America than it did in the United States America. But it happened here as well. So you know it's a tragic part of history and to some extent inevitable because it seems to happen whenever a kind of a civilization encounters barbaric tribes, barbaric peoples, that inevitably lands up in a physical violent struggle.
    I think that particularly in the United States of America it could have been done in a more rational way, a much more rights-respecting way, and in a way that would have led to a lot less violence at the end of the day. [5]

Same here.

The tragedy is that in the United States, when the idea of individualism was in its ascendancy, Indians were treated as tribal because they were considered less than human. The results were often brutal. Yet as ideas changed, and Britons began to realise that non-Britons were human too -- as the anti-slavery movement won its battles and organisations like the Aboriginal Protection Society became influential -- by then the idea of individualism itself had become less powerful, and the impulse instead was to protect indigenous populations in their tribal structures. To protect them not as individuals but (in today's common phrase) as "members of their tribal community." The result was less immediate harm, but the cause of much long-term damage -- most especially the perpetuation of the tribal structure.

Could it all have been different? Yes. Yes, of course it could. But shaming today's New Zealanders by the actions of people in the past is not primarily about history -- the shaming of New Zealanders today is intended simply to precede and encourage their ongoing shakedown tomorrow. That's the effect of today's neotribalism: to put taxpayers on the hook for the perpetuation of this chiefly privilege.

In this new postmodern neo-tribal age, history doesn't provide lessons from the past so much as an arsenal full of weapons. The neotribalists, and their enablers, are happy to pick them up and use them.

NOTES: 
1. Elizabeth Rata, '‘Marching through the Institutions’: The Neotribal Elite and the Treaty of Waitangi,' Sites (December 2005)
2. James Heartfield, The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909 (London, 2011) p. 126
3. Te Tiriti: Translation of the te reo Māori text by Hugh Kawharu
4. Raymond Firth, Economics of the New Zealand Maori (Wellington 1972), pp. 338-366 passim
5. Yaron Brook, 'Q: To what extent was the European treatment of the indigenous peoples of America immoral?' www. Peikoff.Com (3 August 2015)

UPDATE:
Peter Winsley has a different view, arguing that "Article Two transfers Magna Carta and English common law property rights to Māori. "


These tino rangitaranga rights over land and other properties (taonga) were given explicitly to individuals and whanau as well as chiefs and tribes...
Treaty of Waitangi settlements have so far focused on iwi or hapu on the assumption that these collectives will act for all their members. What is lost sight of is that individuals are specifically mentioned in Treaty Article Two, yet Treaty settlements have not been made to individuals. In a future post, this issue will be discussed...
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Monday 3 February 2020

Mike Moore, 1949-2020



On Labour: "It was Nye Bevan ... who said that Labour used to be the cream of the working class. Now it is an intellectual spittoon for the middle class."
~ from his valedictory speech, 1999

"We're full now of people with [an] upper-class nature, [from] private schools, who now lecture to us [working-class people] about what we should do. I find that very funny."
    ~ from the 2017 interview for The Ninth Floor

"How many of those people on Country Calendar do you think vote Labour now? ... Because we’re not seen to be on the side of those who are strivers. I do think we’ve got trouble.”
    ~ from the interview for The Ninth Floor

On leaving parliament: "My friends wanted the best for me, and my enemies wanted to see me go. For once, I was able to please everyone. At last, I enjoyed the total support of my party."

On foreign investment: "The central purpose [of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment] is to ensure that foreign investors are not the subject of discriminatory or xenophobic behaviour on the part of governments in the host country... This is not a new wave of colonisation or the rise of corporatist world government. The Agreement is designed to PROTECT and ENCOURAGE foreign investment because it is such investment that has helped fuel global economic growth and the increasing globalisation of wealth... The MAI will be of the greatest long-term benefit to developing nations."
    ~ from his 1997 recommendation on the agreement to the Labour caucus 

On globalisation: "When the Berlin wall came down, when Nelson Mandela was freed, and when freedom has flourished elsewhere, the world celebrated. We celebrated the universal values of political and economic freedom. No one shouted, cursed and swore about the evils of globalization or common values then."

On poverty: "Poor countries need to grow their way out of poverty. Trade is the key engine for growth... Open markets can play an important role in lifting billions of people out of abject poverty...
    "Liberalisation works. The multilateral trading system works. The last 50 years have seen unparalleled prosperity and growth and more has been done to address poverty in these last 50 years than in the previous 500."
    ~ from a 2001 speech as Director-General of the WTO

On freedom: "The more closed the economy, the more corrupt the practices.... We have learnt that freedom works, and as it grows, so do people’s living standards... "
    ~ from a 2002 speech as Director-General of the WTO

On peace and free trade: "Internationalism and globalisation will be to the 21st Century what Nationalism was to the 20th Century. Thus mankind has learnt the most profound lessons of this century from the great depression and the second world war."
    ~ from a 1997 address by Moore to a seminar on “International Liberalisation”

On Keynesianism: “The lesson of the last 25 years tells us that no individual country can anymore successfully prime an economic pump, even Mitterand discovered this in the 80s when, by priming the French pump, all he did was flood his country with imports from Italy and from Germany. He reversed that position."
    ~ from a 1997 address by Moore to a seminar on “International Liberalisation”

On protectionism: "The 1987 stock market crash was greater and deeper than the Wall Street crash of the 20s. But, the world did not plunge into lasting depressions. Leaders nerves held, there wasn’t an orgy of protectionism and tariff increases which exacerbated the 20s crash... We got through it, we have learnt.”
    ~ from a 1997 address by Moore to a seminar on “International Liberalisation”

On global institutions: "The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have unearned reputations born of the Cold War of being anti-poor, anti-developing countries. The opposite should be the truth. [But] no one believes that any more, except a few deranged misfits on the edges of obscure universities, people who tuck their shirts into their underpants, the remnants of pressure groups and a few geriatrics who claim that Marxism, like Christianity, has not been tried yet.”
    ~ from his 1998 book A Brief History of the Future: Citizenship of the Millennium

On betrayal: "In the end, it's the silence of your friends you remember, not the misdeeds of those who dislike you."
    ~ from the 2017 interview for The Ninth Floor

On Moore: "Mike Moore was like the opposite of L&P: world-famous, just not in New Zealand."
    ~ attributed to Jane Clifton

Here's John Lennon:





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