After a mere handful of months on the Waitangi Tribunal, former Labour Minister and Act Party Leader Richard Prebble CBE has resigned. His appointment was controversial to say the least with Radio New Zealand reporting that Labour’s Willie Jackson described Prebble’s appointment as "unbelievable" and "a kick in the guts" for Māori.
Prebble’s resignation was announced via his New Zealand Herald column in sensational fashion and clearly in an attempt to create impact he felt he couldn’t achieve on the Tribunal.
“I will not participate in turning the Treaty into a socialist manifesto,” he wrote in explaining his rapid exit.
He has since described his horror in reviewing strategic documents that chart a path for the Tribunal that is not only counter to the current Government’s mandate, but which he believes is Marxist and will lead to exacerbating grievance culture and racial tensions.
If the cultural elites in our institutions were incensed by his appointment, Prebble’s resignation opinion piece has sent them apoplectic. They swung into action to discredit and abase the former minister immediately.
Leading the charge was Dame Anne Salmond whose piece for Newsroom was headlined: ‘To lecture us on Te Tiriti, you must first be able to read it’. And subtitled:
What does it say about our country that politicians and ex-politicians are instructing New Zealanders on a document on which they are literally illiterate.
The elitist snobbery that says only certain people are 'expert' enough to read the Treaty or have an opinion on it is classist gatekeeping and seeks to tightly control the narrative. The absolute disdain they have for anyone who doesn't agree one hundred per cent with their views on te Tiriti o Waitangi is plain to see.
Not that they would enjoy me putting it in these terms, but these cultural elites see themselves as the modern cultural equivalent of the magisterium of the Catholic Church. That is the church's authority on the interpretation of the word of God. The truth is only accessible through them; the enlightened.
Dame Salmond’s Newsroom piece is littered with edu-speak and Wellington kaupapa kōrero. She asserts herself as the authority and denigrates an accomplished politician and lawyer as “illiterate”. It is with brazen gall that she positions herself as the reasoned and enlightened party with no apparent awareness of the irony of calling for “calm” while throwing out insults. Dame Salmond writes:
“It is regrettable that some politicians and ex-politicians in New Zealand take it upon themselves to instruct their fellow New Zealanders about Te Tiriti o Waitangi, when they lack even the most basic qualification – that is, the ability to read it. Their accounts are quite literally, illiterate.They are distorting a debate that needs to be calm, impartial and well-informed, and are inciting racist ill will.”
Richard Prebble was a Labour MP (including a minister) from 1975-1993 (18 years) and an ACT MP from 1996-2005 (9 years). He has a double degree in law & history.
According to Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka, since leaving parliament, Prebble has provided pro bono advice to various Māori trusts, hapū, and iwi on a variety of issues. He is married to Māori journalist/producer Ngahuia Wade and lives near Rotorua.
Despite the mass mud-slinging from academic and media elites who say he is not qualified to speak about the Treaty. He is, in fact, qualified in both education and experience. He has engaged with the Treaty, settlements, and the principles throughout his parliamentary career. He is not alienated from Māori culture and illiterate in that sense either. His life is intertwined with many Māori through his wife and others.
What the magisterium-style elites cannot stand is that he does not agree with the narrative that has been constructed around Māori not ceding sovereignty and the political movement propping up Matike Mai and He Puapua. They attempt to discredit people like Prebble because it is a threat to have qualified and educated New Zealanders deviating from the path these elites have carved through our unwritten constitution. They have to show that everyone who TRULY understands the Treaty and its history agrees with them. Everyone else is an uneducated racist buffoon. It is a strategy that betrays the weakness of their positions and their own lack of confidence in what they espouse.
The narrative being spun now is that Richard Prebble is an extremist. This is unhelpful, hyperbolic nonsense, but let's pretend for a moment it is true. One reason given to me was that he called for putting an end date to Treaty settlement claims back in 2004.
He did make these remarks in February 2004 when he was the leader of the Act Party and a member of Parliament: "When is this going to end? There are now 792 registered claims in front of the Tribunal."
However, he was in opposition and retired the next year. He did not write this opinion into law, but somebody else did. In 2006, after Prebble’s retirement, Helen Clark’s Government passed the Treaty of Waitangi Amendment Act which set a closing date of 1 September 2008 for lodging all historical Treaty of Waitangi claims and a target of resolving all historical claims by 2020. Obviously this was not achieved.
This Act was supported by her Minister for Māori Affairs Parekura Horomia who said:
"Treaty settlements strengthen the relationship between the Crown and iwi and lay the foundations for us to build a strong and confident sense of national identity, this Act is an important step in that process."
Helen Clark is surely far more of an extremist than Richard Prebble given her Government also passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004 that gave the Crown ownership of the public foreshore and seabed. Of course, John Tamihere was a key advocate for that law as part of the Clark Government so perhaps he is an extremist too.
It is convenient to cast Prebble as extreme and bigoted, but it is disingenuous. His views are widely held by New Zealanders and up until a handful of years ago were totally in line with what Māori experts were saying about the Treaty.
Activists nowadays not only go after naughty Pākehā politicians who speak out of turn. They will bulldoze over anyone who threatens the new aggressive approach to race relations in New Zealand that advocates for separate rights based on whether or not one has Māori ancestry. These activists are far from only Māori. As evidenced by Dame Salmond, Pākehā or New Zealand European cultural elites are among the quickest to issue edicts condemning who they consider to be deficient Tiriti partners.
The debate over the Treaty Principles Bill has revealed the degree to which institutions and elites despise any New Zealander who does not feed into the ‘correct’ narrative. None are more hated than David Seymour who inconveniently for elites actually has Māori heritage. Winston Peters and Shane Jones may not have supported the Treaty Principles Bill, but they too are treated as kūpapa (Māori who fought alongside the British in the Land Wars).
Most spectacular of all is the cut throat manner with which iconic Māori figures of the past have been stripped of mana in service of the cause. Sir Āpirana Ngata features on our fifty dollar note and until very recently was regarded by virtually everyone as one of Māoridom’s greats. As Winston Peters loves to remind us all, Rangatira Ngata completed his law degree in “two years flat,” was a prominent politician and Ngāti Porou leader.
However, Sir Ngata’s writings on te Tiriti o Waitangi are now woefully out of date according to the self-appointed arbiters of Treaty knowledge. He considered that Māori had ceded sovereignty and given he entered politics in 1897 he was much better placed to assess this.
Lawyer, and ex-wife of former Labour minister Kiri Allan, Natalie Coates somewhat awkwardly tried to correct and chastise the long-dead statesman in her oral submission for the Treaty Principles Bill. She answered a question from Green MP Tamatha Paul saying:
“Āpirana Ngata was a great man and a great statesman. But that doesn’t mean his views on the Treaty are correct.”
Ms Coates appeared to have quickly realised that her comments could be received poorly and backtracked into a rambling explanation of people dishonouring him by ‘weaponising’ his words. She then argues that rather than a Māori lawyer and Parliamentarian who was alive in the 19th century understanding the early stages of Māori/Pākehā relations, the ones who are correct are the current day academics and the “overwhelming amount of work that has been done since that time by historians, by academics, by an Independent Commission of Inquiry, by lawyers, by interpreters.”
New Zealand’s cultural elites cannot see their own arrogance. They cannot imagine that rather than being the pursuers of social justice and what is right, they are the powerful gatekeeping forces they rail against. Until New Zealanders become sufficiently fed up with being told they are ill-informed, uneducated, and unworthy of so much as discussing our country’s founding document, this will continue. This tyranny of the intelligentsia will continue to embed itself and even when the populace votes for change, as occurred at the last election, they will prevent it being enacted at all costs.
This article was reproduced with permission from Ani O'Brien's substack
Comment on this article at https://x.com/BrashHide539