1/9 'Don't listen to Julian Batchelor, he's not an expert. Don't listen to me, I'm not an expert. Go to the experts.' These rare & precious words were spoken by Pere Huriwai-Seger, at the last meeting of the Kaipara District Council. The meeting was a shambles.
2/9 If you order clowns, you get a circus. The circus started when Julian Batchelor addressed the council. Mayor Craig Jepson claimed Batchelor had approached him & asked to speak, but Huriwai-Seger showed the meeting an e mail that proved Jepson had invited Batchelor.
3/9 & Jepson's friend Clive Boonham spoke at the last meeting, using research provided by that noted scholar, Don Brash. Batchelor says that there's a 183 year old conspiracy to hide the true Treaty. Bonham says that the Treaty lost any legal relevance in 1840.
4/9 As Huriwai-Seger told the meeting, Batchelor has repeatedly claimed that Paul Moon supports his ideas. But Moon along with other experts has spoken out against, indeed ridiculed, the idea that a secret Treaty that was discovered in a Pukekohe attic in 1989.
5/9 Boonham says the Treaty lost all importance after Hobson declared sovereignty over NZ. But British administrators like Attorney General William Swainson & James Busby talk constantly about abiding by & implementing the Treaty in the early 1840s. So does the Colonial Office.
6/10 Boonham committed the ultimate absurdity when he quoted a Waitangi Tribunal report in an effort to prove the Treaty had never been part of NZ's constitution. The Tribunal would not exist if that were so. But if Boonham isn't an expert, how do we identify someone who is?
7/10 I'm not an expert on the Treaty & constitutional law. I read Alan Ward's A Show of Justice & Jock Brookfield's Waitangi & Indigenous Rights to get more understanding of these fields. I'd define an expert as someone who relies on other experts. It's a question of method.
8/10Unlike Batchelor or Boonham, who ask us to trust them as guides to esoteric mysteries, Ward & Brookfield constantly acknowledge other scholars, & give their readers footnotes to follow.Ward & Brookfield's books can be dense & dry, but that's because of their respect for truth
9/10 An expert always relies on other experts. If Ward or Brookfield could have addressed the Kaipara council about the Treaty & NZ's unwritten constitution, they would have situated what they had to say within the body of research on these subjects, not acted like prophets.
10/10 The Dunning-Kruger effect is often discussed nowadays. It asserts that the more incompetent a person is, the less they will be aware of it.Stand up, Boonham & Batchelor. An expert is aware, often painfully, of the limits of our knowledge & the diversity of scholarly opinion
@Parmenides44 1/2 I'm not an expert on the 1840 and constitutional law stuff, so I can only defer to those who are, but I have studied the Waikato War deeply, & it's notable that those who want to extinguish the Waikato's independence, like Premier Domett, hate the TOW & want to disregard it.
@Parmenides44 2/2 On the other hand, those who have built up the Waikato Kingdom, like Wiremu Tamihana, refer to the Treaty as justification for their actions. That tells me that to powerful Pakeha & Maori, the TOW was seen in the 1860s as affording at least some Maori sovereignty.
@Mintando 2/2 So Ngata was no fan of Pakeha. & he would be condemned by Pakeha conservatives today - just as he was at the time - for his land development schemes, which were aimed specifically at Maori & aimed at strengthening them. I think Ngata would realise today he was too pessimistic
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1/5 Pacific history is always part of global history. When three young Niueans hacked their tormentor Cecil Hector Larsen to death in his bed in 1953, many palagi interpreted their act thru the prism of Kenya. The Mau Mau, they feared, had come to Niue.
2/5 I’ve been reading Caroline Elkins’ book to get a sense of the way the empire’s defenders were feeling in 1953. It’s hard not to find parallels between the dystopia Resident Commissioner Larsen ran on Niue & the Kenyan order the Mau Mau wanted to smash.
3/5 Today Niue’s prison rarely has more than a couple of guests. In 1949, tho, Larsen, who was judge jury & government on Niue, convicted 1,500 islanders of crimes. He put prisoners to work building roads, growing his food, & building him a golf course.
1/7 MAGA is melting down as the movement's lumpenproletarian base rages against tech bros' talk about American mediocrity & the superiority of migrant workers. I'm reminded of a story Tongan-based American sociologist Maikolo Horowitz told me about Trumpism.
2/7 Horowitz grew up in NYC's Trotskyist community; Allen Ginsberg was a playmate. Later he hung out with Warhol & Lou Reed & turned down a job managing the Velvets. He was too busy helping run legendary protest group Students for a Democratic Society.
3/7 He's spent most of the last 30 years in Tonga, & collaborated for many years with its great educationalist & philosopher Futa Helu. Horowitz used a memory of his SDS youth to illuminate the frustration & resentment that fuel MAGA.
22/30 No one familiar with the history of Aotearoa in the 1840s could take the bill's claims seriously. One only has to read William Colenso's notes of the discussions in Waitangi to see the absurdity of the idea that Maori surrendered all claims to sovereignty in 1840.
23/30 No chief talked about giving up sovereignty. Rangatira talked obsessively about the chaos & land loss caused by Pakeha settlers in the north, & the need for Hobson to control his people. But Act's bill is not about history. It is about psychology.
24/30 By pretending that Maori entered into a mystical union with two thousand Pakeha settlers in 1840 Act has created a sort of origin myth & psychic balm for Pakeha conservatives still unwilling to face the fact of Maori difference, & still in denial about colonialism.
1/30 Te Pati Maori's haka in parliament has been greeted with disgust, anger, & fear by many conservative Pakeha. Like Act's Treaty Principles Bill, this response to the haka is the expression of a massive, long-brewing identity crisis.
2/30 Since the 19thC Pakeha have shown an intense ambivalence towards Maori culture. Lacking a culture unique to these islands, we have alternately suppressed and appropriated Maoritanga.
3/30 During the wars of the 1860s Maori culture was dangerous. Wharenui were burned & wahi tapu systematically desecrated. By the end of the century, tho, Pakeha were turning to Maoritanga as they tried to define themselves.
1/4 Act could help settle the debate about the Treaty of Waitangi by republishing & circulating this little book by William Colenso, which contains his detailed notes on the speeches Maori chiefs made at Waitangi in 1840. But the debate wouldn't be settled the way Act wants.
2/4 Act claims the chiefs inexplicably ceded their sovereignty to a handful of Brits at Waitangi, but anyone who reads Colenso's notes will notice that the chiefs never mention doing that. Nearly all the korero focuses on the problems caused by settlers in the north.
3/4 Riotous behaviour by some settlers & the alienation of land are themes. It is very hard indeed to read Colenso's notes & not feel that the pro-Treaty chiefs wanted to empower Hobson to govern the settlers, not the rest of Aotearoa. That's why many Pakeha disliked the Treaty.
1/60 Martin Phillipps contained multitudes. He leaves an oeuvre that is vast & varied, & that can be interpreted in various ways. I see him as someone who extended & updated a distinctively Pakeha cultural tradition.
2/60 Like the music of Douglas Lilburn, the poems of Ruth Dallas, Charles Brasch & Allen Curnow, & the paintings of Bill Sutton & Rita Angus, many of Phillipps' best songs are powerful responses to the land & seascapes of southern NZ.
3/60 I'm not arguing that Phillipps was necessarily directly influenced by the names I've mentioned. He didn't need to be. He responds to the same landscape, is part of the same history, and dealt with the same dilemmas.