By Dieuwe de Boer

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I supported the treaty principles being put forward by ACT because the treaty is a liberal document. The abstraction of the treaty into universal liberal rights was inevitable and a natural consequence of how great men of the past like Rev Henry Williams and Sir Āpirana Ngata viewed the document.

The principles agreed to by cabinet take us back from that precipice. The first and third principles remain identical in substance, although more verbose. If these principles are put into law, then engaging with the treaty in the 21st century requires all activists to acknowledge that the government is legitimate and it has the right to govern this country and make laws.

Principle two has been modified to recognise that iwi and hapū have specific rights that the treaty sought to protect, and that laws, settlements and other agreements can be made. This is a big change from individualising self-determination (tino rangatiratanga) to all New Zealanders. This is probably going to upset a lot of people who wanted the liberal principles to kill off any legal recognition of native tribes as having a special place in New Zealand law.

I believe this is a positive development because it cuts judicial activism out of the picture. It entrenches the fact that iwi/hapū and the executive are directly responsible for negotiating settlements for historic grievances that stem from the treaty. They should not be bound by any presumption of partnership or interference from the judiciary. This fixes many problems while enabling each iwi to work on their ambitions for greater autonomy at a local level.

Don Brash from Hobson’s Pledge has referred to this as a “nasty surprise”, saying this principle “would entrench the race-based rights that we were hoping that this bill would do away with”.

I will say something controversial and maybe I will get in trouble for it, but allow me to explain. I believe in race-based rights, at least a little bit.

David Seymour speaks of New Zealand as a diverse, modern, liberal and multi-ethnic society at every opportunity he gets. This is seen as the pinnacle of liberalism, where all humanity is one big blob of economic units and every land an economic zone farmed for GDP.

I oppose that with every fibre of my being. A nation is a people with something in common. A shared history, culture, ancestors, religion and many other things. Two distinct peoples can share a nation in a union or confederacy and there is no need for conflict between us. The descendants of the Anglo-Celts who built this nation have every right to be recognised and protected in law as well as Māori. They shouldn’t be slowly reduced to a minority in their own country by liberal immigration policy.

Can you complain about the Islamisation of Europe or the Great Replacement of European people in their own lands without believing in some inevitable form of laws based on race, even if only border policy? For the Māori, this is the ‘Great Replacement 2.0’, having already lived through becoming a minority in the land of their ancestors. They are now being displaced again through mass migration while trying to maintain their ethnic distinctiveness from Anglo-Celtic New Zealand, which is in turn being replaced with rootless multi-ethnic globalism.

I’m sure most of the people coming in are nice people, but that doesn’t make the government’s policy of ethnic replacement in New Zealand today morally correct. In Auckland we’re now treated to weekly news articles of ‘hate-motivated’ attacks in public. The perpetrators are always Māori and the victims are Chinese or Indian. Part and parcel of living in a big city? At some point they’ll simply stop reporting on it, but that won’t mean the problem has gone away.

Settling the treaty principles and closing the borders need to go hand-in-hand if we want to embrace the ‘two people one nation’ solution that has been proposed.

Originally published in Right Minds.