It’s a pleasure to be back in Taranaki, the province where so much is positive about New Zealand’s energy resources and rural wealth.

And thank you, in your busy lives pre-Christmas, for taking time to come this afternoon.

These meetings are critical to the future of New Zealand’s politics. We are on a ‘Listening Tour’ because so much of what is happening in our country is being decided in Wellington without any concern for you, your family, your city and your province.

There has never been in our lifetimes such a serious combination of economic and social concerns.  Never has the twin, or dual, declining economic and social status of our country emerged so starkly on our horizon.

The last Government – Labour and New Zealand First Coalition

New Zealand is at a political, economic, and social inflection and how we respond now has never been so important. 

This week the Prime Minister said “when it comes to our coalition I will not rewrite history, cos’ actually I was proud of what we did so I am just going to stand by that principle”.

The Prime Minister is talking about the Labour New Zealand First Coalition Government of 2017-2020. 

She was very careful to make that statement because Labour won the 2020 election outright as a result of it. 

400,000 National Party voters chose Labour in 2020 because they thought, as Labour claimed, that Labour was responsible for the success of those three years.

And ‘there’s the rub’, to quote Shakespeare. 

In 2017 KiwiRail was dying a death by a thousand cuts before a New Zealand First Minister saved it.

We had a 2016 Defence Plan costed at $20billion without one cent having been budgeted. We had Air Force planes that the makers could not believe were still flying. A New Zealand First Minister turned that around, regaining respect from like minded friends.

Investment in the provinces in 2017 was so neglected that the rural roading fund had long since ended, and project after project had been rejected in favour of spending in the big cities. A New Zealand First Minister turned that around with the Provincial Growth Fund, and all-over New Zealand worthy projects were started that will be here 50 years from now.

Climate change activists had countless concerns publicised but it was a New Zealand First Minister who launched the Billion Trees plan, doing something practical about it.

By 2017 we had downsized a staggering hundred experienced frontline diplomats. And our overseas aid, in a Pacific vacuum, had sunk to the lowest in the whole of the OECD, heading to 0.21% of GDP.  The OECD target is 0.70%.  A New Zealand First Minister turned both those alarming trends around to regain our influence in our neighbourhood and the world. 

Actions speak louder than words.

In 2017 we faced an appalling decrease in frontline police numbers and local police stations, with a ‘catch and warn’ policy to disguise the lack of law enforcement resources. It was New Zealand First that demanded 1800 new frontline police be trained, and at the end of that programme, 2338 had been.

Today tens of thousands of people in New Zealand face capital losses.  You don’t hear of anyone talking about compensating them.  That’s why New Zealand First stopped Labour’s Capital Gains tax. New Zealand First opposed Labour’s one-way wind on this matter.

And when New Zealand First went into government, we demanded that minimum incomes be addressed.  We set the increased targets, not Labour. New Zealand First understands that for workers to be paid properly businesses have to be successful. 

And New Zealand First stopped Labour’s attempts to politically and socially re-engineer New Zealand’s democracy. We stopped attempts by Labour to assert that the Treaty of Waitangi was a partnership.  In our coalition discussions Labour knew that. 

Hence co-governance was not on Labour’s public agenda.

New Zealand First was an engine for good policies and a serious handbrake on bad ones.

In contrast look at the record of so many Labour Ministers.

Just one disaster after another.  Massively over promising, gravely underperforming.

That’s why the Prime Minister said this week “when it comes to our coalition, I will not rewrite history, cos’ actually I was proud of what we did so I am just going to stand by that principle”.

But she and her Labour colleagues didn’t do it. Yet they went to the 2020 election with all of the above New Zealand First achievements in their election publicity claiming them to be exclusively Labour’s work.

New Zealand 2022

In the last 2 years Labour’s serious shortcomings, when it comes to experience, common sense, and certainty have all been exposed.

Today New Zealand is in an economic and social crisis, most of it of the government’s own making. We have:

• A cost of living crisis
• A law and order crisis
• A cost of housing crisis
• A health services crisis
• A mental health services crisis
• An education crisis
• An energy price crisis
• A cost of rates rise crisis

Far too many New Zealanders, many in retirement, now face living in severe hardship.

Labour’s response of late puts one in mind of television advertisements, “but wait there’s more’. 

Except ‘the more’ is worse than when they started.

And day after day Ministers from the Prime Minster down are waving their hands like an Italian chef, burbling from some sociology class script their latest excuses which have all the levitation of a lead balloon.

Kiwis are seeing through it.

This week the Reserve Bank Governor repeated a warning that some of us have given for some time. 

He predicted a recession, and ‘the crowd went wild’, the media crowd that is.

Ladies and gentlemen, just like your home, or your business, if you spend more than you earn there will be a financial reckoning. Question, how come they don’t understand that?

The Reserve Bank admitted this week that it had printed too much money.

Of course, the Finance Minister called it ‘quantitative easing’, to make it palatable for you.

This is the same bureaucratic speak of the ‘Global Financial Crisis’, when everybody knows it was straight Wall St greed and fraud that wrecked so many economies including ours.

This is ‘Heath Robertson’ stuff.

Now you’re being told by both the Reserve Bank and the Finance Minister that you have to cut back spending. 

Do you feel that something is wrong here?  Because cutting back spending is exactly not what you will have to do.

Because you can’t.  And the reason is obvious. To you, but not them. 

Why? Because you’re going to be spending much more of your money, not on necessities, but much higher interest payments to foreign owned banks. 

In short, you’re going to be spending more not less, but on who and why.

Have you followed the politicians discussing this week’s Reserve Bank announcement?

Not one of them connected this serious discrepancy.  They all accepted that we had to tighten our belts. 

And the Finance Minister said Kiwis ‘know we’ve got their backs’.

‘And that the government had been ‘responsible and careful all the way through’.  Meanwhile Labour has been spending a billion dollars more each week.

Really? Excuse the language, but they are ‘pissing down your back and telling you it’s raining’.

Not one of them, reverting to ideological type, have any idea how we can rein back spending and yet keep our savings. 

‘Maorification’

Ladies and gentlemen, have you heard Radio New Zealand lately, or Television NZ? 

They’re not interested in the English language anymore. 

Their project is to, by stealth, ram down your throats any Maori name or title, accurate or inaccurate, the new co-governance lingo. 

Day after day they are changing departmental names, with all manner of unmandated language whether you like it or not. 

Before people can comprehend what is being said they first need to understand what’s being said. The everyday use of language is critical.

What we have is a comedy if it wasn’t so serious.

‘Waka Kotahi’ is a boat on the road. That perhaps explains the potholes.

Air NZ is now the ‘Waka in the sky’.  That perhaps explains the airfare increases.  A boat flight in the sky is expensive.

And if every government department and policy require an English translation of Maori words and phrases then how are John and Mary, or Hone and Mere, ever going to know what’s going on?

And we say Hone and Mere because the mass majority of Maori are not fluent in Maori.

The mass majority of ‘Maori’ are far less than half Maori in their ethnic makeup.  Yet despite this, false claims are made on the number of Māori in New Zealand. It’s not 14%.  It’s not 10%.  It’s not even 6%.

That’s why Labour changed the definition of a Maori for electoral purposes as long ago as 1975.  Before that, one had to be half Maori or more to get on the Maori roll. 

Since then, the only requirement is to ‘prove’ a Maori ancestor in one’s background’. That could be 1 part Maori in 512.

In New Zealand First, we respect your ancestry whatever it is.  If we have Maori in our background, we are proud of that.  If we have European, or Asian, or Pacifica in our background we likewise are proud of that.

We don’t disown it.  We don’t come to the idiotic conclusion that half of our persona has to live a life of despair and uncertainty trying to compensate the other half for events that happened long ago.

We are New Zealanders first.  It’s in our party’s name. Not second, third, fourth or thirty first, but New Zealanders first.

Unity not Division

We know that our country’s future is dependent on unity not division, on co-operation not conflict, on a shared future, not separatism, on one law for all, on one flag, on one person one vote, and every vote being of equal value.

That’s what we in New Zealand First believe democracy looks like.  What our predecessors strove to build in past decades – a work in progress, not always perfect, but where change is based on principle not prejudice.

All ethnic groups have differences but in New Zealand we share goals far more in common. 

Like safe affordable housing, an easily accessible health system, an all inclusive education system, and first world incomes.

That is what most Maori want above all else. And so do most of the rest of our population.

But that’s the last thing the Maori elitist are focused on.  Not for them the ordinary things for everyday people.

No, just one woke virtue signaling, impractical, demand after the other.

No wonder so many Maori don’t bother to vote.  Like so many other New Zealanders today, the political discourse has forgotten them.

Rewriting New Zealand’s Constitution

Which brings us to an issue, alarming and frightful, borne on political deceit and subterfuge. 

It is the attempt by Labour, the Greens, the Maori Party and others to rewrite this country’s constitution. 

To make divisive and destructive constitutional changes for which they never campaigned, and have no mandate.

A radical, elitist small group of Maori, supported by cultural fellow travellers, in and outside of Parliament, want the following.

• Two complete governments – one Maori, one non-Maori, (or all the rest).
• A new constitution based on their new interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi.
• Two justice systems – one Maori, one non-Maori, (or all the rest).
• A Maori court system where someone with a Maori ancestry who offends will be treated differently to non-Maori offenders.
• A change to our common law, built up over centuries abroad and back here, for a legal system based on Maori customs and practices (or Tikanga).
• A separate prison system - one for Maori, one for non-Maori, (or all the rest).
• All Department of Conservation land ownership and control to be moved to tribal authorities. A Department of Conservation with a new ‘Options Development Group’ who have recommended the full control and governance of DOC be Maori.
• Heritage New Zealand to reclassify any freehold or public land that has claimed Wahi-Tapu (something sacred) on it.
• The teaching of critical race theory to school children requiring the rewriting of Maori history where the Maori pupil is the victim and every other child the culprit. Put simply, ‘Maori are good – white people are bad’.
• Two separate health systems - one for Maori, one for non-Maori, (or all the rest). The Maori health and care system, funded by the taxpayer, to have veto rights and decision making over the whole health system.
• If a Maori and a non-Maori go into the healthcare system, same day, same time, the Maori is to be treated first.
• The renaming of all towns and cities, and places around New Zealand with a Maori name if not so named already.
• The change of our country’s name to Aotearoa despite it being a colonial construct and an insult to South Island Maori (Te Waipounamu).
• Every initiative from Local or Central Government to have a Maori construct.
• Five Waters, not three, all to be under the control and ownership of Maori.
• The abolition of full and final Treaty settlements – that is, not accepting that any settlement is full and final.
• That every new local body Councillor receive a government funded lecture on their Treaty of Waitangi obligations.

The present Labour Party is extremist.  This week they slipped an S.O.P from Mahuta, under urgency, to entrench parts of their Three Waters legislation - so that only a parliamentary majority of, not 51, but 60 percent is required to repeal it.

There has never been a political party in the past that has tried this constitutional decent.

To do this, without your support, without any electoral mandate, without ever campaigning on it, is breath-taking deception in the extreme. 

To learn that Labour was secretly working on this when they were in coalition with New Zealand First, is plain dishonesty.

Particularly when the Prime Minister claimed to have no knowledge of it. 

She denied knowledge of He Puapua, commissioned by Minister Mahuta in 2019, then the PM blithely said it wasn’t government policy. 

If the Prime Minister had no knowledge of it, then Mahuta should have been sacked. She wasn’t – because the Prime Minister did have knowledge of it. 

He Puapua, paid for by the taxpayer, was commissioned by the Prime Minister and Minister Mahuta secretly.

And the reason for the secrecy is that the PM, and her team, had to get their cultural re-engineering ducks all lined up.

This is why there has been a full-scale attack using their revisionist view of the Treaty of Waitangi.

That is why they are employing the Goebbels’ principle – if you are going to tell a lie, tell a big one - it’s more likely to be believed.

The Media

But first, Labour had to undermine the principle of the independence of the fourth estate – the media.  The government’s watch dog had to be muzzled.

Government business support packages were put in place to keep all manner of businesses going during the first COVID outbreak in 2020.

It was the right thing to do and that included the first financial package to the media.

However, Labour came to us with the second package in July 2020 and we immediately saw through it. 

Labour had a $75 million media package, that’s $25 million each year for the next 3 years, but no Cabinet paper or analysis to back it up.

New Zealand First saw it as our job to defend the taxpayer.  The whole process was totally unseemly.

We refused on the basis that we’d be accused of bribing the media as well as wasting the taxpayer’s money.

Labour was stopped, but behind our backs told the media owners that New Zealand First was the problem, and every media owner knows it.

Then immediately after the last election, Labour offered the media a $55 million package with hooks, and the media went for it - ‘hook, line, and sinker’.

Labour cynically called it the ‘Public Interest Journalism Fund’.

You get the money but only if you ‘promote the co-governance agenda, Maori demands, and their radical interpretation of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi’.

• And Labour made it clear they would be watching. In short, if media, having taken taxpayers money, don’t have enough ‘Maori content’, or are perceived to be flagging in supporting this cause, then government will demand the money back.
• Labour imposed further conditions. The media were not to present a point of view that opposed the government’s race-based agenda.
• The news must cover items supportive of the government approved narrative.   

That’s the media paid by you, not Labour, although you wouldn’t’ think it.

Which begs the question, if this is needed, or justified, why do we already have tax payer funded Maori Radio stations, and tax payer funded Maori TV? 

We were told back then that these were required for a Maori view. 

Either that is true, or Labour’s latest mainstream media buy off means billions of dollars have been wasted on Maori TV and Maori radio. 

Had we instead spent that money on Maori housing, for example, every Maori family could be in their own home today.

Treaty of Waitangi Revisionism

And Labour had to destroy the concept that the Treaty of Waitangi included Maori ceding sovereignty. They argue:  

• That the Treaty of Waitangi means the Crown could exercise governance over all European settlers ‘but the authority to control and exercise power over Maori stayed where it had always been, with the Iwi’.
• That the only interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi must come from Tikanga Maori and that any other interpretation is allowing ‘myth-making to perpetuate injustice’.
• That if the Crown did not acquire sovereignty under Tikanga Maori then the Crown could not acquire sovereignty over everything else.
  You see here how a sensitive concession in 1840 towards Maori is being twisted to be the primary feature of the Treaty, when it patently is not.
• They argue that any constitution New Zealand may have based on ceding sovereignty, is unstable, that ‘legal myth remains the basis for New Zealand’s constitutional structure.
• ‘this matters because it illuminates the type of thinking to post-facto legitimate and legalise Aotearoa New Zealand’s constitution’.
• ‘that constitutional reform in Aotearoa requires something transformative’.
• That ‘Aotearoa New Zealand needs a constitution that can reconcile the coming together of two peoples and legal orders and that can justifiably claim multi-cultural and multi-ethnic contemporary New Zealand’.
• That this should lead to ‘clear spheres for Maori jurisdictional autonomy and self determination’.
• That this will see ‘distinctively Maori areas, including territories currently in the conservation estate such as rivers and mountains, to come under exclusive Maori authority’.
• The same for health and criminal justice, and
• This will lead to ‘enforcing the Treaty over legislation and executive authority’.

This is the work of the He Puapua Report architects, started by Labour.

The Prime Minister and Labour will deny all this is happening and being paid for by taxpayers’ money.

They are not telling you the truth.

This week a taxpayers subscribed conference, titled Constitutional Korero (talk) occurred at Auckland University.

It’s theme ‘Transforming New Zealand’s Constitution’.

It’s basis ‘How New Zealand might realise it’s obligations in the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ – ‘in particular the illegitimate means by which sovereignty was asserted over Aotearoa and the ongoing effects of colonisation’.

The Honourable Nania Mahuta was Zoomed in as their 9 am speaker, last Tuesday morning, day 2 of a 3 day Conference.

Speakers from all over the world were invited. 

No doubt nearly all of them paid for by taxpayers in this country or abroad.

Ladies and gentlemen, when do you suppose the Prime Minister was going to tell you about this?

Labour’s Raced Based Social Revolution

The truth is we are facing a race based social revolution.

Much of it is in secret.

And it is an affront to the rule of law and to human values.

It is contrary to the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, which New Zealand signed up to as long ago as 1972.

It is contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states:

‘all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set out therein, without distinction of any kind, in particular as to race, colour or national origin’

As the brilliant black law graduate from Harvard, Thomas Sowell, said: ‘Racism does not have a good track record.  It’s been tried out for a long time and you’d think by now we would want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management’.

Court of Appeal Lands Case 1987

As said in previous speeches, as early as 1987, co-governance and constitutional partnership, were never part of the Court of Appeals Lands case in 1987.

These revisionists claim that case is their authority, without a shred of proof.

Maori Chiefs 1840

The revisionists claim that the Treaty of Waitangi was about a universal franchise.

The idea that Maori Chiefs in 1840 had in mind a universal franchise, when the British and the world had never heard of it, is just farcical.

But the biggest insult is to the Maori Chiefs.

What these historical and legal revisionists are doing is demeaning their chiefly ancestors to justify their rewriting history. 

We say - Speak for yourselves but don’t debase our Maori ancestral Chiefs.

And then the legal excellence and cultural knowledge of someone far closer to the events of 1840, Sir Apirana Ngata, stands in their way.

Scholars like Sir Apirana Ngata, Sir Maui Pomare, Sir Peter Buck and indeed Sir James Carroll reading the Treaty of Waitangi, much closer to that event than these modern-day revisionists, accepted that the Treaty of Waitangi was, as Ngata put it:

• Indicative of complete session.
• That it was the transfer by the Maori Chiefs to the Queen of England forever of the government of their lands.
• And it is the absolute authority over the people which the article transmits into the hands of the Queen and Parliamentary Counsel.
• That the main purpose was the transferring of authority of the Maori Chiefs for making laws for their respective tribes and subtribes to the Queen of England forever.
  
  

It was the dawn of a new age, under one government, with equal rights, and special treatment for no-one.

Conclusion

Ladies and gentlemen – New Zealand has reached, sadly a tipping point.

If we continue down this pathway to separatism and raced based policies for everything then our future is certain, bleak and sad.

In a country so blessed with resources to help and feed all of us here, and tens of millions in overseas markets, we will have introduced 21^st century apartheid.

Any hope of equality and basic fairness in New Zealand will be lost.

Our claim to be God’s own country will end in a ‘South Pacific Animal Farm’ where some animals will be more equal than others.

And should that happen, the saddest victims will be the ordinary Maori, in whose name and fictitious number elitist Maori are making false claims.

Elitist Maori growing rich on their own people’s misery.

Look around the world.  You have seen this happen elsewhere. 

Political extremism, grinding poverty, and neglect of the many in stark contrast to a rich small elite.

We are asking you to act, right here, right now, in your busy lives, to nevertheless join our campaign to save our New Zealand, to stand up to defend what New Zealand was, is, and could be.

In the coming campaign there will be many imitations. The ‘me too’s’ trying to climb aboard our vehicle of protest, construction, and eventual victory.

Ask yourselves, when they belatedly try and echo New Zealand First’s message, are any of these other voices authentic?

Ask, what is their track record on these matters?

As the Good Book says “By their deeds you will know them”

Strident idealistic promises you have heard before.  They are worthless without commitment, resolve and determination to make such dreams a reality.

In New Zealand’s history there have been politicians of different persuasions who deserve our respect. For the improvements they delivered to ordinary people.  Richard Seddon, Peter Fraser, Holyoake and others.

They did what is most difficult in politics – they did what is Right

The next few months to election 2023 will go by swiftly.

Let us together make one outcome happen.

Don’t let the next election be about:

• ‘It’s our turn now’, or worse still
• ‘Let’s change, they can’t be any worse than the last lot’

Make sure the next election is not about Left or Right.

Let us together decide, that Election 2023 will be won by ’Right defeating Wrong’.

Good afternoon and thank you.