I see that the National Government has, according to Guyon Espiner, done a huge back down on the issue of mining in New Zealand, but is it just a diversionary tactic? Hide the pea under the other shell while they distract you with something else. In this case could the mining backdown could be seen as the magician's "beautiful girl assistant" (I say that because of a scene I remember from TV show 'The Mentalist')
Patrick Jane: I was thinking: why do magicians have beautiful girl assistants?
Dr. Linus Wagner: Why?
Patrick Jane: Because they're reliable distracters of attention. People will look at a beautiful girl for a long time before they look where they should be looking if they want to see how the trick really works.
In a magazine article, Dr Muriel Newman thinks that perhaps we should have been looking at what was going on in the other hand -
[A high profile diversion] was the tactic National used with the foreshore and seabed review, which was timed to coincide with the highly controversial mining review. As was to be expected, the mining review totally swamped media commentary, even though the mining proposal was targeting 7,000 hectares, while the government’s plans for the jewel in New Zealand’s crown - the foreshore and seabed - covers 10 million hectares and includes resources worth tens of billions of dollars.Newman also comments on the signing of the UN's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and how the National Party has invited the UN’s special rapporteur to come back to New Zealand for some back-slapping. She points out an open letter in the Dominion Post last month by Chris Trotter to National (which I must have missed but which can be read HERE) -
Interestingly, political commentator Chris Trotter, in an open letter to National Party members published in the Dominion Post last month, picked up on this theme, warning that moves to embrace Maori extremism that were afoot deep within the party organisation, could prove disastrous for National. He explained how in the 1980s radical Maori nationalists - led by the Harawira family - took over New Zealand’s most popular overseas aid charity, Corso, leading to its eventual demise. He went on to say, “If you, the members of the National Party, do not rouse yourselves, then your own, once proud, political brand will suffer the same fate as Corso's. Already, ideological extremism has driven thousands of your members out of the party. And now those same extremists, working hand-in-glove with radical Maori nationalists, are getting ready to tip both your government and your dramatically restructured party organisation into the same death spiral that destroyed Corso.”As regards "indigenous peoples", law lecturer and Treaty expert David Round explains -
There is, in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, one very surprising omission. Nowhere is there any definition of who or what exactly an indigenous person is. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that someone or something indigenous is ‘born or produced naturally in a land or region; native to that soil, region’. In that sense, all native-born New Zealanders are indigenous. We may speak a language and have a culture that developed elsewhere; but so did the first Maori when they arrived from the Hawaiki they still remember. On the other hand, if ‘indigenous’ is used to refer to a people whose ancestors have lived in a place from time immemorial, then New Zealand has no indigenous inhabitants.”Newman goes on to point out what I have posted on before; that there were other peoples here before Maori -
Archaeologists agree that humans first settled in New Zealand well over 1,000 years before the main Maori migration, which is estimated to have arrived around 1200 AD. Their evidence is based on the exhaustive forensic examination of historic plant and animal remains. They believe that the settlement of New Zealand was most likely a continuous process, a view that is certainly consistent with early settler journal accounts (from the proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand) which indicate that not only did Moriori precede Maori, but that when they arrived in the Chatham Islands, “they found the country in the possession of aboriginal natives called Hiti”- inhabitants of the “Flint age”, who used not stone, but “chips of obsidian as cutting implements.” There is also strong evidence of an early presence of people of Celtic and Chinese ancestry as well as Greek, French, Portuguese, Spanish and others - in addition to settlers of Polynesian descent.It should be noted here, this has also been proved as far as ash layer testing and the bones of rats brought to NZ, and this view was taken by the Archaeological Association Conference in 2002, as mentioned in this online article 'Academics Agree to Pre 1350AD NZ Settlement'
Despite the clear evidence, some archaeologists did not want to accept the story the bones told: that the accepted theory of human settlement in New Zealand from AD1200-1300 was incorrect. The method of ash layer dating was vigorously attacked, but intensive retesting found it to be sound. A vote at the 2002 Archaeological Association Conference was split – 27 voted for and 24 against early human arrival. There was eventually a majority consensus that humans had brought the rats to New Zealand in 100AD, but didn’t stay.So, if there are no clear indigenous peoples, I do not like the road of division that the Government seems intent on taking New Zealand down.