What does Hipkin's use of "New Zealand" imply?

Maori warriors

To begin with the title of this opinion piece, Christopher John Hipkins is a New Zealand politician who is serving as the 41st prime minister of New Zealand and leader of the left-wing New Zealand Labour Party since 2023.

As for the contents of this essay, a major failing of the work done by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada charged with reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of the country’s Indian Residential Schools — one of many — was its deliberate decision to use mainly carefully selected incriminating evidence only from Canada to build its case that our boarding schools uniquely caused untold damage to the children who attended them.

I refuse to make this same combination of factual and logical errors in my attempt to present not only an impartial picture of life in and the legacy of these schools but on all other indigenous issues as well, including treaty issues.

This is why I re-publish below an analysis of the way the treaty between the indigenous Maori people of what became New Zealand and its colonial conquerors has been deliberately misinterpreted in recent years by woke politicians and others zealots in the same way and with the same racially divisive consequences as the treaties signed with our Canadian indigenous people.

Part of this comparison requires posting the entire contents of the very short Maori treaty, an agreement that resembles our own treaties in their purpose, content, and consequences, no surprise because the same British Crown was the colonial power in both cases. The main difference is that the Maori treaty was signed in 1840, years before the first numbered treaties negotiated with Canada’s aboriginal peoples. More important still, it contains no provision for indigenous land reserves.

This opinion piece was written by Don Brash, New Zealand’s Reserve Bank Governor from 1988 to 2002, and National Party Leader from 2003 to 2006, and was published on January 27, 2023. It is re-posted here with his kind permission.

It needs to be read alongside the following related March 12, 2023 post that I previously made freely available to all readers:

BREAKING: Maori ‘ways of knowing’ are not science, says Richard Dawkins