Confiscation

That's what the foreshore and seabed confiscation looks like in practice. A single side A4 on Ministry of Justice letterhead addressed to no-one in particular and pp-ed by whoever. Reminding the Maori who were about to have their customary rights determined by the Maori Land Court that what minute hollowness of rights might have come out of the first confiscation law in 2004 will now be shifted to the High Court under the new confiscation law where it continues its government directed course of evaporation. Aided and abetted this time by the Maori Party.

And the claimants have to go to Wellington to do this on 16 June. Oh and by the way they've only got a week's notice to tell the Court if they can't make it. Great. And that's justice? Customary rights involve whanau and hapu groups of which the named parties represent many individuals - they have less than a week's notice to get it all together, get all the lawyers sorted, get the memos filed and then traipse off to Wellington... to get... basically, nothing.

That's what Maori land rights are to the Crown - next to nothing and always less than the rights of non-Maori. The NZ government - its officials and institutions, operations and laws - still assume its role is to extinguish rather than recognise Maori rights. This is the reason the NZ government is in continuing breach of the Treaty of Waitangi and has not been fit to hold a Crown franchise since the 1860s. The hostilities are unabated. The encroachment is a permanent feature of the Crown in NZ.

Section 122 of the 2011 CMCA? That relates to: Persons breaching regulations or bylaws may be directed to stop - nothing to do with customary rights orders. So that's wrong. But who cares, eh. It's only justice for them, so who cares that it isn't the right section, that there's only a week's notice? Not the NZ Ministry of Justice. Whoever it is at the High Court deciding the fate of indigenous customary rights with such casual bureaucratic incompetence must really mean section 125:So - not section 122, it's 125. Morons.

It's all a cruel game and the umpire is playing on the opposing team. That's why most Maori groups boycott being run through these sheep pens and refuse to acknowledge the laws or co-operate with the officers of the Crown in the undermining of their own patrimony. That's why other solutions must be found to the problem of the NZ government. If there is no hope in going through or with the Crown to achieve justice and recognition of that guaranteed by the Treaty, then going over the top of and past the Crown must be a live option.