Key points from National Party Leader, Dr Don Brash: Orewa Rotary Club, Auckland, 7.30pm Tuesday, January 27, 2004.

• What sort of nation do we want to build?


• Is it to be a modern democratic society, embodying the essential notion of one rule for all in a single nation state? Or is it the racially divided nation, with two sets of laws, and two standards of citizenship, that the present Labour Government is moving us steadily towards?


• The spirit of the Treaty of Waitangi was expressed simply by then Lt-Gov Hobson in February 1840. In his halting Maori, he said to each chief as he signed: He iwi tahi tatou. We are one people.


• It should not matter whether you have migrated to this country and only recently become a citizen, or whether your ancestors arrived two, five, 10 or 20 generations ago.


• We need to look at our past honestly, not through a lens which projects current values onto 19th century New Zealand, and not by stripping away the context of the past. Over the last 20 years, the Treaty has been wrenched out of its 1840s context and become the plaything of those who would divide New Zealanders from one another, not unite us.


• In parallel with the Treaty process and the associated grievance industry, there has been a divisive trend to embody racial distinctions into large parts of our legislation, extending recently to local body politics. In both education and healthcare, government funding is now influenced not just by need – as it should be – but also by the ethnicity of the recipient.


• Parliament unwittingly created a new concept – the “principles of the Treaty”. But these principles were never defined – nobody had a clue what they might be. Thus, an accident of litigation, which related to a specific provision in a piece of economic legislation, and the Court’s attempt to make that legislation work without adequate guidance from Parliament, ended up by providing a basis for building an entire constitutional relationship between Crown and Maori.


• Local government now also has statutory obligations with respect to the undefined principles of the Treaty. The anachronism of the Parliamentary Maori seats (created as a temporary device in 1867 when tribally-organised, rurally-based Maori still formed the bulk of the Maori population) is now being extended by Labour to include local government.


• Under the foreshore and seabed proposals, the Labour Government will give Maori the right of veto. Under the proposals, Maori can now be owners, managers and regulators, all at the same time, thereby ensuring their own developments can succeed.
They can block others if they can show to sympathetic authorities that their customary right is adversely affected. It is astonishing that the Government could establish such a conflict-ridden model. It is an absolute recipe for disaster.


• The Treaty is not some mystical document. It is not a blueprint for building a modern, prosperous, New Zealand. The Treaty did not create a partnership: fundamentally, it was the launching pad for the creation of one sovereign nation.


• We should not use the Treaty as a basis for creating greater civil, political or democratic rights for Maori than for any other New Zealander. In the 21st century, it is unconscionable for us to be taking that separatist path.


• These are crucial issues for the future of our nation. Unless they are dealt with properly, they will ultimately undermine the very essence of what it means to be a New Zealander.


• National is absolutely committed to completing the settlement of historical grievances. We will ensure that the process is accelerated and brought to a conclusion.


• National will remove divisive race-based features from legislation. There can be no basis for special privileges for any race, no basis for government funding based on race, no basis for introducing Maori wards in local authority elections, and no obligation for local governments to consult Maori in preference to other New Zealanders.


• We will remove the anachronism of the Maori seats in Parliament.


• We will deal with the foreshore issue by legislating to return to the previous status quo – the settled legal situation before the Court of Appeal decision. That is a position where for the most part the Crown owned the foreshore.


• A National Government will continue to fund Te Kohanga Reo, Kaupapa Maori, Wananga and Maori primary health providers – not because we have been conned into believing that that is somehow a special right enjoyed by Maori under the Treaty, but rather because National believes that all New Zealanders have a right to choice in education and health.


• We must build a modern, prosperous, democratic nation based on one rule for all. We cannot allow the loose threads of 19th century law and custom to unravel our attempts at nation-building in the 21st century.

Cut and pasted from nationals website ( just giving credit so no copyright laws are infringed yadda yadda)