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Michael Watt's avatar

A wonderful explanation of what most of us believe to be the best form of Government for New Zealand.Democracy must trump co-governance.

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Ron Segal's avatar

Thanks Gary for bringing David Lange's very pertinent speech to our attention. How ironic, given the last Government in particular, for a Labour PM to voice such a diametrically opposite of woke, 'the Treaty means nothing to me'. Although clearly this is not quite right at least in the sense that if those Maori chiefs had not agreed to British sovereignty, the British might well have left NZ to the French.

Other than that what stands out to me is: "The treaty is a wonderful stick for activists to beat the rest of us with, but it could never have assumed the importance it has without the complicity of others." It is complicity of others, in which passive is almost as bad as active, that is in my view the biggest danger to our democracy. The nation has become too accustomed to a tilted democratic playing field, which is now perceived as the norm. Only a counter social re-engineering effort of some sort will be able to fix that. Perhaps, irrespective of their reality, a "principles" debate would be a damn good start.

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