INDEPENDENT NEWS

Dump the Treaty

Published: Sun 17 Oct 1999 02:40 PM
POLICY RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
"The Treaty of Waitangi has become an instrument of apartheid and should be dumped." That is the view of Libertarianz leader and broadcaster Lindsay Perigo, and that is the policy of his party, reconfirmed today. "It is touted as the founding document of the nation," he says, "yet it was never intended to have such a grandiose status and should not be accorded it now."
"As a founding document, it is woefully inadequate. There is too much that it doesn't say, and what it does say is capable of contradictory interpretations. These ambiguities have permitted the creation of a grievance gravy train costing thousands of millions of dollars and engendering the very tribalism, apartheid and racial hatred the original treaty was intended to avoid."
"The document that was supposed to render all of us British subjects, with the rights & privileges thereof, is now being invoked to implement apartheid - with the explicit sanction of the Minister of Justice. The Treaty that did bring peace in 1840 has raised the spectre of civil war in 2000."
"This must stop. There is no point in repairing to the Treaty - it is ambiguous, however clear the signatories may have been as to what they were signing - and it raises questions which ultimately, in terms of the Treaty itself, are unanswerable."
"It is time to set all of this aside and not to relitigate the past, time to put a REAL founding document in place. Libertarianz propose to do exactly that by introducing a new constitution that supersedes the Treaty of Waitangi & any other quasi-constitutional documents."
Watch this space.
ENDS

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