Old rich man, Don Brash, arch-advocate of private property rights, on Q+A arguing against the property rights of iwi because they’re Maori. He says we shouldn’t have race-based ownership.
No-one’s arguing for that. Only the Right are making this about race. Iwi are arguing for the contract they signed with the Crown to be honoured.
Whether they can, in fact, establish that the property rights they are asserting under that contract exist is an evidential matter but there ought to be no objection in principle to the terms of a Treaty being honoured.
In fact, you would think a rightwinger would be the first to support that. But they don’t, because the truth is that all their talk about protecting property rights is actually about protecting the privileges of the existing elite.
Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this: if this was a big (preferably foreign-owned) corporation saying ‘we own the rights to the water in this river and if you want to use it, you’ll have to deal with us’, would the Right being crying foul or would they shrug their shoulders and wait to see what the judicial process finds?
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