Dear Ignorant people....

 

Talking about Maori as a nation isn't really accurate, there was never such thing as a Maori nation. Closest you could probably get was the group that signed the United Tribes Declaration of Independence in 1840. Maoridom is/was a collection of individual tribes hence the need to get all tribes as signatories to the Treaty.

 

treaty claims nowadays being a crock of sh*t - maori making claims on historic grievences, some example of land being taken off New Zelanader's who have worked tha land for 50+ years, gets given back to the iwi who let it fall into direpai not actually making anything of it -

 

personally, as much as I can admit that the iwi were completly ripped off by the Europeans, I don't see why the current population should be paying for it, they weren't my ancestors.

Link?

 

I once had a pretty bonkers Waitangi day in London - my boss (who was a mental, middle aged women who lived with plenty of cats) gave me a bottle of Champagne when I told her a bit about the day.  I then went out after work where at about 2 in the morning a girl walked up to me, said hi and then started grinding against me.  She then got on her knees in front of me and started sucking my fingers (which where down by my side).  By this stage of the evening I was completely out of money (in actual cash terms and in my bank account, although my pay went in at about 6am the following morning) but convinced I was on to a sure thing (how could you not get laid after an introduction like that????) I ditched my mates to go back to my new friends place.  Problem was that after my mates left, my new friend tells me that we cannot go back to hers as her ex husband is there baby-sitting their kids, but do I want to meet up tomorrow night?  Not really interested in the following night (I was an instant gratification kind of guy) I leave her then realise I am on the wrong side of a pretty large city with no access to money for about 3 hours.  I go walking to find a park to get some sleep in, and as I am walking down a deserted street, I walk past a phone box that is ringing.  With nothing better to do, I answer it where a european sounding girl tells me she is a live in nanny who is bored and ringing random numbers.  Obviously, I ask her what she is wearing, which leads to the most frenzied 15 minutes of phone sex I have ever experienced.  At one stage she inserted the phone inside herself.

 

I swear this is all true.

 

After that calmed down, we said our farewells and I pottered off into the night, killing time till I could get some cash out.  At about 6 I finally could, so I got a cab home, had a shower and headed back into the office for another days work.

 

I guess the reason for this story was to explain why I have mixed feelings about the idea of a London style Waitangi Day in NZ, and also why I get a strange tingling in my under-carriage everytime Feb 6 rolls around.  I guess it was also to encourage people to answer public telephones when they hear them ringing while drunkenly wandering the streets in the middle of the night.

 

Mods - feel free to edit/delete this if you do not think it is relevant to the topic.

 

KP wears a burbery blanket as a cape to Victory matches.  The latest in Aussie Casual.

 

 

She also said that!

 

The Court of Appeal (in the Ngati Apa case) ruled that Maori could apply to the Maori Land Court for a determination of whether an area of foreshore and seabed had been continuously held by a particular hapu/rohe/iwi since colonisation.  If there had ever been alienation of that land in any way (whether by explicit legislation, sale, conversion to freehold or other types of land interests, or other means) then the chain was broken and customary title couldn't be claimed.

 

The legal background is that unless something (direct and specific) happens to disrupt the customary ownership of that particular piece of land, then the indigenous rights to it which existed prior to colonisation continue under common law.

 

My recollection is that it was estimated that less than 4% of the national coastline could be the subject of such a claim.

 

By it's nature, only land that has been customarily and continuously used by the rohe/hapu/iwi could potentially be subject to a claim.  Arguably then, areas which are commonly used by the general public have not been customarily used and/or the lack of exclusivity means that customary title has not been continuously claimed by the descendants of the original owners.

 

Upshot being that it was really only a very small proportion of coastline AND it was coastline that wasn't widely used/accessed by the public anyway, which was capable of potentially being affected.

 

As it turned out, the government's enormous knee jerk reaction prevented a case even being brought to the Maori Land Court to consider, so we'll never know if such ownership did still exist in any areas.