1995: The Travesty of Waitangi

April 4, 2024

By AHNZ

Stuart Campbell Scott (1920-1997) was one of the last of New Zealand’s Expeditionary Generation:  the adulthood generation during WW2. His contemporaries were the American “Greatest Generation,” Edmund Hillary, Robert Muldoon, Norman Kirk,  Brian Gerald Barratt-Boyes, Ruth Ross, Bill Pearson, Keith Sinclair, and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Their talent, intelligence, hard work, and attitudes built up our post-war country: “In the 1950s and 60s, New Zealand was one of the wealthiest countries in the world, awash with talent and virtually limitless natural resources.” Ref. everedgeglobal.com

RNZAF Warrant Officer Scott fought the Pacific War then came home to head the company presently called JSC that his uncle Jack and father George had built out of wood. Ref. JSC.co.nz

The opinions and attitudes of this Expeditionary generation were the Consensus throughout Scott’s adult and mid-life. Members of that generation by no means agreed on everything but they would have found Scott’s views quite recognisable and mainstream if not simply common sense. Courage, hope, patriotic pride, in-group preference, and national self-confidence are essential precursors to a thriving economy and strong society. We got rid of our old way to access those values and, sure as effect follows cause, our social and economic capital fell away as a result. By then Scott’s generation were almost too old or too dead to protest the changed direction. His book The Travesty of Waitangi (1995) was the exception: A call from a terminally ill 75yo Elder New Zealander not to abandon our past wisdom.

A very successful professional with 2 years to live, Scott could have rested the laurels of a triumphant life. His timber import/export business had done brilliantly, especially during the Fortress New Zealand era of import licensing, then sold in the late 80s.¹ He had been President of the Otago Chamber of Commerce and Associated Chambers of Commerce of New Zealand and for decades vice-consul for Denmark among the many other professional hats he wore. Scott had his wife (of Maori descent) and 4 children, had authored several books about his industry when he deiced to turn to face the wind of The Great New Zealand Clobbering Machine.

Can A Nation Go Mad?

Prince Philip Mountbatten was born just 1 year after Stuart Scott and by the end of his life in the 2020s had become a Politically Incorrect anachronism by the standards of the day. All the Prince did was make quips but Scott stuck his fork directly into the electrical power outlet. He wrote a whole book, and then another,² about what men of their era thought about the world around them. Neither man had become what they were accused of and shamed for. They were simply holding on to the established opinions and habits of a lifetime as an Outrage Industrial Complex entered their home and started trying to exile them. In earlier times both men were popular and normal, not mad. From their point of view it seemed everyone else had lost the plot.

“The intended audience for his kind of jokes went extinct a long long time ago. In his prime Philip was very very popular. So popular, in fact, that he appears to be responsible for an enormous boom in the world supply of people called Philip.” – 1947: Prince Philip, AHNZ

“Can a nation enter a period during which rational thinking at control level is abandoned and course of action lacking any sane justification are embarked upon without encountering effective obstruction or resistance from the populace?”

” By some extraordinary feat of mental legerdemain, the Maoris have captured the interest, the sympathy, and then the imagination of leaders in every sector of New Zealand’s social life. Politicians, church leaders, the Judiciary, university intellectuals, key cicil servants, all have come under the spell of Maoridom. Speaking in English, radio announcers must pronounce Maori place names as if speaking Maori, contrary to all international usage.” – Scott (1995)

A legally trained businessman, Scott was trying to grapple with the shifting norms and paradigms his country was changing into. The answer could be found in Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the Paradigm Shift in science, or Mass Formation in social psychology, or Robert K. Merton’s Deviance Typology in sociology. But what Scott had access to in order to explain madness in civilisation was his historical knowledge. German madness (“death camps” and “torture chambers”) became well-established after the War to that Scott’s generation would know they had been right to fight them and beat them. Irish madness, violent generational civil war, was an established nightmare barely woken up from during Scott’s lifetime. Why suppose New Zealand is exempt from catching the mad? Hadn’t it the symptoms?

To the new Mainstream Conformity it was Scott who needed to be painted as mad. TVNZ’s 60 Minutes show denigrated Scott who openly and vulnerably expressed his views which the editors then mocked up into the final product on national television. He was somehow even lured into performing some of his own music which was used in the show to pull focus. Instead of addressing Scott’s focusing question ‘can a nation go mad?’ it concentrated on his view that “The Irish are undoubtedly mad..their behavior has been mad and I think it almost certainly is inbreeding.” Ref. Broadcasting Standards Authority (1996)

The Mainstream Media had done its job of identifying and containing a threat to the New Conformity. It did this by lampooning Scott as a deluded old sing-song twit who hates Maoris and Irishmen and probably ought to be medicated with a straight-jacket and a padded cell. His academic points and opportunity to engage in national debate had been sanatised this way much more effectively than if he had been assassinated. After all, they didn’t kill Winston Smith in 1984 either did they?

The Travesty of Waitangi

Scott’s generation lived and fought to keep the old colonial system which he says worked and was impartial. There was an extended family of the British Commonwealth that the War put an end to and replaced with the United Nations. Racial conflict and economic break-down has been the result in Central America, Africa, Eastern Mediterranean, Celon, Fiji, and perhaps now New Zealand. This had not been the case when we were all British Citizens as we all had been until this was, in the case of ourselves, extinguished and New Zealand Citizenship created before the eyes of a 28yo Stuart C. Scott. Ref. 1948: Extinguishing British Citizenship, AHNZ

It’s common in the 2020s to process the chaos and breakdown of what Donald Trump refereed to as “shithole countries” as the long-term effects of colonialism. Scott’s generation were under no illusions that the old colonial system and trade platforms were what lifted those countries out millennia of shit and kept them there. He had lived long enough to see this understanding turned 180 degrees backward. Many generations after these former Commonwealth nations became “free” they still blame their troubles on something that ended in the 1940s. Is it time yet to ask if the old timers like Scott might have had a point?

Another son of Dunedin, as was Scott, is historian Tony Ballantyne who was puzzling over his research material until he had an epiphany. He wrote in Webs of Empire (2014) that his entire viewpoint had been re-situated by contact with the Peal Archive and the realisation that New Zealand had once been a part of a much larger world. “I was increasingly aware of a profound disjunction between the highly mobile and imperial intellectual visions that were the very stuff of the Peal collection and the ‘instituting imaginary’ of the National Library itself. The addresses, letterheads, postmarks, stamps, postcards, and bookplates found in Peal’s collection were testament to the construction of powerful networks that cut across the boundaries of emergent nation states. The collection is housed in an archive that erases such imperial structures as it frames its collections within a post-colonial vision of New Zealand as a nation. Since the mid-1970s, New Zealand public institutions have slowly, unevenly, and painfully been reshaped around a particular postcolonial vision: biculturalism…not hidden away in the institution charter or mission statement, but rather shapes the library’s public image, its architecture, decoration, and organisation. Its bilingual name (the National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa), the use of both English and Māori signage, the significant space and resources attached to Māori language materials and resources relating to Māori pasts, and the prominence of Māori art within the National Library reflect a concerted attempt to decolonise the archive.”

Ballantyne (Generation X) was rediscovering what Scott (Expeditionary Generation) knew in his bones. The present paradigm ‘Aotearoa New Zealand Culture’ is not immutable but was manufactured in the 1950s by academics like Beaglehole and Sinclair and mainstreamed when the Boomer Generation came of age. It should not be, as Scott found it to be, a taboo to question or contradict this historiography. The Colonial Saeculum (ie era) of which Stuart C. Scott was the last gasp very evidently was functional and productive and had some good points in its day and we might need to bring more than a few of them back to use again. We should remember that this set of cultural technology largely built New Zealand and served it for a good 80 years before being displaced by the Millennial Saeculum now coming to its own end.

To read Scott’s book is to hear from a Colonial New Zealander what he thinks of our modern country and what we’re doing with it. One of his key observations is that he had witnessed in his own lifetime a history and meaning attached to the Treaty of Waitangi that it had never had before. Most people alive today would know no better having been directed by a government controlled education and media system that enforced the Treaty narrative. But Scott knew the current narrative was manufactured because he saw it coming off the production line new!

“And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.” – Lord of the Rings

“The Treaty of Waitangi has, since the 1960s, become an object of almost mystical veneration in New Zealand, akin to the Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Grail. It has had meanings and interpretations attributed to its three simple clauses which would cause the mouths of its authors to fall open in astonishment.” Scott (1995)

“The historical turn to, what Ruth Ross dubbed, the ‘autochthonous soil’ – beginning with the work of J.C. Beaglehole, popularised by Keith Sinclair and now reinforced by a thriving tradition of bicultural historical writing – has erased many of the connections and exchanges that moulded (and continues to mould) New Zealand’s development.” – Ballantyne (2014)

“The Etruscans ritualized it and the Romans first gave it a name: the saeculum…cycles of human affairs are approximately the length of a long human life…Dating back to the first stirrings of the Renaissance, Anglo-American history has traversed six saecular cycles, each of which displayed a similar rhythm…We are presently in the Third Turning of the Millennial Saeculum,..” – The Fourth Turning, Neil Howe and William Strauss (2000)

“Waitangi Day isn’t an authentic, grass roots, event going back to 1840. It was an invention of the 1970s, an institution created by the state. Much similar to how Sir Walter Scott invented Scottish identity. Nothing organic about it at all.” – AHNZ

“29 January, 1890, we celebrated our first 50 years of New Zealand history…it was not at all set from the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February. New Zealanders of 1890 knew better than ourselves when the colony got started because it was their lived experience.” – 1890: Celebration of the Colony’s Jubilee, AHNZ

In Chapter 5 of his book Scott lays out several subheadings that concerned him but which have become absolutely mainstream to us in the 2020s. It is every easy to find headlines in recent newspapers to back up that these things are really happening. Apartheid, once the cause almost of a New Zealand civil war, is absolutely fine if it’s happening along the ‘socially just’ fault lines…

1. Separate Churches
2. Anglican Church splits into 3 race-based groups
3. Separate Judicial System
4. Separate Schools and Universities
5. Separate Radio and TV
6. Maoris Call Separate Maori Government
7. Separate Maori Health System
8. Separate Local Government
9. Separate Maori Theater
10. Separate National Rugby Team
11. Separate Educational Administration
12. Separate Maori Political Party
13. Separate Standards for Accounting
14. Separate Science
15. Separate Arts Council Boards

In the 1990s it would have seemed alarmist to suggest such things could happen here yet all of these things have come to pass beyond the wildest expectations of the author.

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1 Press (1986,) Papers Past

2 Travesty After Travesty, Scott (1996)

Image ref. Press (1968,) Papers Past

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