Sujet : Waitangi Day (6 February)
De : benlizro (at) *nospam* ihug.co.nz (Ross Clark)
Groupes : sci.langDate : 05. Feb 2025, 10:30:01
Autres entêtes
Organisation : A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID : <vnvb33$2b2hp$1@dont-email.me>
User-Agent : Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.9.1
It's New Zealand's national holiday. Commemorates the Treaty of Waitangi, proclaimed and signed by Maori chiefs and representatives of Queen Victoria at Waitangi ("noisy water") in the Bay of Islands on 6/2/1840. It's not exactly NZ's constitution, but of equally fundamental importance, and its interpretation has been controversial from the first, but especially in the last 50 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_WaitangiA big gathering takes place at Waitangi, attended by Maori from all over the country and political leaders. Confrontations and protests are not infrequent. This year is no exception. Apparently this video clip was seen by many elsewhere in the world:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2024/nov/14/mp-rips-up-bill-leads-haka-as-nz-parliament-erupts-over-waitangi-treaty-bill-videoNB: She was tearing up, not the Treaty, but the "Treaty Principles Bill", a project of David Seymour, leader of our rightmost parliamentary party. (You may remember him being referred to as an "obnoxious twerp" [?or words to that effect] by Jacinda Ardern when she was PM.) The bill would toss out the understanding and application of the Treaty resulting from the deliberations of many learned and serious people over the years, and put it to the general public in a referendum.
Anyhow, it has no chance of passing into law; just being allowed to introduce it was one of Seymour's rewards for joining the governing coalition.