Talks on Waitangi Treaty

Press, 6 February 1986, Page 6

Talks on Waitangi Treaty

Seven hundred people packed the Limes Room at the Christchurch Town Hall last evening to listen to a mainly calm discussion on the Treaty of Waitangi. A wide range of people, old and young, attended. It was organised by the Waitangi Action and Learning Coalition. The loudest applause came not in reaction to S? of the six speakers Kiit when a man in the audience asked that both.:

Maori and pakeha people give up their “rights” and start to discover and live in peace with one another. Until then, the audience had mainly heard that the Maori people wanted the Treaty of Waitangi honoured and their rights restored. . Voices were raised near the end of the meeting when another person in the audience asked how the Maori people hoped to go back to farming sweet potato in the age of the

computer. In reply, Ms Atareta Poananga, a Maori activist and one of the speakers, said that the people who had developed the most sophisticated technology were not white but Asian. “If you are trying to say that we are not sophisticated enough to run things ourselves — if we were allowed (to run the country) we would be,” she said. we developed in

this country where no pakeha had arrived we would probably be rivalling the Japanese (in technology) right now.” The Maori people had had an extremely sophisticated trading system, before the Europeans arrived, that the pakeha had not been able to match, she said. Other speakers at the meeting were Tim Shadbolt, Pat Hohepa, Jenny Schroeder, Riki Pitama, and Garth Cant t h