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An Epitome of Official Documents Relative to Native Affairs and Land Purchases in the North Island of New Zealand

Recent Enactments

Recent Enactments.

  • 19. In all this business of bringing the Natives within the operation of the law, it behoves us to be ourselves careful to act according to law, and that the law of England. As long as we are able to say, "This is part of the law of England," we insure a certain degree of acceptance; for 'the-belief is widely entertained among them that our superiority is owing in great measure to the fact that by the act of writing we have been able to preserve and accumulate the experience and wisdom of past generations. They are willing to recognize in the greatness of our nation a proof of the excellence of our laws. But we offer them as a boon the name of English subjects (as we are now doing by the Native Rights Act just passed), and, if they find that in practice for them that name is to mean subjection to hard rules, which no man in England is subject to, they will not be eager to accept our offer. 20. A strong instance of the evil to which I am referring is supplied by the Outlying Districts Police Act, also just passed. From the beginning of our connection with the Natives, the one principle which has been more than all impressed upon them as the distinguishing excellence of the law, not only of England but of all civilized nations, is the principle that crime is to be avenged by smiting the actual offenders, and not by visiting the whole tribe with war: the more advanced among them have learnt to accept it as such.

    The recent enactment embodies the opposite principle. It makes it lawful for the Governor to take land at discretion and appropriate it for purposes of settlement, wherever a supposed criminal is not given up on demand. The demand may be made on rumour or suspicion, for no previous inquiry is required by the Act; all lands alike are made subject to seizure, with only one exception applying to a very rare case. To the Natives this must appear tyrannical. There exists amongst them no organization for the purposes of police, and' any person who may be disposed to apprehend offenders can do so only at the risk of civil war. Is this to be to them the manifestation of our authority and government, to cast on them the very work which we took upon ourselves in the beginning, and to punish them by seizure of land of all alike incase they fail to effect that which we confess to be beyond our own power? Can this appear to them anything but a device for getting land?

    As to the suggestion that there is some English precedent for this enactment, true it is that in old times the inhabitants of a district were under pledge for the peace of the district, and were liable to the extent of a fine to be levied upon the district in case of a person suspected not being forthcoming. Nothing like the present enactment has proceeded from the Parliament of England, so far as I know, even in the worst times. The circumstances attending the passing of this Act were singular. Misgivings as to the probable effect of the measure were strongly expressed on all sides. I do not learn that any one member gave it a cordial support; but it was a Ministerial measure, and at that time the Opposition were not willing to give the Ministry any ground for resigning.

    Amongst ourselves of late years much has been said of the necessity of keeping questions of crime apart from questions of land. This seemed to be one of the few points upon which men of all ways of thinking had come to an agreement; but all our experience is now put aside.

    The new enactment affords a striking instance of the mode in which measures, which are at first defended only as exceptional, come to be extended to entirely different cases. The seizing of the land of innocent men for the offences of others whom they could not restrain and did not aid, was recently justified, in the discussions on the New Zealand Settlements Act, only as being a consequence of war. It is now attempted to make it a part of the ordinary and permanent law, and this too at the very time when the principle is abandoned in the practical working of the original enactment.

  • 21. Another instance is found in an Act passed in the session of 1864, intituled "An Act enabling Land, to be taken for Roads and other Public Purposes through Native and other Districts of the Colony" (13th December, 1864, No. 5). The effect of this enactment is to assert a general authority to take land for roads, &c, at the discretion of the Government, whenever and wherever the Government may see fit. The ordinary English provisions for securing a safe exercise of this power in each particular case are omitted, and resistance to such taking is made a ground for taking more, and for applying to the case the provisions of the New Zealand Settlements Act, which in this case also are to be made a permanent part of the law of the colony.

    Thus within twelve months two Acts have been passed which, if they should actually remain as law, would leave to scarcely any Maori in the country any security for the retention of an acre of his land. To these enactments the objections which were urged by the Secretary of State against the page 20New Zealand Settlements Act apply in their full force. In consequence of these objections, it was enacted in the session of 1864 that the New Zealand Settlements Act should continue in operation until the 3rd December, 1865. In the session of 1865 the Outlying Districts Police Act was passed, by which, the extraordinary powers given by the former Act are in fact revived and greatly extended; for by the former Act the power of taking land for settlement is to be exercised only in cases where at least "a considerable number of persons shall have been engaged in rebellion against Her Majesty's authority;" whereas, under the new Act, it suffices that a single person be supposed to have committed a crime, or that a single suspected criminal be supposed to be concealed in any district.