Cactus Kate asked an interesting question this morning on her post about taxpayer subsidies for the Maoritocracy, the select 5 iwi with special treatment under Nick Smith’s secret deal over the ETS.
How many staffers that influence Maori Party policy have direct links to these Iwi? Show us the conflicts.
Sources around parliament tell me that the deal is so secret that other senior members of cabinet were not even aware of the deal as late as last night. Those same sources tell me that the $100 billion woman, so to speak, is Sacha McMeeking. I took the liberty of applying the tried and true blogger technique of Googling her.
She is a university academic, a high-ranking Ngai Tahu exec, the secretariat for the Iwi Leadership Group and is now being paid amongst others by the Maori Party to negotiate with National!
How can one person have so much power over whether a $100 billion policy goes ahead or not????
Sacha McMeeking is of Ngai Tahu descent, and is aged in her early thirties (either 31 or 32). Ms McMeeking is the General Manager Strategy and Influence with Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu, having returned after lecturing in law at the University of Canterbury and consulting for iwi and the Treaty Tribes Coalition.
The foreshore and seabed issue brought together her academic and advisory interests, enabling her to support Treaty Tribes Coalition advocacy in the United Nations, resulting in the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination finding that New Zealand was in breach of international human rights standards.
In her current role, Ms McMeeking has moved far beyond her legal background into a range of areas including providing political advice, brand and reputation management skills, and the integration of tikanga to incorporate governance arrangements. She is also on the Council of the University of Canterbury.
Other details gleaned from Google include:
In 2004, Ms McMeeking was co-spokesperson of “Te Mangaroa” organisation that occupied New Brighton Pier in Dec 2004 in opposition to foreshore and seabed legislation. Following the end of the occupation, she commented that:
“We welcome a summer-long protest movement, signalling to the Government that they will be held to account at the polls….We believe that Mahara Okeroa will receive his dues at the next election. He maintains that the legislation improves recognition of Maori customary rights, because it is a clear and certain statutory framework. He is simply wrong. The only certainty is that Maori property rights have been extinguished, and that there will be no recognition of customary rights because the statutory framework is the most restrictive and reductive in the Commonwealth. He turned his back on his electorate when he voted for the Bill, inevitably, his electorate has turned their back on him”
In November 2005, Ms McMeeking joined a voluntary ad-hoc Maori organising committee formed to ensure Maori participation in the visit to New Zealand by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Funadamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples
Ms McMeeking spoke as an “expert” at a forum organised by the Green Party on “Protecting the RMA” in March this year.
Ms McMeeking was keynote speaker at Amnesty International’s AGM in Auckland this year. Her speech focused on the legal system and the need to balance Maori human rights with protecting the rights of other New Zealanders.
In July this year, Ms McMeeking delivered a presentation at the Indigenous Legal Water Forum (an international conference at Otago University)titled “Navigating the National Landscape”
Ms McMeeking spoke at this year’s Hillary Symposium on the role of Ngai Tahu in addressing climate change.
She has a reputation in some quarters as a role model for young Maori women aspiring to future success
In 2006, Ms McMeeking was awarded the Ngata Centenary Doctoral Scholarship at Canterbury University
That is a brief summary of what I found on Google about Sacha McMeeking, the woman holding New Zealand’s economic fortune in her youthful hands. The $100 billion woman is a woman of many hats and one can only wonder how she manages to maintain professional standards representing so many different organisations as well as being on the payroll of multiple organisations.
What is The Prime Minister’s go-to man, Wayne Eagleson, to think when Ms McMeeking walks in for a meeting. Is she there representing Ngai Tahu? perhaps it is the University of Canterbury? Maybe the Maori Party? OIr some of her former activist organisations? Certainly this capable woman is a woman of many hats. Just which hats she wears at any one time is anyones guess.
The worse proposition though is that she speaks on behalf of the unelected Iwi Leadership Group, which is a largely secret grouping of the elite Maoritocracy, who have seemingly negotiated a secret deal that not even senior members of cabinet are yet aware of to committ the greatest robbery of public assets in the history of New Zealand and hand them over to a select privileged group of Maori in an undemocratic, and unchallenged manner.
Question 1 today certainly looks to be interesting from John Boscawen and one wonders how Nick Smith will weasel his way out of that one. This is an issue that stands to cost this coutnry dearly while every other country resiles from Copenhagen. Nick Smith is plunging us headlong into economic oblivion to solve a problem that does not exist and the woman whipping us along that route to detruction is a veteran protestor and maori protagonist in the pay of many paymasters.
