where entrepreneurs pitch new ideas in the hopes of hitting the big time. And now, a new challenger enters the den ` Captain Cook. - Yes, I'm the new kid on the block, but I feel I've got some very good offers here, and I can't wait to face the taniwha. Taniwha, thank you so much for this opportunity. - Kia ora. - Kia ora. - Kia ora. I've got some great ideas for you that I think you will love, starting with... civilisation. - (SIGHS) - Oh, this is so big back in Britain, let me tell you. It's all the rage. - Yeah, look, uh, Hemi? - It's James. - Hemi. Now, we appreciate the big trip getting out here and everything, but we've already got civilisation, so I think it's gonna be a no from all of us. - Yeah, it's definitely a no. - Yeah, pretty much there. OK, no, that's fine, cos I've got loads of ideas. How about the second one ` religion/God? Ah, yes! Oh yeah! Oh mwah! Yes. It's so yeah! - Wait. Just the one god? - Yes, just this guy. - And his name is God? - Yes. And he's quite the doozy. (GIGGLES) - I think that's a pass. - Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. I've got plenty of other ideas. How about sailing? You know, utilising the wind and traversing great distances. - Yeah, got it. How do you think we got here? - What about the class system? Very good. - Me and my friends love it back in Britain. - No, thanks. - Muskets, tobacco and alcohol? - Wait. What do those things do? - Kill you at various speeds. - Ooh, hard pass. - What about ovens? Ooh, yes, let's cook that up. Yes! Delicious. - Did you do any market research? - Sorry. Again, that'll be a no from us. - Yeah. Well, I do know something that you definitely do not have. Come out. Come this way, little friend. My little friendy. Presenting... His Majesty the King! - Oh, is that what that was? - Oh, thank God. I thought that was a ghost. - Yeah, this is awkward. Thank you for standing there so quietly, but I think it's gonna be a no. - BOTH: Mmm. - Right, well, fair enough. - Good work, though. - Thank you! - Some of the best standing I've ever seen. - Bye-bye! - OK, well, I don't know, um,... potatoes. Yum, delicious. Um, hammer and nails. Oh, fix my house! I don't know. Um, God, bread. Bread. Will bread do?! Toast, delicious. - Well, actually, those last three, I can actually get behind. - I'm interested too. Those potatoes sound yummy. Why didn't you lead with that? - Really? - Look, those last three do sound quite interesting. - The potatoes? - Yeah, the potatoes. But I guess I'm just worried that when we write up the contract, it'll result in a poorly worded document that you think implies that you can do whatever you like, thus subjecting us to unfair treatment, something we'll be debating from now until the end of the human race. But who would ever do that, right? - No one. - (LAUGHS) What?! - (LAUGHS) Exactly. - No one would do that. - That is a wild thing to do! - Awful. - It'd be sick. - Horrible thing to do... - Awful! - ...to a race of people! - (LAUGHTER) - Who would do that (!) - Let's write that deal. - Great. And we'll translate. (HUMS, GIGGLES) - New Zealand ` for better or worse, it's a country, and you're a citizen there, and you're supposed to know how it works. So let's get into it. - # It's time for... - (BLUESY PIANO BALLAD) # ...The Citizen's Handbook. # Mm-mm-mm. # Hi. I'm Robbie, and the government gave me a bunch of money to tell you how New Zealand works. So I got a big desk and lots of camera angles and a bunch of smart people to teach me stuff ` people like this. And those smart people told me that if I want to explain how New Zealand works, I'd better start at the beginning. So here we go. Roughly 10,000 years ago, before the iPhone 10, the iPhone 6 ` nay, even the iPhone 3, a bunch of travellers set off from the comfortable, dry land of Asia on a mission to explore the largest ocean in the world ` Te Moananui a Kiwa ` AKA The Pacific Ocean. This was a particularly bold move, considering the Pacific Ocean has both A ` an enormous amount of water, and B ` not that much land. And there's a decent chance you're gonna miss that land and sail into nothing until you die. These explorations were basically the historical equivalent of flying to the Moon, except maybe even harder, because at least you can see the Moon ` it's just over there. Luckily, these explorers were the best sailors in the world. And over thousands of years, they ventured further out into the Pacific, setting up lives in Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. And just when they thought they were done, a few last explorers, including the legendary Kupe himself, set off on a particularly huge voyage south and found something awesome ` the islands of Te Ika-a-Maui, Te Waipounamu, and their weird little brother, Rakiura. Word spread back to their homeland, and soon settlers from East Polynesia were arriving by the waka-load. And when they settled here, they became tangata whenua ` people of the land. The early settlements were small and coastal, and, unfortunately for all parties involved, pretty dependent on moa. And as the moa started to run out, as sometimes happens to delicious animals after coming into contact with humans, these settlers looked for other ways to support themselves, which started a revolution. And it's exactly what you're thinking. What causes revolutions? Gardening! That's right ` like a retiree who wants to avoid their spouse, these early communities got really into gardening. They started to move inland towards all the good gardening soil, and their settlements started getting bigger and bigger. People started living in pa and growing and hunting and storing everything they needed to eat. Battles broke out occasionally, but unlike battles that happened in other places around the world, these ones had pretty low casualty rates. Looking at you, England and France and Russia and Italy and Germany, if you exist yet; I'm not 100% sure. Usually only a few people would die, if any at all, before someone stepped in and was, like... 'All right, all right ` let's all just` Can we take a chill pill? OK, can we just find a peaceful resolution now, please and thank you? Awesome.' The values of living were being cultivated too. Tikanga Maori, like Manaakitanga, which means caring and looking after people, even if they're randoms, and Whanaungatanga, which are close connections with people who are like brothers or sisters to you, as well as your actual brothers and sisters, who, let's face it, are sometimes more like work friends. Society was flourishing in New Zealand, although, obviously, no one's calling it New Zealand. So because this is a civics series, let's break down how society was working at the time. And if you already know all of this and don't feel like you need to hear a Pakeha man explaining Maori society to you,... - No thanks ` not keen. - ...that's fair enough, and just feel free to skip this next bit. OK, so, day-to-day, your main community is your hapu, which is made up of your whanau, plus a few others who are all living with each other. Different hapu who whakapapa to common ancestors also align into iwi, because sometimes it helps to have a few hundred people to back you up. Hapu and iwi are run by the chiefs, the ariki and the rangatira. Also ranking pretty high up there are the tohunga, who are experts in history and tradition and healing, basically walking googles. But the leadership of the rangatira and the tohunga isn't taken for granted. Their power is collective ` they don't just make up rules and expect people to go along with them. Their job is to figure out what everyone thinks the rules should be, and then make sure everyone's on the same page. Pretty much the only way to stay a rangatira is by constantly proving that you're a good rangatira. These societies are busy. Trade is booming. Rivers aren't just rivers any more; they've become water highways. Waka are paddling up, and then cruising down them, trading minerals like pounamu and obsidian for harakeke or food or whatever else is on special. Things are going good. And when Pakeha turn up, it turns out they've got cool stuff too, like nails and cloth and bigger boats. And the little Pakeha settlements that have popped up are desperate for food and resources, so Maori are happy to trade and swap some knowledge with them. And now iwi and hapu have got big market gardens and farms and flour mills. They're producing so much, they're running exports out to Australia. Now, in 1830, there was a slight snag, when the Australians detained a Maori-owned ship for not flying a flag, so a group of Northern Rangatira got together and signed He Whakaputanga, the Declaration of Independence, to tell Western peeps, 'Just so you know, 'we've got sovereignty over this place, and we've also got a really dope flag now too. Awesome.' More and more Brits kept coming, so in 1840, more than 500 Maori chiefs and a representative of Queen Victoria, chief of the Brits, signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi. It was supposed to give Queen Vic the power to apply her laws on subjects over here in New Zealand to keep them under control. But something got lost in translation. To be honest, this was all so lovely, and I don't want to tell you how bad things are about to get. So with that in mind, we strongly insist that you stop watching the series and never come back. - ('CITIZEN'S HANDBOOK THEME') - Goodbye! - # The Citizen's Handbook. # - # Mm. # - (BLUESY PIANO BALLAD) - # The Citizen's Handbook. # - # Mm. # - (BLUESY PIANO BALLAD) - Yes, good. OK, well, I'm glad I could help. Have a lovely time. Goodbye! Next! Hello, settler. On behalf of the New Zealand Company, welcome to New Zealand. - Yeah, right. I was told there was gonna be a house here waiting for me, but there's nothing there. - Ah. Well, OK. So, the first thing to know about this is it's not our fault, OK? Now we definitely sold you a real house that does exist. But what I think must have happened is after you bought it, someone probably came along and just picked it up and stole it away, most likely a giant. Yes, absolutely. There are giants in New Zealand. Did you not know that? Well, we should really put that in the brochure. Damn you, giants! Damn you and your giant sticky fingers. Stop stealing our houses. We want to live in them. Just give them back! Well, as you can see, not much we can do about that, so OK? Sorted? Right. Next! - No, no, I think I know what's happening here. You guys` - Giants. - No, you guys sold me a fake house that never existed, knowing full well that when I came here, - I have no legal recourse, cos we're outside of British law. - Ah. (LAUGHS) OK. I will admit I wasn't 100% truthful about the giant thing. - Yeah, I knew it. - They don't steal houses. - No. - They blow them away... (BLOWS) out into space! That's where your house is. If you go out at night and look up into the night sky and you see a shooting star, well, that could be your house, boy! Then make a wish. You know what I would wish for? A new house. - Come on, man. Just admit the house never existed. - I... will admit that the giants are very jealous of us, and they want to get into our houses, but they're too big. So when they open the door and they can't fit in, they get so mad. - So they smoosh our houses! Smoosh, smoosh, smoosh, smoosh! - OK. - And that's where your house is ` it's in the ground. Yes. - Smooshed, yeah. I think it's much more likely that you guys just lied to me and there never were any houses. - (SCOFFS) - Admit it. - Well... (CLEARS THROAT) Look. WHISPERS: OK, listen, you seem like a man who won't be trifled with, so here's what I'll do ` I'm going to see if I can get you an audience with the giant king. His name is Gorf, and he owes me a favour, cos I pulled a needle from his foot. Gorf! It is Wakefield, and I demand a meeting with you in your giant fudge castle! I won't take no for an answer! (CHUCKLES) Oh, good boy, Wakefield. Next! Ah, yes, hello. As you can see, we're quite flat-tack at the moment, but we should be able to get to your complaints in about 150 years. Does that work? - Most British settlers in the early days were brought over by this guy, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Back in England, Wakefield abducted a girl and forced her to marry him, but he was caught and sent to prison. And while he was in prison, he thought of the idea of colonising New Zealand. That's true. That actually happened. This guy started the colonisation of New Zealand. This guy! Him! This piece of sh` - (THEME MUSIC) # The Citizen's Handbook. # The Citizen's Handbook. # # Mm. # Europe had known about New Zealand since the Dutch East India Company stumbled across it in the 1600s on a racist adventure for jewels. But it was considered a bit too out of the way to be worth it for European ships, so they left it alone for a while. And then in the 1700s, Captain Cook popped by, apparently for scientific reasons, and he used his scientific guns to kill locals and wrote a lot of notes in his little science book about how nice it would be if the English started living here. And when his science notes got back to England, the flow of foreigners making the long journey to the Pacific began. Firstly, it was just sealers getting dropped off round the coast to beat up seals. Then it was loggers as well, who came to cut down trees and haul them away on big tree boats. And in the early 1800s, whalers arrived, and they set up stations near where the whales hung out, so they could catch them and chop them up into bits. Between sailing, logging and whaling, the Brits were a real triple threat to the environment. Most of the time, these foreigners got on well with local iwi. Rangatira would sign off on deals for land in return for access to cool European technology, like nails! Frickin nails! And marriages between Maori and Europeans became more common, as trading relationships between the two cultures became more important. It was all very win-win. - # The Citizen's Handbook. # - (BLUESY PIANO BALLAD) This Saturday only, get any large value pizza from just $3.99. Choose from seven delicious recipes, all from just $3.99 each - only this Saturday and only at Domino's. - Word spread around the world about the opportunities New Zealand had to offer. Thanks to Wakefield's false advertising, the British started rushing over like it was a Mrs Brown's Boys live tour. And then someone discovered there was a bunch of gold in Otago, and people from China, America and even Australia came over to try and get rich quick. Then someone else discovered kauri gum was useful for stuff that you kauri gum for. And people from Dalmatia showed up to work with Maori in the gumfields up north. Aotearoa was becoming more diverse by the second. But unfortunately, like television in the '90s, the British weren't huge fans of diversity. Lots of Brits were very into the idea of racial supremacy and refused to accept that they might be equal to everyone else. And unfortunately for everyone else, white Brits were the ones whose population was going up the quickest. By 1858, the settler population caught up to the native population, and then it kept going. And as the balance of power started to tip towards the British, abiding by Tikanga Maori became less important for the settlers and the government they'd just thrown together. Deals that were once negotiated in good faith became more forceful and underhanded. Land deals stopped being mutually beneficial. In some cases, the settler government didn't even pretend to hold up their end of the bargain. They allegedly bought most of Te Waipounamu off Ngai Tahu on the condition Ngai Tahu could hold on to 3.5 million acres of it and would also get some schools and hospitals built for them. But unfortunately, the settlers were massive flakes, so none of those things happened. The settlers took all of Ngai Tahu's land, which sucks, because land is power, and if you can't look after your people, it's pretty hard to fight back. In addition to ripping people off by lying, the settler government invented the Native Land Court to rip people off with made-up laws as well, because apparently back then, inventing a new court was just a thing that you could do. The Native Land Court forced iwi and hapu to register their land in a weird new system invented by the English. But to register it, hapu had to travel to the court for weeks at a time and just leave their crops behind to die. Not registering your land sucked, because it meant it wasn't in the system and random Brits could just wander in and set up camp. But registering your land sucked too, because it meant that a whole hapu's whenua was now officially owned by just 10 people, which meant that instead of convincing 200 people to part with their land, Pakeha land buyers only had to convince 10 people, one at a time. It almost seems like the whole system was built to make it easy for land to slip from Maori hands into Pakeha hands and very hard for it to go the other way. It all really sucks. Not even registering your land and not selling it was enough to keep it, because the thing that really sucks about the British settlers is that they weren't gonna stop until they got their hands on pretty much everything. So when their rigged the legal system wasn't taking land from Maori fast enough, the settlers turned to war. There had been battles over dodgy deals since the 1840s, like in Northland, Wairou, Wellington, Whanganui, Taranaki and everywhere else the Brits decided to settle. But things got way worse in the 1860s, when this guy got into power. George Grey was one of the British Empire's most bloodthirsty hitmen, and in 1861 he was wheeled out from colonial South Africa to start a war in colonial New Zealand. Grey assembled an army from across the empire as well as local settler militias and marched south from Auckland to invade the Waikato and punish Waikato iwi for the crime of not selling their land to settlers fast enough, which is obviously not a proper reason to start a war. Which makes him, yes, one of these. As the army set off from Auckland, Grey and informed hapu on good farmland like Ihumatao that they were in rebellion against the Queen, which was news to them. And then he informed them that as punishment, he was confiscating their land. At the end of his illegal war, Grey had burned down villages, torn up gardens, devastated local Maori and confiscated 1.2 million acres of Waikato land, which he sold to settlers to pay for the war. 100 years after signing Te Tiriti, enshrining Tangata Whenua's rights to full chiefly authority over their people, resources and land, British settlers had taken 95% of Maori land. It sucks really bad. The whole thing just really, really sucks, really, really bad, but it's something you need to know. - After all, you're a citizen of New Zealand. - # The Citizen's Handbook. - Sorry. - # The Citizen's Handbook. # Captions by John Gibbs. Edited by Faith Hamblyn. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air.