Peter Dey (The Weekend Sun, June 14) is wrong on so many counts it's hard to know where to start.

Mr Dey should provide evidence that Parliament has formally decided that the Treaty of Waitangi is a 'legally binding partnership agreement” between Maori and the Crown because I most certainly cannot recall such a vote. Justice Cooke did suggest that the Treaty did create a relationship in the nature of a partnership, but he did not suggest that that was a partnership of equals, as Peter Dey implies.

Political leaders as different as David Lange and Winston Peters have dismissed as absurd the notion that Queen Victoria, head of the greatest empire the world had seen to that date, would have entered into a partnership of equals with 500 chiefs on the far side of the world, almost none of whom she had ever met and most of whom were illiterate.

Article II of the Treaty guaranteed Maori ownership of their property, which they were entitled to sell to an agent of the Queen if they so wished. Of course, most of that property was sold decades ago. There is not, in the Maori language version of the Treaty, any mention of forests or fisheries.

Mr Dey argues that the equality which Hobson's Pledge argues for is 'based on the belief that Pakeha culture is superior”. Well, it certainly was vastly superior to Maori culture in 1840, with Maori culture having no written language, no knowledge of the wheel, and no knowledge of any metals.

But our argument today is not based on which culture was or is superior but on the simple notion that there can be no racial harmony in New Zealand unless all citizens have equal political rights, and it was exactly that equality of political rights that Article III of the Treaty guaranteed to us all.

Don Brash, Auckland