I'm not going to get into a tit for tat row with Mary Brookes and her supporters. I feel the need to respond to C. Thompson, hopefully just this once.
If I offended Mary I apologise. I merely set out to correct her propensity for false statements. Regardless of what is right and what is wrong her continual attacks on the attempt by successive governments to rectify an obvious injustice is worth confronting. In the process harm is being done to race relations in New Zealand. This serves no one; it is a complete waste of time and energy. The message is, if you can't take it, don't dish it out.
We are all the product of a mixed society. We are all susceptible to the distortions of history and the usual discrepancies of personal opinion. Written history gathered decades after the battles of 1860 are no more reliable than the verbal accounts they are based on.
Of course people will cling to what they believe; they are entitled to do so. However my concern is if you do not question history, you are bound to repeat it. You clearly believe that the troops and the administration sent to NZ by the British crown were sent here to stop a few Maori doing battle. Oh! And by the way chaps just pop in to India and save the Indian people from themselves. After all we've just rescued the North American Indians and given them a nice little reservation to live on and we are in the process of sorting out the Africans and so on.
I make no apology for my cynicism the ‘greedy imperialistic British forces' were just that. Not so much the soldiers but certainly those who commissioned them.
The empire builders came to New Zealand for the same reason they invaded all of the above and more. It is the way things were. Profit, gain and strategic value.
The very sad irony is whilst doing all that the same administration were allowing enslavement and forced labour of thousands of their own people in the cotton mills of Lancashire. Children from the age of six forced to work sixteen hours a day. Crippled from crawling under looms and redundant and thrown out before they were 20. The message is learn from your own history with an open mind before you judge others. Perhaps then you can move on, and allow the Maori people to do the same. Remember that evil flourishes when good people say nothing.
Peaceful coexistence is the only way forward.

Robin Bell, Omanawa.