I’m glad to report that aside from changing the minds and hearts of hundreds of New Zealanders who read Forbidden History the book is also impacting people in high places – and even adjusting political policy.

In Hamilton, for example, a majority of city councilors have bought the book, as has Hamilton East National MP David Bennett.  Complimentary copies of Forbidden History have been presented to former Prime Minister John Key, to Attorney General and Minister for Treaty Settlements, Chris Finlayson, to Maori Affairs Minister Te Ururoa Flavell. A book will also be presented to current Prime Minister Bill English when opportunity affords.

What’s more I am reliably informed by New Zealand First MP Barbara Stewart that most of the party’s MPs have read the book and a majority are pressing for a change in New Zealand First policy as a result. As I understand it they now wish to legislate to remove the tangata whenua (first people of the land) status from Maori.

This status is currently embedded in Treaty of Waitangi legislation and provides the basis for preferential treatment of Maori and increasing recognition of Maori claims to chieftainship rule separate from and outside the normal vehicles for political governance of New Zealand.

Importantly, this move to change New Zealand First party policy came about as a result of copies of Forbidden History being gifted to the Parliamentary Library. I am told they have been widely read by MPs of all parties and that the personal testimonies of Patupaiarehe leader Monica Matamua and Waitaha paramount chief George Connelly included in the book have done much to dispel the previously held myth in the minds of this country’s legislators that that the Waitaha and Patupaiarehe people no longer exist.

In doing so, of course, the book has also gone a long to laying to rest the erroneous claim that Maori people were the first and original inhabitants of New Zealand. As is becoming increasingly clear we may never know who the first residents of this ‘Far Away Land’ really were. What we do know is that people were here in New Zealand cutting down trees and burning off bush as far back as 4,000 years ago.

The crucial truth our politicians now seem to be recognising, partly as a result of the book’s publication, is that for many centuries before the coming of the Maori large numbers of Caucasian peoples, the Patupaiarehe, Turehu and Waitaha lived here and, as the book is at pains to point, they lived in peace for many centuries.

This is evidenced, for example, by Mr. Finlayson halting completion of a major land settlement Agreement in Principle (AIP) with the large central North island tribe of Tuwharetoa until negotiations with Monica Matamua’s Ngati Hotu and Ngati Hinewai Patupaiarehe people for the return of a significant swathe of land near Mt. Ruapehu traditionally owned by them but now held by Tuwharetoa are satisfactorily concluded.

The move is unprecedented in that it is the first to recognise the land rights of the Patupaiarehe people, who are officially said by Maori, leading academics, much published history and even the Te Ara Encyclopaedia, to no longer exist as a people today!

Furthermore Mr. Finlayson may be opening another door to recognition of New Zealand’s earlier inhabitants in that he has offered to meet with surviving descendants of the Chatham Islands Moriori people. Until the 1980s publication of Michael King’s book Moriori it was officially considered that these peaceful people had died with the death of Tommy Solomon. However, Mr. Finlayson apparently now accepts that is not the case.

There can be no doubt then that Forbidden History, coming as it does as the latest in a line of books, film documentaries and online postings also asserting the truth that others were here before the Maori, has made its mark.

Because the book tells the personal stories of the survivors of the great New Zealand holocaust and relates the inherited history of these ancient peoples it has an unmistakable ring of truth in its very words. Words that are now helping to rewrite New Zealand history – at least in the minds of those that read it.