When David Seymour first talked about rewriting the treaty principles and subsequently holding of a referendum to cement them into being, I was reminded of Aesop’s fable, The Dog in the Manger. I’ve often wondered what motivated the dog to keep the cattle from eating the hay. He couldn’t eat it himself, so it wasn’t a food issue so maybe it was because he was comfortable lying there on a bed of hay. No one likes being turfed out of their comfort zone, so I guess that was the dog’s motivation. Of course, when the farmer came along and saw what was happening, he took a stick to the dog and drove him out of the stable.
There is no farmer in the treaty principles debate. The PM, Christopher Luxon has abdicated responsibility and left the dog to go at it, which of course he is. In the last election David Seymour campaigned using simple messaging like “End Division by Race.” He barks endlessly using slogans like “New Zealanders are sick and tired of race and the Treaty being injected into everything.” And “ACT will put an end to it. Every New Zealander should have the same rights and equal opportunity .” All these slogans do is inflame the already growling ‘dog in the manger’ attitude some people have towards Māori. ACT panders to those people to gain votes and power within the coalition government.
Nicky Hager says in this E-Tangata article, Act’s slogan End Division by Race is “actually more like Defend Division by Wealth. Act is the make the rich richer party and, at the same time, the attack the poor party.”
No one likes to think one set of people is being privileged over another. But the fact that Māori are among the most disadvantaged is a stark reality. Almost every metric from health to employment, to incarceration negatively affect Māori. Policies which have been put in place to redress the situation, are being dismissed by Seymour as somehow unfairly advantaging Māori over other Kiwis. The fact is, they are based on need, and there is and never has been equal opportunity. As an example, we have a two-tier health system where the privileged who can afford it have health insurance while the rest sit on waiting lists for years to get knee surgery to end the crippling pain they live with daily.
Indigenous peoples throughout history have been poorly treated by colonisers seeking to expand their access to resources, territories and influence. Whether it was Africa where they were herded onto ships and taken to America to be slaves, Aborigines in Australia hunted for sport, First Nations people in Canada and the US ghettoised on reservations or Māori in Aotearoa forced off their lands by British armed forces. As an ironic aside to the treatment of First Nations peoples, the Stony Nation in Alberta were given a piece of unproductive land outside Calgary and expected to somehow survive there. They struggled for years until a large natural gas field was discovered beneath their land and their fortunes changed.
Aotearoa is unique among countries whose indigenous peoples signed up to or had treaties forced upon them. Our treaty, Te Tiriti O Waitangi has become our founding document and rather than accepting some unproductive block of land to live on, Māori believed they had retained, through rangatiratanga, the right to use and control their resources. However, despite the treaty, colonisers carried on in the ways they had always done and stripped Māori of all those rights as well as taking their lands by force.
When I grew up assimilation was the name of the game. Māori were expected to abandon their language and their culture and become like the rest of us. This is something I believe David Seymour wants to return to. I grew up knowing nothing of Māori culture except as performance to be put on display for tourists. It was as if all trace of their culture was to be erased and all that would be left would be displays in a museum. Māori have never accepted that and pushed back endlessly against the treatment they received at the hands of the crown. In 1975, Dame Whina Cooper led a land march from Te Hāpua in the far north, to Parliament in Wellington, demanding action on the loss of Māori land. “Not one more acre” was the catch cry of the march which started off with 50 people and ended up with over 5,000. They presented a petition of over 60,000 signatures to then Prime Minister, Bill Rowling.
The Human Rights Commission says this “The long period of suppression and failure to honour te Tiriti o Waitangi has resulted in Māori being over-represented in poor health statistics, education outcomes, rates of homelessness and incarceration, and more. The Crown therefore has an “equity" obligation, which means adequately funding Māori-led solutions that over time can achieve equality for Māori in Aotearoa.”
Fortunately, as we matured as a country, we finally began to recognise that our behaviour towards our indigenous people had been unacceptable and sought to change it. The Waitangi Tribunal was set up under the Treaty of Waitangi Act In1975. The aim was to address issues over iwi land claims.
In the 1980s the courts needed a set of guidelines in order to interpret the treaty when making judgements. The former president of the Court of Appeal, Sir Robin Cooke devised a set of principles and then Prime Minister, David Lange, adopted them. Five principles would help the government make better decisions about treaty related matters. Partnership was considered the key principle obligating the Crown and Māori to work together in good faith. For a more in depth look at how the treaty principles came into being Te Ara has a good explanation.
Since then, there has been significant progress in working together from having te reo incorporated into the names of all government departments and to policies, Acts and documents. Setting up Māori television and radio, kura teaching in te reo Māori. Progress has been made in Treaty settlements with iwi and the renaissance in Māori culture has been amazing.
I for one will never forget the moment Hinewehi Mohi chose to sing our National anthem in Māori before a rugby world cup match in England in 1999. That act of defiance and celebration was a transformational moment in our history and led to a new tradition. While she suffered a verbal trashing by those who disagreed with her, from that time on it’s been customary to sing the first verse of the anthem in both Māori and English.
In 2001 Helen Clark’s Labour led coalition passed the Local Electoral Act, allowing councils to opt in to have Māori Wards. Having Māori wards in local government and a te ao Māori approach has seen a change in the way we view and protect our natural resources. Under John Key and Bill English, National made co-governance arrangements with iwi over Te Urewera national park, the Waikato and Waipā rivers, and the Whanganui River (which is also a legal person). Ardern’s government set up Pae Ora, The Māori Health Authority which the coalition quickly scrapped. However, a fifty year study by Harvard University found that “When Native nations make their own decisions about what development approaches to take, they consistently out-perform external decision makers—on matters as diverse as governmental form, natural resource management, economic development, health care and social service provision.”
David Seymour wants to wind the clock back on all that, virtually taking us back to the 1950s. In this Guardian article on co-governance from two years ago Morgan Godfrey describes Seymour and the people he represents as “the exhausted rearguard of New Zealand conservatism.” He also says, “the source of opposition to co-governance isn’t some fidelity to good public policy but simply an opposition to Māori.”
However, rather than being exhausted Seymour sees, in Luxon’s inability to manage his ambition, the perfect opportunity to rewrite history. As part of the coalition agreement, all of Act’s anti Māori policies were added including the plan to introduce a Treaty Principles Bill based on ACT’s policy and support it to a select committee and the dis-establishment of Māori wards requiring referenda to re-institute them and removing co-governance from the delivery of public services. The full list can be found here.
For something as important as the Crown Māori relationship, why did Luxon cave in to the demands of an ideolog indoctrinated by neoliberal thinking and the leader of a party with just eight percent of the vote? I suspect that’s because Luxon shares Seymour’s antipathy to Māori, given some of the actions so far of the National wing of the coalition.
Seymour’s treaty principles bill is a vanity project, and David Seymour is the epitome of vanity. In publishing this term was used when an author had written an unpublishable work, then paid a fringe publisher to publish it for them. A bit like the poetry of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council. If you haven’t heard about it, look it up.
Given the circumstances, Seymour’s vanity project could well become law. Sending a bill to select committee invites a well-orchestrated campaign to send it to a second and third reading. The effort and money put into opposing Three Waters co-ordinated by the Taxpayers Union, the Free Speech Union and the Campaign Company, all Act’s Astroturf’s, was slick and professional. You had better believe that this time they will double down on fomenting hatred against Māori in epic proportions. Seymour has alluded to this saying in an interview with Newstalk ZB that he “believes the next steps for the bill following its first reading will have little to do with what the National and NZ First parties desire - as the public's say on the matter will play a big part.”
Right now, for the majority of us, the idea of having a referendum to decide on the future of the Crown Māori relationship is a nonsense. Te Tiriti was signed at a time when Māori outnumbered settlers 40 to one. And it was Te Tiriti O Waitangi that Māori signed up to, not the English translation of it. Now that Māori are around 17.3 percent of the population what chance have they got of upholding the mana of Te Tiriti in a referendum?
Māori accepted us coming to Aotearoa as manuhiri, visitors and all settlers from 1840 to now are manuhiri. When people visit, usually they respect the place they’re visiting and don’t trash it or the people they visit with. Unfortunately, the 2,000 or so settlers in 1840 behaved in unacceptable ways and Māori saw that the need for an agreement with the Crown to keep the settlers under control was necessary.
Sadly, it was that agreement, Te Tiriti O Waitangi, that was subsequently trashed, repeatedly. As David Slack puts it in his estimable Substack More Than a Fielding, “It’s a simple tale of a group of rich thugs coming down the street, spotting someone else's house, saying ‘I fancy this’, inviting themselves in, partying up large, trashing the whole house, staying on, and on, eventually burning it to the ground and pushing the owners out into the street, then building their own mansion over the smouldering ruins and then taking the people they’ve just dispossessed to come back inside to live in the cellar and work for a pittance.”
The word manuhiri conveys an encounter and relationship with tangata whenua through invitation and shared responsibility, this goes directly back to the concept of partnership. My question is what bad thing would happen if we incorporated the principles of te ao Māori into our everyday lives? What horror would visit us if we truly honoured the partnership we signed up to in 1840 and instituted co-governance in whatever form it might take? Governing the way we’ve always done is literally burning down the planet, creating chasms of inequality and a generation of kids who can’t look forward with hope for a better future.
Do we really want to reverse all the gains we’ve made as a nation. Do we want to go back to a time where the only thing we cared about was the endless, and futile, pursuit of wealth with a total disregard of everything and everyone who stood in our way. I don’t, I want to keep exploring what life might be like if we truly embraced our treaty partners and what they have to teach us. Please, let’s just do that.
What’s outlined in this article explains Seymour’s and other conservative and neo liberal NZers attitudes to the genocide and 75+ years of Israeli terrorism and atrocities committed against the indigenous population of Palestine. David Slacks analogy is literal.
Thank you for this. The various threads are clearly visible.