Labour, the Greens and liberal parts of the media have not adjusted to the fact that liberal and Maori are different things.
To start with, the super-liberal state-owned media frame current Maori political representation as within Labour, Greens, or Te Pati Maori. Typically, they do not mention the Maori within New Zealand First, ACT, or National.
Mihingarangi Forbes said a few days ago in a hot breath of histrionic catastrophism that “I think they’ve burnt the house down and literally repealing everything they assume to be race-based. … I think the Treaty has been robustly analysesd and defined by our most brightest legal minds in the country … if it’s up for more discussion, the place for that is with them not so much the general public.”
With just 17 years to go to our bicentenary, proposing that you don’t need to take the public with you on a constitutional document is an appalling arrogance. Labour and the Greens were told this by voters up and down the country for over a year. They didn’t listen, so they got their parliamentary asses handed to them. Moist left commentators like Forbes need to do their grieving elsewhere and then figure out how Maori within power are shifting.
Labour and the Greens do not have a right to presume Maori will support them. Maori-roll voters turned their backs on them and only supported Labour sufficiently in one Maori electorate.
The Green Party have two Maori MPs. The Greens have fewer Maori MPs than either ACT or NZFirst. Neither Labour nor Greens can claim to represent Maori better than the current government.
The left have to get over themselves.
Maori, being complex but rational beings with diverse interests, will engage with the government because that is where power and leadership and public funding is. Likely that is the situation for the next six years.
There is every reason to believe that Maori will do as good if not better under this government than they did under Labour-Greens in the previous term. It was great that the previous government gained massive volumes of funding for various institutions, and made a huge symbolic lift to the status of Maori culture with the new Matariki public holiday. It was not great that when it came to standing up for many other policies, because the government decided to make a bonfire out of them rather than stand up straight in the election. Funding and symbolism were not sufficiently material to enough Maori voters.
So why weren’t Maori voters just grateful to the left?
In its most polemical form, we can get James Baldwin to state it clearly: “I am not your nigger.” Baldwin was very difficult to pin down as a revolutionary, a radical, or a black pacifist. Beneath his rage you can still discern a reach for unity. What he hated was being treated as if his anger was inappropriate or worse an impediment to black progress, or even that it would take a particular form. Even at its friendliest, the culture still condescends. Black people operate in United States cultures in as complex a set of forms as any other. Same here.
We can see that calculus in the results that are in cabinet now, where Maori have made it through party membership and candidate selection, and voting, and ranking, and coalition negotiations, to now be in power. They are working through the system gaining power and influence and responsibility. On their own terms. On terms that the left clearly doesn’t yet understand.
With that in mind let’s turn to Maori in Cabinet. In no particular order:
Check this context for him:
I went to a school [Raumanga Middle School] where probably most of the students were Māori – and I grew up in Northland, which has a higher proportion of Māori than most other parts of the country. So, I was at ease in a Māori world, or at least in a mixed Māori and Pākehā world.”
Check out also:
Out of the 20 Cabinet members, 7 are Maori. That’s well over the Maori population proportion of 17%.
Astute followers of New Zealand politics will also know that the public board positions are at least as powerful as most Ministerial positions. So one might expect the ‘downstream ticket’ effect of appointing Maori (just as Labour did) into such major boards as TVNZ, RNZ, Transpower, Pharmac, ACC, Reserve Bank, NZTA, Infrastructure New Zealand, AgResearch and other CRIs, and the many other quangos that actually exercise the real power in New Zealand. That’s one to watch through the Appointments Committee.
Let’s get back to that question of why Maori didn’t support a return to power for the left.
As commentator Jon Stokes (Raukawa, Maniapoto) noted:
It is more likely Māori voters did what most voters do leading up to the election: asked themselves whether their lives and the experience for their whanau and community had improved under the current government, or not.
Whether change would improve things or make things worse. This would be measured against the very immediate impact on everyday life, including the cost of living, rent/mortgages, crime, access to quality health and education.”
And now we need to follow the money.
Some sectors of Maori have learnt over the last century that the commercial interests they have developed must be defended from the interference of government. A typical case in point is the flat rejection by Maori fishing interests of a Kermadec marine sanctuary – despite years of intensive negotiation with both National and Labour.
These commercial interests are vast and need substantial mediation with central government – as one can see with their engagement via MFAT.
The Maori economy is growing up to about $70 billion already and will likely continue to outpace the rest of the economy.
To get just a glimpse into the breadth and complexity of Maori interests in governance, in 2020 there were 1,230 Maori authorities, and three fifths of those were considered essential during the COVD lockdown. Maori authorities exported about $755 million worth of goods in 2020, about half of which went to China. And the average Maori farm is about five times the size of the average New Zealand farm.
We don’t need to go into the massive scale of development that Ngai Tahu or Waikato Tainui are into now. But it’s worth pointing out that Maori commercial interests need the state neither more nor less than the rest of New Zealand’s commercial interests. There have to be rational reasons to engage with each other, not a presumption of perpetual statist dependence.
Maori commercial interests are not the same as the interests of the left, and it is not up to Maori explain that to the left. In fact it is more likely that Maori commercial interests will find it easier to deal with the new government than the previous one.
Maori are not owned by the left. Maori interests are not the same as the interests of the left. Maori voters will continue to vote in their own interests. Maori are now significantly in power and in power on their own terms – likely for the next six years.
The left will regain power in part when they figure this out.
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