It has been a hell of a week for race relations in Aotearoa New Zealand.
On Monday Christopher Luxon visited Kīngi Tuheitia to try and smooth relationships ahead of the weekend hui planned for Ngāruawāhia Marae to discuss the Government’s support for the introduction of a Bill that would undermine te Tiriti o Waitangi and its attacks on Te Reo.
Next morning Shane Jones went onto Radio New Zealand and did his best to undo any good that Luxon’s visit may have achieved. He described the Hui arranged for yesterday at Ngāruawāhia as a monumental moan session. Real mana enhancing behaviour that.
Then National announced that Tama Potaka and Dan Bidois would attend the Hui. Potaka described claims that the Government was underpinned by white supremacy as premature. Does this mean he thinks that this is a future possibility?
Then on Friday the draft Cabinet Paper on Act’s insane treaty referendum was leaked. It was as bad as if not worse than all of us thought it would be. Effectively if it was passed it would be difficult to see how the treaty could have any further effect.
Paora Goldsmith confirmed that the paper was an actual draft of a Cabinet Paper and not a figment of someone’s imagination.
That same day the Herald gave David Seymour space to set out his views of the treaty which Enoch Powell would have been proud of. His views were internally contradictory and frankly complete bollocks. For a party that survives on the largess of uber wealthy people and historically the generosity of the National Party to give the wealthiest people in the country a nod and a wink to get them over the line, to talk about division and the need for unity is insulting at so many levels. But that is what he did.
He also completely misrepresented the treaty and continued with the lie that under the treaty Māori gave up their rights of governance.
If you think about the historical context and the time that the treaty was signed you will understand this. In 1840 there were 80,000 Māori and only 2,000 or so Pakeha. And Māori were and are a proud and independent race. If you believe that Māori willingly gave up Tino Rangatiratanga to an English woman who lived on the opposite side of the world then I have a bridge I would like to sell to you.
Then yesterday the Hui at Ngāruawāhia called by Kīngi Tuheitia took place. Thousands attended including significant numbers from all the major tribes, even Ngāpuhi despite their historical indifference to the Kīngitanga movement. An estimated ten thousand were present.
John Campbell has this wonderful description of the day and the background. He says this:
The National Hui for Unity was only called by Kīngi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII (Kīngi Tuheitia) at the beginning of December. That so very many people would arrive here, only six weeks later, in the holiday-season slowness of the third week of January, speaks not only to how resoundingly those present reject the coalition government’s Treaty Principles Bill, but also to a strength of unity already existing.
That is to say, a unified rejection of what Kīngitanga Chief of Staff, Archdeacon Ngira Simmonds, described as the “unhelpful and divisive rhetoric” of the election campaign.
“Maaori can lead for all”, said Ngira Simmonds, at the beginning of this month, “and we are prepared to do that.” *
This is part of a growing sense, as Ngāpuhi’s Mane Tahere told me, that “we’ve turned a corner”.
The corner is that u word – unity. The increasingly urgent sense of the need for a collective response to the coalition government.
And his description of what Act wants to achieve and how it represents the policy of division is captured in this passage:
My 1News colleague, Te Aniwa Hurihanganui, obtained details of the coalition Government’s Treaty Principles Bill. In its initial form it is not so much a re-evaluation of the role of the Treaty as an abandonment of it. Professor Margaret Mutu, speaking on 1News on Friday night, called it “an attempt to abolish the Treaty of Waitangi.”
This has arisen out of National’s coalition agreement with ACT.
I wrote about this at the end of last year, and also in the weeks after the election. I looked at the coalition agreements between National and ACT, and National and New Zealand First. And I noted their pointed focus on Māori. Some of it felt mean. What I called a strange, circling sense of a new colonialism.
I wrote about what I saw as ACT and New Zealand First’s experiments with a kind of “resentment populism”.
Who are we?, I asked. And where are we heading?
We’re heading to National reaching 41 percent in the first political poll of the year, “a massive jump”, as Thomas Coughlan described it in the NZ Herald, earlier this week. And we’re heading here, to Tūrangawaewae, and to thousands of people who travelled from throughout the country to collectively say, “no”.
In other words, we’re heading towards, or have already arrived in the vicinity of what PBS called the “divide and conquer populist agenda”.
And we’re heading to politics that purport to speak out against division, whilst arguably fomenting it.
The coalition politics are fascinating. National’s attempts to placate Māori are being actively undermined. The effects of Luxon’s visit to Tuheitia and Potaka’s and Bidois’s attendances at the hui have been completely undone by Jones’ “monumental moan session” and by Seymour’s actions. Act will clearly push the referendum as strongly as it can. NZ First will want to completely undermine it but in a way that does not upset its red neck supporters and I don’t think that it has worked out how to do this at least not yet. And National will be trying to keep it all together and douse down the feelings of outrage that are building while at the same time try and not fracture its rather fragile coalition.
Why does an Atlas funded far right political party want to completely undermine indigenous rights?
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it is all about access to minerals. Māori have been some of the most determined protectors of the environment in the country. If their rights are extinguished then this removes a major impediment to gathering minerals in National Parks and in our oceans and shores.
But this is going to get ugly. The choice is to either respect Tangata Whenua and the rights that te Titiri recognised or to increase their pain and sense of dislocation and the devastation of Te Ao Māori.
So which side are you on?
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