Beyond Question?

Record Numbers: The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, on 11 November, culminated outside Parliament on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, in one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

ACCORDING TO TE ARA, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, there were 15,000 in 2004. Protesters, that is. Gathered in front of Parliament to demonstrate their opposition to the then Labour Government’s foreshore and seabed legislation.

Twenty years later, on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, the number was 42,000 – a truly vast crowd spilling out of Parliament Grounds and into the surrounding streets. This makes the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, nine days earlier, on 11 November, one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

On the surface, David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, seems too puny a thing to have provoked such an extraordinary outpouring of opposition. After all, no party represented in the House of Representatives – apart from Act – is committed to supporting the Bill beyond its Second Reading debate.

Seymour’s proposed legislation is a dead man walking. It will not be enacted during the current parliamentary term. Those determined to prevent the Treaty Principles Bill from becoming law – thereby precipitating a binding referendum on its content – have already won.

How, then, is it possible that a Bill with just six months left to live, has inspired 42,000 mostly Māori New Zealanders to gather outside the parliamentary complex to demand its instant demise? If they’ve already won – why are they still fighting?

They are still fighting because they know that David Seymour is right. His bill might be killed at its Second Reading, but the issues he has raised will not die. He has placed a question on the parliamentary table. A question which a great many more than 35,000 New Zealanders would like to hear answered:

Is this country to be forever constrained by the content of an agreement entered into 184 years ago, by individuals long since deceased, binding entities that have long since disappeared, in order to resolve issues that have long since been decided?

Another way of framing that question is to ask:

Should the New Zealand that was built after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and very largely in spite of it – i.e. the New Zealand of today – be radically refashioned, constitutionally, administratively, politically, economically, and culturally, in accordance with the alleged understandings and intentions of te Tiriti’s Nineteenth Century Māori signatories?

But that question immediately raises another – and this one is much more dangerous.

With the benefit of hindsight, do the Māori of today regret the decision of their ancestors to sign the Treaty, or, at least, do they lament that their tīpuna did not make clearer what they expected to get by entering into a formal relationship with one of the Nineteenth Century’s most powerful states?

Which, in turn, raises another.

Is that what has really been going on these past 50 years: have Māori, alongside their Pakeha allies in the judiciary, the universities, and the public service, been quietly revising the Treaty’s meaning so that it better reflects, and serves, the needs of Māori living in the Twenty-First Century?

It is precisely to prevent these sorts of questions being asked – let alone answered – that Māori are so determined to “Kill the Bill”. It also explains why sending Seymour’s Bill to the Justice Select Committee has been so energetically resisted by so many Treaty “defenders”: everyone from a curious clutch of Christian clergy, to a concerned collection of King’s Counsel. The very last thing they, and the organisers of Tuesday’s extremely impressive hikoi, want, is for the meaning and purpose of the Treaty of Waitangi to be openly debated for months at a time.

David Seymour’s great sin has been to offer an alternative to this covert effort to change the constitution of New Zealand by changing the Treaty’s historical meaning. Those who argue that the Treaty Principles Bill is a blatant attempt to re-write the Treaty are quite right. What they omit to say, however, is that Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, in legal chambers, common-rooms, and public service offices for the past 50 years.

The critical difference, of course, is that Seymour was proposing to give the rest of us a vote on his version.

Leaving us with one, final, question:

Is 42,000 enough to stop him?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 November 2024.

Unstoppable.

Too Big To Fail: Forty-three years after the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, Maori defenders of te Tiriti, by their own efforts, and using their own resources, are poised to descend on the capital with upwards of 100,000 followers at their back, and no force in front of them even remotely capable of turning them around.

THE ORGANISERS OF THE Hīkoi mō te Tiriti are predicting record-breaking numbers. As the advancing column of runners, marchers, and cars approaches the capital, its numbers are expected to swell into the hundreds-of-thousands. If these predictions are borne out by events, then the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti will, indeed, be the largest protest demonstration in New Zealand’s political history.

Although no single demonstration associated with the 1981 Springbok Tour came anywhere near 100,000 participants, the 56 days of the Tour, and the months leading up to it, indisputably witnessed in excess of 100,000 protesters on New Zealand’s streets.

Significantly, the convulsions of 1981 and the record numbers participating in the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti are not unrelated historically. The lessons drawn from 1981 by an entire generation of progressive activists have, in the intervening 43 years, resolved themselves into a seemingly unstoppable ideological narrative. That narrative now constitutes the driving-force behind the movement toward decolonisation and indigenisation.

The nationwide campaign to end sporting contacts with Apartheid South Africa began as a fight to see the guarantee of human equality embodied in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights upheld by the New Zealand Government. The Republic of South Africa had been suspended from the UN in 1974 for its refusal to observe the principles enshrined in the Declaration. Playing Rugby with a side purporting to “represent” South Africa was, accordingly, condemned by many New Zealanders as morally indefensible.

In New Zealand’s churches, universities, professional associations and trade unions, this opposition to the 1981 Springbok Tour was deeply entrenched. In the New Zealand of the early-1980s, however, the nation’s demographic structure more-or-less guaranteed that a very large percentage of the population would remain unmoved by the arguments of the Tour’s opponents. Rugby was hugely important to New Zealanders, more than half of whom, according to the opinion polls of the day, were anxious to “keep politics out of sport”.

These New Zealanders had a powerful champion in their country’s National Party prime minister, Rob Muldoon. Presenting himself as the defender of the “ordinary bloke”, he cast the Tour’s opponents as, at best, snobbish intellectuals, and, at worst, subversive communists. In this he could rely upon the nation’s news media, both private and public, to take such accusations seriously. The instincts of most publishers, broadcasters and editors in 1981 were deeply conservative. Many of them regarded protest demonstrations as potentially dangerous attempts to apply extra-parliamentary pressure upon the nation’s democratically elected representatives.

Contrast Muldoon’s strong opposition from the top in 1981 with the way in which the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti has been treated by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in 2024. National’s leader has been careful not to openly criticise or condemn the Hikoi – with whose bitter criticisms of the Act Party leader’s Treaty Principles Bill he claims to be in at least partial agreement. Luxon and his government have also been careful to affirm publicly the right of New Zealanders to engage in peaceful protest. No thought in 2024 of portraying the Hikoi participants as enemies of anything so retrograde as the “ordinary bloke”.

The behaviour of the mainstream news media in 2024 offers an even stronger contrast with the way events were covered in 1981. From the moment the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti began its long journey to Wellington, the nation’s largest media operations have presented it as something akin to the living embodiment of the nation’s best and truest instincts.

At least one editorial leader-writer has depicted the Hikoi as a powerful and much needed corrective to the “colonial” attitudes embodied in Seymour’s bill. The possibility that 100,000 angry citizens massed outside the New Zealand Parliament might constitute a serious threat to the safety and security of the country’s democratic institutions does not appear to have given the nation’s journalists pause. Or, if it has, then the prospect of Members of Parliament – especially ACT MPs – being sorted-out and set-straight by the people is not one that bothers them unduly.

Clearly, much has changed since 1981. Certainly, the three Treaty principles set forth in Seymour’s bill (the language of which carries strong echoes of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) would have been warmly endorsed by the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders 43 years ago. How, then, has this extraordinary transformation: from multiple demonstrations against the denial of human equality, to a nation-spanning hikoi denouncing its legislative affirmation; been accomplished?

The big idea driving the shift, both here and overseas, in the 1970s and 80s was that white people are blind to their own racism. In biblical terms, Europeans are very good at drawing attention to the mote in other peoples’ eyes, all the while ignoring the whopping great beam that is in their own.

How is it, demanded the Māori who’d marched alongside Pakeha anti-tour protesters, that you could become so incensed by the racism of white South Africa’s apartheid system, but had so little to say about the racist foundations of your own nation?

You took our land, built a happy little colonial state on top of it, and left us to contemplate your generous legacy of ruin and loss. The strategies we adopted for our own survival, most of which reflected our need to avoid te Riri Pakeha – the anger of the white man – you interpreted as evidence of our easy-going good-nature, and patted yourselves on the back for presiding over the “best race-relations in the world” The treaty our ancestors signed in 1840, in which the British Crown promised to protect the autonomy and resources of our tribes, your Chief Justice casually dismissed, just 37 years later, as “a simple nullity”. You’ll understand, then, if we look at you Pakeha and see nothing but a bunch of bloody hypocrites!

It was a list of charges to which the progressive Pakeha Left had no convincing answers, other than to hang their heads in guilt and shame, and promise to do all within their power to right the wrongs of colonisation, and restore to the maximum extent possible the rights of Aotearoa’s indigenous people.

That they chose to do this through the courts, rather than through Parliament, is a reflection of the fear and loathing many anti-tour protesters, university students in particular, took away from their encounters with supporters of the Springbok Tour. That these people were racists went without saying, but the vicious sexism experienced by female protesters came as a nasty shock. Male protesters were equally stunned by the homophobic slurs hurled at them by rugby supporters.

Obviously, from the progressive perspective, National Party voters could not to be trusted to do the right thing. But, sadly, neither could the party of the working class. Far too many Labour voters had been willing to abandon their democratic-socialist ideals for a game of footy. Long before Hilary Clinton came up with the description, New Zealand’s progressives made it their business to ensure that the important business of decolonising and indigenising Aotearoa was kept as far away as possible from such deplorable citizens.

A lot can happen in 43 years. New Zealand jurisprudence can be radically reoriented. The National Party can atone for the sins of Rob Muldoon by initiating the Treaty Settlement Process. Apart from its votes, Labour can give up expecting anything from, or doing very much for, the New Zealand working-class. Te Tiriti, itself, can cease to be regarded as a simple nullity and become New Zealand’s foundational constitutional document. From around 10 percent, Māori can grow to 20 percent of the population.

Most importantly, from being a noisy and morally aggravating adjunct to the anti-apartheid movement in 1981, Māori defenders of te Tiriti, in 2024, by their own efforts, and using their own resources, can descend upon New Zealand’s capital city with upwards of 100,000 followers at their back, and no force in front of them even remotely capable of turning them around.

This essay was posted exclusively on the Bowalley Road blog of Monday, 18 November 2024.

This One's Just For You, Martyn.

 

Hard Hat & A Hammer

Alan Jackson

Video courtesy of YouTube

Posted on Bowalley Road on Thursday, 7 November 2024.