Visitors With Votes.

The Way We Were - And Hoped To Remain: The iconic photograph of Prime Minister Norman Kirk holding the hand of a little Māori boy at Waitangi on 6 February 1973 held out the promise of a future founded upon the uncomplicated and uncontested acceptance of racial equality.  

WAITANGI DAY commentary see-saws manically between the warmly positive and the coldly negative. Many New Zealanders consider this a good thing. They point to the unexamined patriotism of July Fourth and Bastille Day celebrations, and applaud the fact that the character of Aotearoa-New Zealand, and its future evolution, remain matters for passionate disputation, rather than military chauvinism and outsized flags.

Conservatives of a certain age are less confident of the virtue of this annual debate. They look back wistfully to that period of New Zealand history when the constitutive peoples of New Zealand, Māori and Pakeha, gathered at Waitangi to celebrate the 1840 treaty signing which, according to Queen Victoria’s representative, Captain William Hobson, constituted them as “one people”.

In the memories of these people, no Waitangi Day better illustrated this notion of national unity than 6 February 1973. That was the day when the newly-elected Labour prime minister, Norman Kirk, announced that henceforth Waitangi Day would be known as New Zealand Day.

A powerful visual image of Kirk’s intentions for this new public holiday was provided by the photograph of a big prime minister holding the hand of a little Māori child as the two of them made their way across the Treaty Ground. Symbolically, the image suggested that the rising generation of Māori should expect to live lives of equivalent fullness to those of their Pakeha compatriots. The photograph’s clear assimilationist message was not welcomed by all, but for a large number of New Zealanders it expressed their hope for a future founded upon an uncomplicated and uncontested acceptance of racial equality.

“Why can’t we have Waitangi Days like that anymore?”, these old-timers ask. “Why can’t we celebrate the positive national achievements of New Zealanders, regardless of ethnicity? What is to be gained, in terms of strengthening social cohesion, by foregrounding – and all-too-often fomenting – this country’s ethnic divisions?”

The straightforward reply from the nation’s historians, Pakeha and Māori, is that the legacy of conquest, land seizure, economic marginalisation, and cultural erasure central to the European colonisation of New Zealand is seared into the collective memory of its indigenous people. At some point, the historical injustices that have not been forgotten by the colonised will have to be acknowledged and redressed by the colonisers. To suggest otherwise, they insist, is itself an act of colonialist oppression. Moreover, as the rising generation of Māori nationalists are only too willing to point out, by no means all these injustices are historical. Far too many of them are contemporary.

The articulation of such grievances, long assumed by the victors of the New Zealand Wars to be safely buried in the past, gathered momentum throughout the 1970s and 80s and were characterised by legal challenges and vigorous political protests.

The impressive Māori Land March of 1975 hastened the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal. Equipped with quasi-judicial powers, the Tribunal was instrumental in investigating past wrongs, determining the most appropriate means of their redress, and introducing New Zealanders to a more complete account of their history. Over the course of the next 50 years, its power and influence would undergo significant expansion.

The forcible eviction of the Ngati Whatua occupiers of Bastion Point in 1978 presented New Zealanders with a rare and shocking demonstration of the raw power of the Pakeha state. Hundreds of Police officers were involved, with logistical support provided by the armed forces. The operation provided a jarring reminder to New Zealanders that the alienation of Māori land and resources was predicated on the actual or threatened use of force by political and legal institutions that were overwhelmingly dominated by Pakeha – and remained so.

The watershed event that finally extinguished the sunny optimism of 1973, however, was the 1981 Springbok Tour. The dramatic and at times violent incidents that marked the 56-day tour by Apartheid South Africa’s rugby team brought the idealistic champions of classical racial equality into frequent and often uncomfortable contact with Māori protesters who had experienced first-hand the widespread and deeply ingrained Pakeha racism that, thanks to the Tour, would ensure the re-election of Rob Muldoon’s National Government.

The young, well-educated, middle-class Pakeha who mostly comprised the anti-tour movement found themselves at a moral disadvantage when challenged to account for the fact that they were willing to suffer Police batons for Black South Africans but not for Brown New Zealanders. Why was the racism of the White South Africans capable of inspiring a mass anti-racist movement, but not the equally egregious colonialist excesses of Pakeha regimes past and present?

The only acceptable answer was: “Because we’re as racist as the Rugby thugs.”

“Damn right!” came the Māori nationalists’ retort, “And now is the time for you to do something about it!”

Which they did. For the next forty years the students who had supplied the shock-troops of the anti-tour movement accepted the wero Māori Nationalists had laid before them and slowly but surely integrated it into whatever institutions they found themselves in a position to influence and/or control. Political parties, the courts, universities, schools, hospitals, the public service, law firms, the news media, trade unions, even corporations: all those institutions into which young, idealistic New Zealanders were disgorged annually. Places where, increasingly, the best way to get along was to go along with the ever-expanding ramifications of “the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi”, and the Crown-Māori “partnership” which the New Zealand judiciary had determined the Treaty to mandate.

By the 2020s this self-replicating social layer of te Tiriti-inspired professionals, administrators and managers numbered in the hundreds-of-thousands and was exerting a decisive influence over the evolution of New Zealand’s political, social and cultural institutions. Binding its members together was a deep mistrust, bordering on active hostility, directed at that part of New Zealand society which evinced little or no understanding of, or enthusiasm for, te Tiriti and the transformational narrative it was driving forward. That this part of New Zealand almost certainly outnumbered te Tiriti’s promoters and protectors gave cause for even greater concern, raising serious doubts about the cultural safety of democratic institutions.

Nevertheless, it was this strategic aggregation of Pakeha allies that facilitated significant cultural, economic, and political indigenous progress – precipitating a veritable “Māori Renaissance”. Mutually reinforcing, the alliance between Pakeha jurists, administrators, and educators, and the rapidly expanding Māori middle-class fostered by te Tiriti’s official rehabilitation and the opportunities flowing from a succession of substantial iwi-based “Treaty settlements”, continued to grow and strengthen. By the second decade of the twenty-first century it had solidified into the permanent and seemingly unchallengeable arbiter of New Zealand’s social, economic, cultural and constitutional development.

Te Tiriti’s victory may have been complete in these institutional islands, but they were surrounded by a vast sea of doubt. A substantial majority of Pakeha, as well as a growing portion of the recent immigrant population, struggled to accept the Waitangi Tribunal’s increasingly radical findings. Before their eyes the power of the Crown seemed to be crumbling away – a shrinkage of sovereignty fuelled by historical revisionists who flatly contradicted the public’s understanding (however flawed) of their nation’s story.

It was only a matter of time before this public doubt crystalised into public anger. Increasingly, the narrative growing out of the Treaty’s judicial and bureaucratic restoration was being presented to Pakeha in ways that not only made clear the “settlers’” general unfitness to shape its evolution, but also rejected, absolutely, their democratic right to do so.

That the 80 percent of New Zealanders who did not identify as Māori were to be given no say in elevating the Treaty’s status to that of supreme and unchallengeable law was finally made clear in the He Puapua Report. This document, penned by Treaty scholars and activists, and presented secretly to the Sixth Labour Government in 2019, detailed the changes required to ensure that New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements conformed with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The measures required to achieve this goal in time for the bicentennial celebration of the Treaty’s signing in 2040 were deemed to necessitate a full-scale constitutional revolution. This was not to be attempted in one go, however, but piecemeal. Each step along the way was to be accomplished through stand-alone, apparently unconnected, legislative adjustments. Significantly, the plan included no provision for these cumulative, transformational, changes to be presented to the whole citizenry for ratification by referendum. Like the proverbial slow-cooked frog, Pakeha New Zealanders were to be kept in ignorance of their constitutional fate until it was too late to change it.

That such a plan was thought to be implementable in an open democratic society speaks eloquently of elite New Zealanders’ assumptions concerning both the powers they wielded and the extent to which those powers could be challenged by ordinary citizens. As Sir Geoffrey Palmer makes clear in his book The New Zealand Constitution In Crisis, confidence in his own and other elite actors’ ability to sideline the democratic process was considerable:

The logic of the approach was as follows… Some parliamentary action by way of legislation was needed to make a base. But if that legislation itself redressed the grievances it would run into the problem that the majority of the community would oppose it. If, on the other hand, legislation was used to set up processes, and procedures and the principles on which decisions should be based were stated, it may be possible to get even a majoritarian legislature to act. The initial commitment required was to a process. No tangible outcome was provided by the legislation itself. What should be done was to be decided only after judicial or quasi-judicial processes had assessed individual cases. First it was necessary to give the courts something to interpret. Such was the nature of the approach I brought to both statutory incorporation of the Treaty in statutes, and extension of the Waitangi Tribunal to examine grievances back to 1840.

What brought He Puapua and the elite Treaty project generally to grief certainly wasn’t its exposure and condemnation by mainstream journalism. Indeed, the opposite was true: the major media organisations saw themselves as integral to the project’s success. Ultimately, what doomed the elites’ Treaty project to failure was the democratising impact of social media.

Palmer’s “processes” required media gatekeepers committed to keeping “the majority of the community” out of the game. In fact, so reliant upon the exclusionary powers of these gatekeepers were Palmer’s strategies for their ultimate success, that the moment the Internet empowered ordinary citizens to receive and impart information independently of the mainstream media and its guard-dogs, they began instantly to fall apart.

The picture that emerged from the collective exertions of these “citizen journalists” was as clear as it was disturbing. The bureaucratic and administrative elites had, since the early-1980s, come to view themselves as the irreplaceable brain and muscle of what political scientists call the “permanent state”, and constitutional lawyers refer to, simply, as “The Crown”. They had arrived at this conclusion alongside the leadership of the tangata whenua, who saw themselves, and were certainly acknowledged by the leaders of the Permanent State, as the “Permanent People”. The relationship between the two was mutually reinforcing.

The conclusion to be drawn from this reading of New Zealand’s constitutional, political and cultural evolution is daunting.

The status of those who are members of neither the Permanent State nor the Permanent People is problematic – to say the least! That they constitute a majority of the population is openly acknowledged by both the Crown and Māori. But, majorities under pressure from minorities all-too-easily behave tyrannically. Meaning that, while New Zealand remains a representative democracy, the non-Crown, non-Māori majority is likely to be treated as a permanent threat.

Because, what are they really? Victims of history: the flotsam and jetsam of a botched process of colonisation? Communities without roots, lacking permanent interests, bereft of cultural awareness, and off to Australia at the drop of a hat? A people just passing through?

No wonder Māori politicians call these New Zealanders manuhiri – visitors.

But that is not what they call themselves. It would, therefore, be most unwise of both the Permanent State and the Permanent People to forget that these visitors, these citizens, still come armed to the teeth with votes.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project website on Friday, 14 February 2025.