A Strange Hill To Die On.

Last Stand? Has Labour’s caucus chosen the Government’s deeply unpopular Three Waters policy as the hill upon which it will stand and die? And, if that is the case, then – why?

CURIA RESEARCH recently conducted a poll in the Napier electorate. Bad news for Stuart Nash, the Labour incumbent, whose chances of holding the seat are currently fluctuating between slim and none. Bad news, too, for the Labour Government as a whole, because the issue of most concern to local voters, by a Hawke’s Bay country-mile, is Three Waters. Around a third of the voters polled put the controversial water project at the top of their list of concerns. That’s nearly twice as many as the next most pressing concern for Napier voters – the parlous state of our health system.

One has to go back a long way to find a government so willing to press on with a policy so roundly rejected by the electorate. It is more than thirty years since Richard Prebble, confronted with the evidence that close to 90 percent of New Zealanders opposed the sale of Telecom, responded with the observation that Kiwis should be proud to have a government with the guts to face down such a powerful pressure-group!

Opponents of Rogernomics knew their efforts to turn around Labour’s caucus were doomed when MPs, confronted with evidence of the damage the Government’s policies were doing to their own chances of re-election, proudly declared that they would rather lose their seats than abandon the economic reforms. When fanaticism replaces politics, there’s not a lot anyone can do.

Is that what New Zealanders are faced with in the Three Waters Project – fanaticism? As happened thirty years ago with Rogernomics, has Labour’s caucus chosen this deeply unpopular policy as the hill upon which it will stand and die? And, if that is the case, then – why?

Tasked with a very similar question by the veteran business journalist, Fran O’Sullivan, the Deputy-Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson, indicated that if the most controversial element of Three Waters, the co-governance provisions, were stripped out of the Water Services Entities Bill (which is now only one reading away from the Royal Assent) then the two key questions Three Waters was formulated to answer: ‘Who owns the water?’ and ‘Who should manage it?’ would “end up in the courts immediately”.

Why should that be seen as an insurmountable problem? The answer, for Labour, can be given in three words: “foreshore and seabed”. The younger generation of Labour activists and politicians were mortified by Helen Clark’s ruthless countermanding of the Court of Appeal’s controversial judgement on who owned the watery margins of New Zealand. They still cringe at her in/famous description of those leading the protests against Labour’s legislation as “haters and wreckers”. Jacinda Ardern’s and Grant Robertson’s generation vowed “never again”.

What they still fail to grasp, however, is that Helen Clark’s government’s political response was both courageous and correct. The Court of Appeal had presumed to intrude upon matters that – as subsequent events proved – were quintessentially political in nature and, therefore, the proper preserve of the nation’s supreme political arbiter, Parliament. By reaffirming, through over-riding legislation, what the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders already believed to be the case – that the coastline belongs to all the people – Prime Minister Clark was telling the judiciary, in no uncertain terms, to get back in its box.

It is a matter of considerable constitutional concern that this present Labour Government does not appear to be willing to invite the courts to do the same.

Mr Robertson’s fear of the Three Waters controversy ending up in the courts strongly suggests that he and his Cabinet colleagues are simply unwilling to avail themselves of the power to determine who does – and who does not – own the water.

Is that because they are frightened that Labour’s Māori caucus will revolt if the co-governance provisions of the Water Services Entities Bill are stripped out of the legislation? Or, is it because they are afraid that the Judiciary will openly declare any such move by the Legislature to be ‘inconsistent’ with the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi?

If the first explanation is correct, then Mr Robertson and his Cabinet colleagues are guilty of political cowardice. If the second explanation holds true, then the Ardern Ministry is guilty of constitutional dereliction-of-duty.

The day unelected judges are permitted to dictate policy to the people’s elected representatives, in Parliament assembled, is the day that democracy dies in New Zealand.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 November 2022.

History Lessons.

“That’s a C- for History, Kelvin!” While it is certainly understandable that Māori-Crown Relations Minister Kelvin Davis was not anxious to castigate every Pakeha member of the House of Representatives for the crimes committed against his people by their ancestors; crimes from which his Labour colleagues continue to draw enormous benefits; the direction of his prosecutorial rhetoric at National and Act MPs exclusively was historically indefensible and morally obnoxious.

I SURE HOPE Kelvin Davis wasn’t a history teacher before he became a principal and then Te Tai Tokerau’s MP. Why? Because his grasp of what happened in this country between the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and today isn’t just wrong, it also has the potential to create great mischief.

The speech he delivered to the House of Representatives on Wednesday (11/5/22) is a particularly grim example of the Minister for Māori-Crown Relations historical ignorance. In it he appeared to equate the Opposition parties with the entire Pakeha population – past and present. This was more than just racially inflammatory, it represents a dangerous distortion of reality.

Addressing the Opposition Benches, Davis declared: “They conveniently overlook the fact that their wealth, their privilege and their authority was built off the backs of other people’s misery and entrenched inequality across generations.”

This is interesting. National’s leader, Christopher Luxon, was born in 1970, and the Act leader, David Seymour, in 1983. At the ages of 52 and 39 respectively, that doesn’t leave them many generations across which to have inflicted misery and entrenched inequality! He would have been on slightly firmer ground if he had been addressing his remarks to Labour’s Roger Douglas – whose policies did indeed inflict misery and inequality. Perhaps not across generations, but certainly since 1984. Except, of course, Labour MPs don’t like to draw attention to those policies – mostly on account of the fact that their party has done so little over nearly 40 years to reverse them.

Davis did considerably better, historically, when he described to the House the fate of his ancestors at the hands of Nineteenth Century colonial authorities. The gradual consolidation of the colonial state, its laws and regulations, effectively dispossessed Davis’s forebears, leaving them destitute and demoralised.

What Davis failed to mention, however, is that the Nineteenth Century dispossession of the Māori was Crown policy. More importantly, it was a process cheered to the echo by the overwhelming majority of the burgeoning Pakeha population. Rich and poor alike understood that their future prosperity was contingent upon the immiseration of the “native” population. Meaning that it wasn’t just the ancestors of the present Opposition MPs who built their wealth and privilege off the backs of his tupuna, but also the present crop of Pakeha Labour MPs seated alongside him.

While it is certainly understandable that Davis was not anxious to castigate every Pakeha member of the House of Representatives for the crimes committed against his people by their ancestors; crimes from which they continue, as a people, to draw enormous benefits; the direction of his prosecutorial rhetoric at National and Act MPs exclusively was historically indefensible and morally obnoxious.

If Davis is unaware that the single most devastating economic and social assault upon Māori of the last 50 years occurred on the Fourth Labour Government’s watch, then he has no business being an MP – let alone the Minister of Māori-Crown Relations. Certainly he cannot have forgotten that it was the Fifth Labour Government which oversaw the passage of the Seabed and Foreshore legislation. Or, that it was a Labour Prime Minister, Helen Clark, who described the leading opponents of that legislation as “haters and wreckers” – preferring to meet with an excessively woolly ram than with the tangata whenua her proposed law had so enraged.

Maybe the reckless willingness of the Sixth Labour Government to embrace the co-governance agenda of its Māori caucus is a delayed reaction to the actions of the Fourth and the Fifth. If so, then it is a very foolish reaction. Had Helen Clark and her Attorney-General not moved with speed to reverse the Court of Appeal’s overturning of what had been considered settled law, then Don Brash would, almost certainly, have won the 2005 General Election. Given that a National victory in 2005 would have meant the effective re-nullification of the Treaty and the abolition of the Māori Seats – thereby provoking civil war – Māori and Pakeha both owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude.

The depressing thing about the politics of the moment is the apparent historical amnesia of just about all its practitioners. The Settler Nation responsible for extinguishing the Treaty in the 1860s is simply not prepared to see it reinstated as New Zealand’s de facto constitution in the 2020s. The way Davis chose to deliver his thoughts to the House of Representatives: in the form of an attack on the Opposition; shows just how impossible it is to construct an argument about our history that does not inevitably boil down to the equivalent of Sir Michael Cullen’s memorable taunt: “We won. You lost. Eat that!”

The most frightening aspect of Davis’s performance is that it showed no signs that the Minister of Māori-Crown relations has the slightest idea of what will happen to that relationship if co-governance is forced upon an unwilling Pakeha nation.

Davis’s colleague, Willie Jackson, has labelled the Act leader a “useless Māori” and “a dangerous man”. But David Seymour is no more or less “useless” than those Māori iwi and hapu that saw which way the wind was blowing in the 1850s and 60s and ended up fighting alongside General Cameron’s imperial troops. As for being a dangerous man. Well, Jackson’s description can only be proven if Seymour and his party attract sufficient support to enforce the implementation of Act’s radical policies. He will be a dangerous man only because his fellow New Zealanders have made him one – by voting for him.

It’s not Seymour that poses a danger to you and your people, Willie, it’s democracy. But, then, you already knew that, didn’t you?

By the same token, it’s not the Opposition that has somehow cornered all the privilege, Kelvin, nor is it the exclusive property of the 63 percent of the New Zealand population known as Pakeha. These fair-skinned Polynesians are not – and never will be – “Europeans”. Just as contemporary Māori are not – and never will be again – the Māori who inhabited these islands before colonisation. Both peoples are the victims of historical forces too vast for blame, too permanent for guilt.

It is high time we stopped using History as a weapon, and started relying upon it as a guide.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 13 May 2022.