Hearing Ourselves Think.

No Longer Silent: The one sound loud enough to be heard above the efforts of even the most determined makers of political noise, is the sound of the long-suffering majority making up its mind. Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar addresses the Free Speech Union AGM held at Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre on Saturday, 9 November 2024.

ARE WE LIVING in a world where, increasingly, “noise” is drowning out “sound”? A world in which it is getting harder and harder to distinguish the discrete voices of reason from the angry roar of the crowd. Where we are assailed by the deafening racket of bad political actors determined to drown out any and all opinions but their own.

Political “noise”, and its impact on society’s ability to “hear” itself, was brought to life vividly by Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar from Oxford University in his keynote address to the AGM of the Free Speech Union, held at the Viaduct Events Centre on Saturday, 9 November 2024.

Pilloried by the Woke Left for daring to express the heretical view that colonialism wasn’t an unalloyed evil, and that the British Empire, in particular, wasn’t all bad, Biggar recalled the 2016 Oxford Union debate concerning the fate of Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. The enemies of colonisation were determined to remove this memorial to one of Nineteenth Century Britain’s greatest imperial swashbucklers (think Elon Musk with a Maxim gun) and Biggar was on hand to argue that it makes more sense to understand your country’s history than to cancel it.

Every time an anti-Rhodes speaker sat down, Biggar told the surprisingly large audience of between 200-300 AGM attendees, the venerable debating chamber would erupt into wild and sustained applause. To the casual observer, support for the removal of Rhodes’ statute would have seemed overwhelming. Looking around the Chamber, however, Biggar noticed that the number not cheering and clapping was almost as large as the number who were. The “anti-colonialists” simply made a lot more noise. (The “Rhodes Must Fall!” motion was eventually carried 245/212.)

This is what political noise does. It renders nuance and subtlety impossible. It makes the voices of dissenters appear weak. Most importantly, deliberately amplified political noise causes those holding dissenting views to doubt the efficacy of their own judgement, intimidating them into inaction and silence. Political noise thus achieves the same result as switching-off an opponent’s microphone. The sounds made by individual contributors are lost in the deafening noise of the mob.

That Prof. Biggar’s speech to the FSU’s AGM, and the introduction of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill to Parliament, occurred in the same week could be seen as a happy coincidence. In the week ahead, a Hīkoi mō te Tiriti will set off from the Far North for Wellington. As it wends its way south, the ratio of noise to sound promises to be politically instructive.

According to the latest poll, conducted by Curia Research between 3-7 October 2024, 46 percent of those surveyed support the Treaty Principles Bill, 25 percent oppose it, and 29 percent are “unsure”. When compared to Curia’s first poll on the Bill, published on 14 March 2024, these latest results indicate a substantial drop in the number of respondents indicating assent. Back in March, the supporters of Seymour’s legislation outnumbered its opponents 3:1.

What caused this drop, from 3:1 to 2:1, has become a matter for debate. When Curia’s first poll was taken, Seymour’s principles possessed an admirable clarity. By October, however, the second of the three fundamental principles had been complicated considerably by the Bill’s drafters – to the point where its meaning was no longer readily intelligible to the ordinary voter. This would certainly explain the 7-point rise in the number of respondents indicating uncertainty.

The 7 percentage point rise in those indicating opposition to the Bill may also reflect the confusion created by the revised version of its second principle. There is certainly quite a difference between March’s Version 1:

The New Zealand Government will protect all New Zealanders’ authority over their land and other property.

And October’s Version 2:

The Crown recognises the rights that hapū and iwi had when they signed the Treaty. The Crown will respect and protect those rights. Those rights differ from the rights everyone has a reasonable expectation to enjoy only when they are specified in legislation, Treaty settlements, or other agreement with the Crown.

The hitherto staunchest supporters of Seymour’s legislative initiative may well consider the revised version of the Second Principle to be altogether too “Treaty-ish” in its wording and intent to be worthy of their continuing support.

Alternatively, the relentless demonisation of Seymour’s bill by all major media organisations, the overwhelming majority of political journalists and columnists, and – most effectively – by the nation’s leading political cartoonists, may be convincing an increasing number of the Bill’s supporters that they are indeed guilty, as charged, of being on “the wrong side of history”.

By preventing its supporters from hearing either themselves, or the clear plurality of other New Zealanders who share their views, think, the deafening political noise generated by the Bill’s institutional opponents, particularly the universities and the Waitangi Tribunal, may simply, through grinding emotional attrition, be turning the numbers around.

This is the bet that National and NZ First have taken. That, by the time the six months of select committee hearings have concluded, conservative New Zealanders will have grown heartily sick of the whole business.

It could be a shrewd bet, because the select committee hearings will doubtless be drowned out by the relentless cacophony of the Bill’s opponents. What’s more, the constant and public vilification of the Bill’s supporters will not only encourage their shell-shocked withdrawal from the debate, but also convince an ever-increasing number of New Zealanders that the political game is no longer worth the candle.

Alternatively, the actions of the Treaty Principles Bill’s opponents may provoke the same sort of angry public backlash that followed the violent end of the anti-vaccination mandate movement’s occupation of Parliament Grounds.

The Police are expecting upwards of 25,000 Māori protesters and their allies to descend upon the Parliamentary Precinct on Tuesday, 19 November. Among those allies, Police anticipate having to deal with a large number of gang members intending to defy the legal ban on public displays of gang insignia. It is also thought that a contingent of activists determined to link the “anti-colonial struggles” of Māori and Palestinians will be part of the Hikoi.

The Hikoi leaders have assured the Police that its demonstration of opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill will be peaceful. But the level of political noise, and the passions it can hardly avoid arousing, may outstrip the ability of the leaders to keep their followers under control. If the whole thing turns pear-shaped, then National and NZ First will lose their bet.

In the aftermath of the American elections, the Coalition Government would be unwise to position themselves too closely alongside a noisy – let alone a violent – minority. The one sound loud enough to be heard above the efforts of even the most determined makers of political noise, is the sound of the long-suffering majority making up its mind.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 11 November 2024.

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.