Secretive Constitutional Reform Is Political Kryptonite.

Dangerous Stuff: The moment it becomes clear to non-Māori New Zealanders just how violently Te Pāti Māori’s reforms would re-arrange the country’s constitutional furniture their reaction is likely to sink any chance of a centre-left victory. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, talk of serious constitutional reform has the effect of Kryptonite on most New Zealand politicians.

CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM is Kryptonite to our political leaders. New Zealand’s No. 8 wire constitution, largely unwritten and characteristically informal, has been deemed “rough enough” by the country’s two largest political parties. In both National and Labour, excessive interest in the topic is not career-enhancing – being taken as evidence of the political trainspotting to which most “ordinary” Kiwis are violently allergic.

This allergy has only gotten worse as the political salience of Te Tiriti o Waitangi has increased. The alacrity and energy with which National and Labour politicians kick Tiriti-based constitutional reform down the road is remarkable. That republican proposals regarding the monarchy are similarly postponed to some nebulous future time, merely confirms our politicians’ aversion to serious constitutional debate.

The politicians’ aversion to substantive constitutional reform is perfectly understandable when set against the New Zealand electorate’s strongly-held conviction that Parliament is – and should remain – supreme. Formalising our constitutional arrangements in writing would lead, inexorably, to the Judiciary adjudicating constitutional disputes. The idea of appointed judges having the final say over the actions of our democratically-elected House of Representatives has never gone down well in these parts.

Like it or not, however, the pressure to enshrine Te Tiriti at the heart of our constitutional structures continues to grow. “What to do about ‘The Treaty’?” is certain to be one of the key questions dominating the forthcoming election campaign. This is not because our political leaders have finally decided to bite the bullet on constitutional reform, it’s because Māori activists – both legal and political – have finally forced the issue onto New Zealand’s short-term political agenda.

Both of the major parties have been caught in a pincer-movement. From the left, Te Pāti Māori (TPM) has made it clear that constitutional reform must be part of any coalition and/or support agreement involving itself, Labour and the Greens. From the right, the Act Party is insisting that any conservative coalition government must commit itself to, first, defining te Tiriti’s meaning and scope, and then, confirming that definition by referendum.

The moment it becomes clear to non-Māori New Zealanders just how violently TPM’s reforms would re-arrange the country’s constitutional furniture their reaction is likely to sink any chance of a centre-left victory. By the same token, an affirmative referendum vote for a re-definition reducing Te Tiriti to a mere constitutional flourish would unleash racial conflict on a scale not seen since the land wars of the 1860s.

Presumably, it was thoughts of this sort that prompted the Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, to warn New Zealand’s minor parties against announcing bottom-lines that neither Labour nor National can accept without setting themselves up for a fatal electoral backlash. Hipkins’ (along with the Opposition Leader, Christopher Luxon’s) problem is that neither TPM nor Act can afford to be seen abandoning their principles for the baubles of office. Both parties’ electoral strength has been built upon their very public determination to stand firm even when all those around them are bowing to “mainstream” pressures.

The uncompromising positions adopted by those parties operating beyond the pale of political orthodoxy are what you get when orthodox politicians’ refuse to both sanction and participate in genuine constitutional debate. But if, by their refusal, those same orthodox politicians believe that serious constitutional debate can be stifled indefinitely, then they are wrong. If the non-Māori political establishment was unwilling to countenance constitutional reform, the Māori political establishment – in the guise of the Iwi Leaders Forum – were determined to set the wheels in motion.

It was in 2010, at a meeting of the Iwi Chairs’ Forum, that a proposal for Matike Mai Aotearoa, the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, was first laid upon the table. By 2012, Matike Mai, led by Margaret Mutu and the late Moana Jackson, was ready to begin developing and implementing “a model for an inclusive Constitution for Aotearoa based on tikanga and kawa, He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Niu Tireni of 1835, Te Tiriti o Waitangi of 1840, and other indigenous human rights instruments which enjoy a wide degree of international recognition.”

For more than four years, up and down New Zealand, Māori gathered to impart their ideas about constitutional transformation to Matike Mai. For the most part, Non-Māori New Zealanders remained unaware that such a process was underway. Certainly, only a very small number of Non-Māori understood the radical character of the undertaking. In the words of the Working Group’s final report:

The Terms of Reference did not ask the Working Group to consider such questions as ‘How might the Treaty fit within the current Westminster constitutional system’ but rather required it to seek advice on a different type of constitutionalism that is based upon He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti. For that reason this Report uses the term ‘constitutional transformation’ rather than ‘constitutional change’.

Mutu and Jackson clearly considered this approach to be optimal, but, from the perspective of those seeking constitutional reform proposals with significant buy-in from Māori and Non-Māori alike, Matike Mai was emphatically sub-optimal. Its recommendations, untested by the responses of Non-Māori, could hardly avoid becoming political Kryptonite. The moment the Non-Māori population became aware of what Matike Mai was proposing, things were going to get extremely messy.

The change of Government in 2017 hardly improved matters. Now vested with all the powers of the Executive, Labour’s Māori ministers opted to continue down the constitutional reform path unaccompanied by the Non-Maori Treaty partner. Commissioned by Nanaia Mahuta, the extraordinary He Puapua Report (kept under wraps until the 2020 general election was safely out of the way) rehearsed many of the radical constitutional ideas first mooted in Matike Mai. When, inevitably, the contents of He Puapua was leaked to the public, Jacinda Ardern and her Non-Māori colleagues could not back away from it fast enough.

And, as if Matike Mai and He Puapua weren’t enough, there was also a constitutional consultative process of extraordinary design moving inexorably towards its scheduled conclusion. This exercise was notable for its division into two separate stages.

The first stage was restricted to Māori. Only when their recommendations had been finalised would Non-Māori be asked to respond. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson received the Māori-generated constitutional proposals he refused to put them before Cabinet. He then (wisely) decided to halt the entire exercise until after the election.

In the light of this extraordinary history, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that those charged with managing the discussion of New Zealand’s future constitutional arrangements have been guilty of appalling cowardice. Rather than insist that any and all discussion of the nation’s constitutional future takes place in the full view of its citizens, the representatives of both Treaty partners found it more expedient to do their talking separately and behind closed doors. Inevitably, this secretive process has given rise to profound misgivings, especially among the Non-Māori majority. The Labour Government’s shameful lack of transparency has allowed fear and doubt to grow about the motives and intentions of the Māori minority. This has contributed to an unnecessary and distressing deterioration in New Zealand’s race relations.

To prevent matters deteriorating further, Labour and National should both undertake to defer any significant constitutional change until there has been a opportunity for all New Zealanders – Māori and Non-Māori – to engage openly, and without fear of “cancellation”, in discussing and debating the full range of options for how their country might be governed. It is not in the least reasonable to assume that a durable constitution can be drafted in the absence of untrammelled popular participation.

Political Kryptonite can only be rendered harmless by exposing it to the remedial effects of direct democratic sunlight.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 15 May 2023.

A Real Revolution?

Secret Revolutionary? “I think the general public is not aware that we are going through huge revolutionary changes in the country and, in fact, we have taken that such a long way, there is no going back.”  –  Dame Claudia Orange

SUPPOSE THEY MADE A REVOLUTION, and nobody noticed. Suppose the “Cabinet Office” ordered the nation’s public servants to implement an unmandated revolutionary transformation of New Zealand, and they complied. Suppose one of the leading authorities on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Dame Claudia Orange, confirmed that this revolution was, in fact, a done deal.

This is what Dame Claudia told the NZ Herald’s Audrey Young:

I think the general public is not aware that we are going through huge revolutionary changes in the country and, in fact, we have taken that such a long way, there is no going back.

Now, forgive me, but my understanding of revolutionary change is that it does not, and cannot, take place without the “general public” being aware. The active participation of the people in replacing a regime that has, in their eyes, lost all political legitimacy, is pretty much the definition of a revolution. The idea that not only could such a profound upheaval have taken place, but also gone past the point of no return, without the people either noticing it, or sanctioning it, is, quite simply, absurd.

So what should we call a programme initiated by the “Cabinet Office” (Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet?) with the ultimate intention of transforming the nation’s constitutional arrangements in such a way that the “consent of the governed” need not be confirmed by democratic means?

Given that New Zealanders have lived through such a transformation before, when the programme of ruthless economic “reforms” known as “Rogernomics” was unleashed upon them without warning, and without an electoral mandate, between 1984 and 1987, then it seems only fitting that this latest attempt to impose transformational change from the top down be described in the same manner. What New Zealanders have been experiencing since 2019 is a “bureaucratic coup d’état”.

Indeed, the parallels between 1984 and the present are uncanny. In 1984, the incoming Labour Government, led by David Lange, was presented by its Treasury advisors with “Economic Management” – essentially a blueprint for Finance Minister Roger Douglas’s radical transformation of the New Zealand economy.

Prior to the 2020 general election, a similar transformational blueprint, “He Puapua” was handed to the Minister for Māori Development, Nanaia Mahuta. Commissioned by the Minister in 2019 to envision a pathway to the full implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, “He Puapua” dovetailed neatly with the “Cabinet Office’s” instructions regarding Te Tiriti.

The parallels do not stop there. Three years after “Economic Management”, the Treasury presented the re-elected Labour Government with “Government Management” – a detailed blueprint for adapting the instruments of state administration to the needs of the new “free market”.

Three years after “He Puapua”, the re-elected Labour Government has been presented with two reports, “Ki te whaiao, ki te ao Mārama” and “Maranga Mai” both commissioned by the Human Rights Commission and reflecting the advice of some of the most radical Māori nationalists in New Zealand. Among a host of revolutionary recommendations, the “Maranga Mai” report concludes:

Reform of central and local government systems is also needed to reduce and eliminate institutional racism which cause inequities and inequalities for Māori in outcomes. This reform should uphold and align these systems with Te Tiriti o Waitangi, by following the foundational work and recommendations set out in Matike Mai Aotearoa and He Puapua reports.

Were the recommendations of “Matike Mai Aotearoa” and “He Puapua” to be followed, the manner in which New Zealanders are governed, and the rights and privileges they are heir to, would indeed be transformed – out of all recognition.

Race Relations Commissioner, Meng Foon, has responded to the reports by committing himself to the long-term goal of “Eliminat[ing] racism in Aotearoa in all forms, in all organisations whether it’s government, non-government organisations, businesses, amongst our communities.”

New Zealanders anxious to learn how this elimination might be accomplished – especially given the Human Rights Commission’s acceptance that racism and white supremacy are baked-in to New Zealand society – should probably study the “re-education” centres established by the Chinese Government in Xinxiang to eliminate radical Islamist ideology from all mosques, schools, organisations, businesses and communities of the Uighur people.

It is difficult to believe that Labour could be contemplating a bureaucratic coup-d’état even more destructive than Rogernomics. If they are, then – this time – they will provoke a real revolution.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 10 February 2023.

After Ratana.

Smiling And Waiving A Golden Opportunity: Chris Hipkins knew that the day at Ratana would be Jacinda’s day – her final opportunity to bask in the unalloyed love and support of her followers. He simply could not afford to be seen to overshadow this last chance for his former boss to shine. National’s Christopher Luxon, however, was under no such obligation.
 

CHRIS HIPKINS found himself in an impossible situation yesterday (24/1/23). He had come to the tiny village of Ratana at the side of his Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. At what would be her last official public engagement in that role, he could not possibly upstage her. His job was to smile and mouth platitudes. He was there to “introduce” himself to the assembled leaders of Maoridom and convince them that he will be a fitting replacement for the most accommodating prime minister Māori have ever had. He knew that this would be Jacinda’s day – her final opportunity to bask in the unalloyed love and support of her followers. He simply could not afford to be seen to overshadow this last chance for his former boss to shine.

The other Chris, however, National’s Christopher Luxon, was under no such obligation. He came to Ratana with a message to deliver. That message was not for the assembled Māori leaders, or, at least, not primarily for them. Luxon’s message was aimed squarely at all those Pakeha conservatives who have for many months been openly sceptical of National’s willingness to take a strong stand against Co-Governance, He Puapua and Three Waters. Ardern’s resignation and the uncontested election of Chris Hipkins to replace her had made the delivery of an unequivocal repudiation of all three of these racially-charged propositions a matter of urgency. Luxon and his advisers knew that if National didn’t stake out its position immediately, then the Hipkins-led Labour Party would beat them to the punch.

And Luxon did stake out a clear – or should that be clearer – position. His remarks concerning co-governance, recorded by RNZ-National’s reporters, left little room for misunderstanding:

I think it has been quite a divisive and immature conversation over recent years,” Luxon told the Ratana crowd, “and I personally think it’s because the government hasn’t been upfront or transparent with the New Zealand people about where it’s going and what it’s doing […..] We believe in a single coherent system – not one system for Māori and another system for non-Māori – for the delivery of public services. Things like Health, Education, and Justice, and critical infrastructure like Three Waters. It doesn’t mean that we don’t want Māori involved in decision-making and partnering with [non-]Māori, [but] we have a princip[led] objection because New Zealand has one government: it’s elected by all of us, it’s accountable to all of us, and its public services are available to anyone who needs them.

Clear enough for the Pakeha conservatives? Possibly. But, for many on the Right, National remains the party of John Key. The same John Key who secretly dispatched Te Pāti Māori’s Pita Sharples to the United Nations in New York to sign on behalf of all New Zealanders the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The very same UNDRIP that Labour’s Helen Clark had refused to sign, because, with her much deeper understanding of the indigenous debate, she understood that the Declaration posed a direct threat to the constitutional integrity and sovereignty of the New Zealand state.

Those same conservative Pakeha also know that National is the party of Chris Finlayson who, while New Zealand’s Attorney-General and Treaty Settlements Minister, did more to hasten the fulfilment of the Māori nationalist agenda than any politician not named Mahuta or Jackson. The Right understands that an extremely radical reading of te Tiriti o Waitangi has already been deeply entrenched in the New Zealand Public Service (bolstered by legislatively enforceable Treaty principles) and is steadily transforming the way in which New Zealand is administered, as well as raising serious questions about the long-term future of private property rights.

There is also serious doubt on the right of New Zealand politics that Luxon and his advisers have even read – let alone understood – the He Puapua Report. Their fear is that, as the Māori nationalist, Donna Awatere, observed back in the early-1980s, Pakeha politicians will continue to remain blind to virtually every aspect of the nationalists’ project, and that this, the Pakeha’s racist refusal to take Māori sovereignty seriously, is what offers its promoters their best chance of success. Moreover, when two Labour prime ministers in a row have proved themselves incapable of answering basic questions about the content of te Tiriti o Waitangi, it’s difficult not to concede that Awatere and the conservatives have a point!

While it is certain that Luxon’s statements at Ratana constitute a direct conceptual challenge to the transformative constitutional project posited by the authors of He Puapua, what is much less certain is whether the National leader – unlike the leader of the Act Party, David Seymour – grasps just how much of the basic infrastructure of co-governance has already been constructed. Having drawn his line in the sand at Ratana, Luxon cannot now avoid arriving at the same political destination Seymour reached more than two years ago. The point where he realises that the progress towards a racially bifurcated, co-governed Aotearoa can only be halted by enshrining a conservative reading of te Tiriti in law, and by rooting-out with ruthless thoroughness all of the structures and procedures that have grown out of the radicals’ reading of te Tiriti’s meaning.

The daunting challenge confronting Chris Hipkins is how to regain the initiative from Luxon without locking himself into the same conservative logic currently drawing National and Act inexorably towards a maximalist, Pakeha-driven, revision of the Treaty’s constitutional, political and cultural significance. Between now and the October General Election, Hipkins and his party are going to have to learn to take Māori nationalism seriously. Because Luxon is right, to date Labour’s handling of this issue has been divisive and immature. The new prime minister could, therefore, do a lot worse than to sit down with an old one, Helen Clark, and learn a few home-truths about the deadly seriousness of the indigenous forces seeking to take their country back.

Hipkins’ first and most obvious move is to announce that the Three Waters legislation will be repealed, pending a broad and thorough examination of the project’s all-too-obvious political and economic shortcomings. Pushing the pause button on this extraordinarily unpopular project will be good, practical, “bread-and-butter” politics. Were the new prime minister to follow it up with a promise to initiate an equally broad and thorough democratic debate about the moral and practical status of the Tiriti/Treaty in twenty-first century New Zealand, the public response might be even more positive – especially if the right of all schools of historical and constitutional thought to freely contend with one another was guaranteed by Hipkins’ Government.

Jacinda Ardern’s greatest contribution to her country’s evolution was to reinvigorate the idea that politics should be about more than conventional administration and “responsible” financial management. She made us believe again that a person’s reach should exceed their grasp. “Jacinda” was a ray of sunlight through the drear neoliberal darkness. In that shaft of sunlight she showed us a new and wonderfully different nation. The task she has bequeathed to her successor – and her people – is to create the road that will take them there.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 26 January 2023.

A Matter Of Trust.

Hard To Win, Easy To Lose: Trust cuts both ways. It is equally critical, in political terms, that a government trusts the people to at least the same extent as the people trust the government. Indeed, nothing erodes the voters’ trust faster than evidence their own government considers them untrustworthy.

TRUST. Nothing is more important to a government than the trust of the governed. With trust, there is very little that a government cannot accomplish. Without it, durable political accomplishments are much less likely. Jacinda Ardern’s government is currently teetering on the brink of forfeiting a crucial percentage of the electorate’s trust – more than enough to cost it the next election.

Trust, of course, cuts both ways. It is equally critical, in political terms, that a government trusts the people to at least the same extent as the people trust the government. Indeed, nothing erodes the voters’ trust faster than evidence their own government considers them untrustworthy.

At the heart of the political uncertainties enveloping the concept of co-governance is the Labour Government’s all-too-obvious lack of trust in the Pakeha majority. A lack of trust also displayed by the National Party. What other explanation could John Key possibly offer for sending the Māori Party’s co-leader, Pita Sharples, to New York, in conditions of virtual secrecy, to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP).

Given that UNDRIP was largely authored by, and has become the crowning achievement of an indigenous New Zealander, Moana Jackson, a New Zealand government, untroubled by the public’s reaction, might have been expected to make more of the event than a diplomatic fait accompli. Likewise, with respect to the formation of a special working group tasked with identifying the cultural and constitutional changes required to give full effect to UNDRIP.

A government untroubled by the political ramifications of such an investigation would not have kept its existence hidden from its coalition partner. A government willing to trust the New Zealand electorate would not have kept the working group’s report – He Puapua – under wraps. On the contrary, it would have welcomed the lively political debate which the unedited Report’s voluntary release would undoubtedly have generated.

But, as we all know, trust was lacking. Not only was the re-elected Labour Government anxious to keep the document secret, but those Māori with a deep interest in constitutional reform – including Moana Jackson – similarly manifested a strong aversion to debating He Puapua’s recommendations openly in the public square.

Even when the full text of He Puapua was leaked to former Act MP Muriel Newman’s right-wing New Zealand Centre for Political Research, the reaction of the Labour Government was to downplay its significance and emphasise that it was not – repeat NOT – government policy. The Prime Minister went further: flatly ruling-out implementing one of the Report’s most controversial recommendations – the creation of an Upper House of Parliament, composed of an equal number of Māori and non-Māori members, and tasked with testing the legislation passed up to it by the Lower House against the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Jacinda Ardern’s reflexive rejection of the proposed Upper House was not only precipitate, it was also politically injudicious. There are many recommendations contained within the He Puapua report that are considerably more problematic than the creation of an Upper House. Indeed, if a government was anxious to demonstrate to voters the efficacy of the principle of co-governance, then a second chamber made up of 50 percent Māori and 50 percent Non-Māori, would be precisely the right place to start.

An Upper House constitutionally limited to reviewing, reporting-on, and – if necessary – returning, legislation to the House of Representatives for further consideration and/or revision, could play a powerfully educative role in preparing the population for other cultural and constitutional changes.

Critical to the Upper House fulfilling such an educative function would be the elimination, as far as practicable, of all the debilitating distractions of partisanship.

For the Māori half of the Chamber, this could be achieved by delegating the choice of representatives to an agreed-upon roll of collective Māori entities. The manner of identifying these entities’ representatives would be determined by the iwi and hapu involved. Some might opt for election, others for more traditional methods of identifying and anointing leaders.

For the Pakeha half of the Chamber, partisanship might be avoided by following the example of Seanad Éireann, the Irish Senate, members of which are appointed to represent Public Administrators, the Legal Profession, Employers, Farmers, Trade Unions, the Universities, and people prominent in the world of Arts and Letters.

Anxious to move beyond the murderous allegiances of the Irish Civil War (1922-23) the framers of the Irish Republic’s constitution strove to construct an upper house guided not by fierce party loyalties, but by a determination to meet the challenges of self-government by harnessing the wisdom of the whole nation.

Thus constituted, the proposed Upper House could play a crucial role in identifying, investigating, and debating to what extent each piece of legislation passed by the House of Representatives conformed to – or deviated from – the principles of the Treaty. Have the decisions of the lower house strengthened or weakened the partnership between the Crown and tangata whenua? Are its decisions justified? Or should the legislation be sent back to the House for further deliberation?

It is difficult to conceive of a more gentle or thoughtful way of demonstrating the value of co-governance as a method for devising policies and making laws which both Māori and Non-Māori can accept without reservation and/or resentment. An Upper House with strictly limited powers, but constituted in such a way that the worth of legislation driven by purely partisan considerations can be assessed by those beholden to very different principles, would fast become the respected educator of the nation.

The Prime Minister’s rejection of this key He Puapua recommendation – almost out of hand – is deeply regrettable. As a means of instilling and demonstrating trust in the capacity of Māori and Non-Māori to determine and advance their best mutual interests, an Upper House has a great deal more to recommend it than Labour’s (and the Greens’) increasingly divisive Three Waters project, which, right from the start, has communicated to all affected parties an almost total lack of trust.

That Māori have myriad reasons to withhold their trust from Pakeha is undisputed by those with even a rudimentary understanding of New Zealand history. To refuse trust as a matter of policy, however, cannot hope to bring Māori and Pakeha close enough to jointly determine a mutually rewarding future for Aotearoa-New Zealand. For that to happen, both peoples need to trust each other enough to embrace new and untried solutions.

The Prime Minister should withdraw her objection to the creation of a co-governed Upper House. Let New Zealanders witness in public the Treaty debates that, hitherto, have only taken place in private. If there is wisdom and generosity to be found in the processes of co-governance, then let their virtues be seen by Māori and Non-Māori alike.

Trust them, and New Zealanders will, almost always, make the right choice.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 5 December 2022.

Jackson's Trap.

Tight Spot: Maori Development Minister Willie Jackson has been left holding a draft implementation plan for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which is too radical to present to Cabinet, but which its authors refuse to re-write. Much broader public consultation has been promised once the plan is released, but time is short, and the clock is ticking.

WILLIE JACKSON is caught in a trap of his own making. Three groups, tasked in April with developing a detailed plan for implementing the provisions of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) have steadfastly refused to play the bureaucratic game the Minister for Māori Development has forced upon them. In essence, they have delivered Jackson an offer neither he, nor the Cabinet, can accept. Their “Declaration Plan”, clearly politically unacceptable, has been kept under wraps for months.

Non-plussed, Jackson asked the plan’s authors: unidentified representatives of Te Puni Kokiri, Pou Tikanga (Iwi Leaders Group) and the Human Rights Commission; to present a revised document for Cabinet’s consideration by July. With November fast approaching, the document’s authors have yet to respond. It is difficult to interpret this tardiness as anything other than a deliberate effort to run down the clock on Jackson. The Declaration Plan’s authors appear confident that their failure to adhere to the Minister’s consultative timetable will make it virtually impossible to organise an effective public response prior to the 2023 General Election.

Clearly, a high-stakes hand of political poker is being played out here. It is hard to interpret the Declaration plan’s authors’ failure to meet Jackson’s deadline as anything other than an act of deliberate defiance. What has prompted their non-compliance?

The most obvious answer is to be found in the unusual ordering of the “Declaration Plan’s” preparation. Rather than gather a broadly representative group of cultural, political and legal experts to develop a blueprint for UNDRIP’s implementation – something in the nature of a Royal Commission of Inquiry – Jackson initiated a round of consultations with Māori groups across the country, and then tasked TPK, the Iwi Leaders Group and the HRC with producing a “first draft” of the results. Once endorsed by Cabinet, this draft Declaration Plan was to be presented to the whole population of New Zealand for consideration, comment, and revision.

Now, any Māori ethno-nationalist worthy of the name will immediately recognise Jackson’s action-plan as a crude mechanism for forcing tangata whenua to water-down their proposals to the point where a Pakeha-dominated Cabinet will find them acceptable. This signed-off Declaration Plan must then be subjected to all the slings and arrows of Pakeha racism – the mouthpieces of which will undoubtedly demand even more watering-down. By the time the process is complete, New Zealand’s plan for implementing UNDRIP will be so anodyne that even Jair Bolsonaro could give it the thumbs-up!

It is worth recalling at this point that a comprehensive “Declaration Plan” already exists. Commissioned by the then Minister of Māori Development, Nanaia Mahuta, in 2019, the He Puapua report, sets forth a step-by-step process for bringing Aotearoa into full compliance with UNDRIP by 2040 – the 200th anniversary of the signing of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Kept under wraps by Jacinda Ardern’s government, He Puapua was clearly regarded as far too radical to be placed before the New Zealand electorate in 2020. When, inevitably, the document found its way into the public domain, the newly-elected Labour Government was quick to deny that its proposals were – or would ever be – in any way driving Government policy. The Prime Minister curtly ruled-out He Puapua’s plan for a Māori upper-house of Parliament.

The institutions brought together by Jackson can hardly have missed the unspoken terms-of-reference underpinning their endeavour. Under no circumstances were they to present a Declaration Plan as radical as He Puapua. Not only that, but Matike Mai Aotearoa: Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, an impressive consultative exercise in its own right, commissioned by the Iwi Leaders Group, and conducted under the guidance of the late Moana Jackson, which, itself, provided powerful inspiration for the authors of the He Puapua report, was also to be consigned to the “too-radical” basket. So constrained, the authorial group might as well have subtitled their Declaration Plan “Uncle Tom’s Report”.

Nevertheless, the institutions tasked with drawing up the Declaration Plan had no option but to serve. That being the case they seem to have agreed that the whole exercise should either produce a document worthy of UNDRIP, or, if that proved impossible, come to nothing.

This is what they appear to have done. Jackson was presented with a Declaration Plan which, almost certainly, incorporated the core ideas of both Matike Mai and He Puapua. Given the extent of consultation within Maoridom which preceded and informed the Matike Mai working-group’s report; and in light of the courageous creativity of He Puapua, the draft Declaration Plan’s authors could hardly have done otherwise. By any reasonable measure, Matike Mai and He Puapua are the truest reflection of the Māori ethno-nationalist position. If Jackson’s group didn’t back-up the work already done, then they risked being written-off as latter-day kupapa.

Jackson, meanwhile, is left holding a draft Declaration Plan he can’t present to Cabinet, and which its authors refuse to re-write. And, the clock is ticking. When he meets with the authors on Friday (21/10/22) what are Jackson’s options?

He could threaten to release their draft plan to the public, reasoning that the reaction of most Pakeha would be so negative that the whole process of fulfilling New Zealand’s obligations under UNDRIP would come to a shuddering halt. If he was feeling particularly embittered and Machiavellian, he could further argue that the racist backlash would be so powerful that the Government would have to abandon, at least temporarily, its whole co-governance agenda – Three Waters in particular. Could they not produce a document that would reassure Pakeha that UNDRIP was no threat: a document that would actually make the introduction of co-governance easier? Isn’t Māori control of water worth a little bit of watering-down?

Shrewd arguments, certainly, but they don’t get Jackson out of his trap. He simply can’t escape the fact that to meet the requirements of UNDRIP – let alone te Tiriti – the Crown will have to cede an unacceptably large amount of its sovereign power to Māori. As a Minister of that Crown, it is more than Jackson’s warrant is worth to place such a proposition upon the Cabinet Table. In the Realm of New Zealand there can be only one Crown.

Moana Jackson, the authors of He Puapua, and the authors of the draft Declaration Plan: all reached the same conclusion. Neither UNDRIP nor te Tiriti o Waitangi will ever be fully realised in the Realm of New Zealand. To fulfil the promises of these documents a wholly new kind of state will be required – one so radically different to the state New Zealanders presently inhabit, that their acceptance of it could only be secured in the conditions of a full-scale revolution.

And not even Willie Jackson can sell a full-scale revolution to this Labour Government.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 21 October 2022.

Imagining Away The Opposition.

The High Tide Of Popular Protest: In 2019 Chile was racked by massive protest demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor, Chileans served notice on their government that the moment had arrived for their country to cast off “Pinochet’s Straightjacket” – the 1980 constitution imposed upon Chile by its former leader, the dictator Augusto Pinochet, as the price it must pay for even a limited restoration of democracy.

HOW QUICKLY THINGS CHANGE. Three years ago Chile was racked by massive protest demonstrations. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor, Chileans served notice on their government that the moment had arrived for their country to execute a decisive break with its recent past. Politically, economically, and culturally, they said, Chile was ready to ditch the debilitating legacy of General Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year-long dictatorship. Most particularly, “Pinochet’s Straightjacket” – the 1980 constitution he imposed upon Chile as the price it must pay for even a limited restoration of democracy – must go.

For a while, it looked as though the youth of Chile, the poor of Chile, the women of Chile, and the indigenous peoples of Chile, would get their wish. A Constitutional Convention was convened. Delegates were elected from every part of Chile who engaged in passionate debates over the nature and purpose of the new rights to be enshrined in their nation’s fundamental law. When they were finished, the delegates submitted what they proudly described as the world’s most progressive constitution to the Chilean people for ratification.

According to The Guardian: “The proposed constitution: included a long list of social rights and guarantees that had appeared to respond to the demands of [the vast social movement that had called it into existence]. It enshrined gender parity across government and other organs of the state – for the first time anywhere in the world – prioritised environmental protection and recognised Chile’s Indigenous peoples for the first time in the country’s history.”

The new constitution also enshrined the social and economic rights which Pinochet’s dictatorship had swept away in the coup d’état that toppled Salvador Allende’s socialist government in September 1973. The Convention’s delegates had attempted to forbid forever the neoliberal economic policies which Pinochet’s military government had road-tested for the free-market ideologues who would go on to guide Great Britain and the USA – and New Zealand – away from the social-democratic policies of the post-war years.

It was too much. Earlier this week, the Chilean people decisively voted down the new constitution which the Convention’s delegates had delivered to them. Like Allende’s Popular Unity Government before them, the delegates had pressed ahead with the radical vision of the future they were so certain would heal the harms of the past. Like the young socialists of 50 years ago, they would not be held back by the reservations of the conservative Chileans they derided as “Momios” (mummies of the Egyptian kind) and, once again, they have paid the price.

One of Allende’s advisers, Prof. Ariel Dorfman, looking back on those days, recalled:

It would take years to understand that what was so exhilarating to us was menacing to those who felt excluded from our vision of paradise. We evaporated them from meaning, we imagined them away in the future, we offered them no alternative but to join us in our pilgrimage or disappear forever, and that vision fuelled, I believe, the primal fear of the men and women who opposed us.

One of the most striking features of the controversial He Puapua Report is its authors’ assumption that constitutional changes every bit as radical and all-embracing as those just rejected in Chile can be introduced to New Zealand without a Constitutional Convention, and without being voted up, or down, in a binding referendum.

Undoubtedly, some of those who favour the dramatic changes proposed in He Puapua will look at what has just occurred in Chile and say: “See? That’s what happens when you give white supremacists the chance to strike down the just and necessary changes required to heal the harms of 200 years of colonisation!” The fate of the world’s most progressive constitution will be seen as vindication of the He Puapua authors’ horror of “the tyranny of the majority”.

But this would be an entirely mistaken conclusion for radical Māori nationalists to draw from the Chilean experience. The fundamental error of the Constitutional Convention was to allow the best to become the enemy of the good.

The harms of the past cannot be healed by legislating them out of existence from on high. Healing will only come kanohi ki te kanohi – face to face – through hard but honest conversations, over many frustrating years, until, unforced, and almost unaware, the overwhelming majority of Māori and Pakeha arrive at their long anticipated destination – together.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 September 2022.

Nanaia Mahuta’s Super-Narrative.

Dangerous Political Narrator? What this Labour Government risks is the emergence of what might be called a “super-narrative” in which all the negatives of co-governance, media capture, and Neo-Tribal Capitalism are rolled into one big story about the deliberate corruption of New Zealand democracy. The guilty parties would be an unholy alliance of Pakeha and Māori elites determined to keep public money flowing upwards into protected private hands. 

WHETHER NANAIA MAHUTA followed the conflict-of-interest rules set out in The Cabinet Manual hardly matters. A dangerous political narrative is forming around the appointment of, and awarding of contracts to, Mahuta’s whanau in circumstances that, at the very least, raise serious questions about this Government’s political judgement. Enlarging this narrative is the growing public perception that the mainstream news media is refusing to cover a story that would, in other circumstances, have attracted intense journalistic interest. The conflation of these two, highly damaging narratives with a third – the even more negative narrative of “co-governance” – has left the Labour Government in an extremely exposed and vulnerable position.

The Government’s failure to adequately prepare the New Zealand public for what Labour clearly regards as the inevitability of co-governance hasn’t helped. The party did not campaign on the issue, and kept He Puapua, the controversial “road-map” to full implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – i.e. co-governance – by 2040, under wraps. Similarly unheralded was the Government’s determination to establish a separate Māori Health Authority. And the application of co-governance principles to Mahuta’s deeply unpopular “Three Waters” project has done nothing to allay public fears that the country is being changed, in fundamental ways, without the electorate’s consent.

The apparent failure of the mainstream news media to follow up on the story is being attributed to the extraordinary conditions attached to the Public Interest Journalism Fund administered by New Zealand On Air. In essence, these conditions require media outlets in receipt of the Fund’s largesse to subscribe in advance to a highly contentious series of propositions concerning the Treaty of Waitangi – most particularly to the Waitangi Tribunal’s claim the Māori never ceded sovereignty to the British Crown, and that this “fact” requires the Fund’s recipients to accept and support the “partnership” model of Crown-Māori relations. The fear expressed by independent journalists is that the net effect of these conditions will be unquestioning mainstream media support for co-governance.

Since the widespread assumption among Pakeha New Zealanders is that co-governance and representative democracy are fundamentally incompatible, Labour’s willingness to be presented as co-governance’s friend runs the risk of being cast as democracy’s enemy.

Of even greater concern is the inevitability of this anti-democratic characterisation being extended to an ever-increasing fraction of the Māori population. Statements from Māori leaders appearing to discount the importance of, or even disparage, the principles of democracy have done little to slow this process. Neither have the intemperate statements of the former National Party Minister for Treaty Settlements, Chris Finlayson. His comment to the online magazine E-Tangata, describing those opposed to co-governance as “the KKK brigade”, merely reinforces the widespread public perception that the slightest public opposition to the proposed changes will bring down accusations of racism upon the opponent’s head.

The problem with this willingness to indulge in ad hominem attacks on people holding genuine reservations about the Government’s proposals is that more and more of them will decide that they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and embrace the very racism of which they stand accused. In this context, the revelations that some members of a Māori Minister of the Crown’s whanau have been the recipients of Government funds, and appointed to roles not unrelated to the furtherance of the Minister’s policies, will be taken as confirmation that all is not as it should be in Aotearoa-New Zealand.

What began as an anti-co-governance narrative, and then merged with an anti-mainstream news media narrative, risks joining with a much older and more deeply entrenched narrative concerning the entire Treaty settlement process. This is the narrative that identifies the primary beneficiaries of Treaty settlements as a collection of Crown-assembled tribal elites, along with their legal and commercial advisers. Over the past thirty years these “Neo-Tribal Capitalists” have been accused of investing hundreds-of-millions of taxpayer dollars in what amount to private tribal corporations, over which the intended recipients of these funds – hapu and whanau – exercise only the most indirect authority and receive only the most meagre of rewards.

The result could very easily be the emergence of what might be called a “super-narrative” in which all the negatives of co-governance, media capture, and Neo-Tribal Capitalism are rolled into one big story about the deliberate corruption of New Zealand democracy. The guilty parties would be an unholy alliance of Pakeha and Māori elites determined to keep public money flowing upwards into protected private hands. In this super-narrative, the structures set forth in He Puapua to secure tino rangatiratanga, will actually ensure the exclusion of the vast majority of New Zealanders from the key locations of power. The only positive consequence of which will be a common struggle for political and economic equality in which non-elite Māori and Pakeha will have every incentive to involve themselves.

The painful irony of this super-narrative scenario is that Labour will have positioned itself as its cause – not its remedy. Rather than repeating in the Twenty-First Century the fruitful political alliance between the Pakeha working-class and the victims/survivors of the deals done between the Crown and the Māori aristocracy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth, Labour will be seen to have facilitated the creation of a Treaty Partnership that not only undermines democracy, but also exacerbates the inequality between Māori and Pakeha, Pakeha and Pakeha, Māori and Māori.

What lies ahead, as the institutions of co-governance take shape, is the coming together of two very privileged birds of a feather: the Pakeha professionals and managers who have taken command of the society and economy created by Neoliberalism, and the Māori professionals and managers created to produce and operate the cultural and economic machinery of Neo-Tribal Capitalism.

This, ultimately, will be the spectre that arises out of the controversy swirling around Nanaia Mahuta. The spectre of the worst of both the Pakeha and the Māori worlds. Worlds in which the powerful trample all over the weak. Where tradition constrains the free exploration of ideas and techniques. And where the petty advantages of separation are elevated above the liberating effects of unity. Where “Aotearoa” creates two peoples out of one.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 31 May 2022.

The Choice.

Revolution From Below Averted: The critical political choice made by leading Pakeha politicians, jurists and bureaucrats in the 1980s and 90s was to halt the momentum of left-wing Māori nationalism from below, by inserting a layer of elite Māori business-people between the Crown and the economically and culturally impoverished Māori working-class. Waitangi Protest 1982 by John Miller.

“INSULATION from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.” The words are those of former Labour Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer. The “settlements” he refers to are the Treaty settlements negotiated between the Crown and Iwi.

It is to Iwi, New Zealand’s officially recognised tribal entities, that the responsibility for reinvigorating Māori society has been entrusted. Palmer’s confidence that the process has been walled-off from the “ravages” of democratic interference is important. The critical political choice made by leading Pakeha politicians, jurists and bureaucrats in the 1980s and 90s was to halt the momentum of left-wing Māori nationalism from below, by inserting a layer of elite Māori business-people between the Crown and the economically and culturally impoverished Māori working-class.

Only by fostering the rapid growth of a Māori middle-class could the Pakeha state avoid being compelled to negotiate with social, cultural and political forces with precious little to lose. Forces, moreover, whose lack of a meaningful stake in the capitalist system might encourage their leaders to contemplate sponsoring an entirely different set of economic arrangements.

Fostering a Māori middle-class would not only create social, economic, cultural and political forces with a great deal to lose, but, by frustrating kotahitanga – unity – it would protect the Pakeha state from a popular movement it could not defeat – except by the application of overwhelming military force.

Forty years ago, the vital moral truth that Geoffrey Palmer and, following him, Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, grasped was that a New Zealand state strong enough to, once again, frustrate Māori aspirations by force, would not be worth living in.

That historical choice: to forswear force; made by the more enlightened leaders of Pakeha society back in the 1980s and 90s, was crucial. The settlement process – led and controlled by the Crown – would empower and enrich only a fraction of Maoridom. But, this small, highly privileged group would, in their turn, guarantee the integrity of the core institutions of the New Zealand state.

The Iwi institutions constructed out of the capital transfers at the heart of the Treaty settlement process were modelled on the corporate structures of the Pakeha economy. The name given to this phenomenon by Professor Elizabeth Rata is “Neo-Tribal Capitalism”. Like the Pakeha system which inspired it, iwi-based capitalism elevates a very small minority to great wealth and power, while consigning the majority of Māori to a life of exploitation, deprivation and desperation.

Like capitalism everywhere, it isn’t fair – but it works.

Ironically, the man who came closest to destroying this mutually beneficial system, in which the elites of both ethnic communities gave away a little to get a lot, was one of New Zealand capitalism’s staunchest defenders, Don Brash. Perhaps he intuited that, having indicated their unwillingness to contemplate the force majeure deployed at Bastion Point, the Pakeha elites would inevitably find themselves prevailed upon to transfer more and more power and resources to the iwi-based corporations and the Māori middle-class which serviced them. Perhaps he simply refused to contemplate the evolution of a “bi-cultural” state. Whatever the explanation, Brash’s controversial Iwi/Kiwi election campaign of 2005 brought him within a whisker of discovering exactly how much force it would take to trash the principles of the Treaty and restore the colonial state to its former glory.

Brash’s successor, John Key, moved decisively to restore the relationship between the Pakeha and Māori elites. His reaching out to the Māori Party, and the latter’s positive response, confirmed beyond dispute the truth of Geoffrey Palmer’s assertion that the settlement process had moved beyond the sanction of “extreme opinion” and become part of the mainstream.

Over the course of Key’s nine-year (nearly) reign, the rapidly expanding Māori middle-class grew progressively more nationalistic. That they would promote their language and culture with ever-increasing fervour was entirely predictable. Historically, it has been the practice of all colonised peoples to not only claim full equality with their former masters’, but also to elevate the achievements of their own culture well above those of their brutal conquerors. The strong symbiotic relationship in which erstwhile oppressors and oppressed typically become enmeshed is simply edited out of the ethno-nationalist discourse.

The New Zealand state thus finds itself in a position roughly analogous to that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. The dominant group is no longer confident of exerting its formal (but waning) imperial authority without causing the entire ramshackle edifice to disintegrate. So strident and uncompromising have the nationalist claims of its subject peoples become that meeting them would instantly dissolve the constitutional glue holding the state together. To resist their claims means war. Ultimately, there is no winning move – except surrender.

Certainly, it is difficult to read in John Key’s decision to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and Jacinda Ardern’s decision to allow Nanaia Mahuta to commission a report on its implementation, as anything other than a capitulation to the political logic of Māori nationalism.

He Puapua is an imaginative and honest presentation of the steps necessary to establish a te Tiriti-based constitution based on the principle of co-governance. The fact that its recommendations, which included the elimination of majority rule, failed to elicit any significant protest from Ardern and her cabinet colleagues, indicates just how completely Labour has been persuaded that the future of Aotearoa will be driven by Māori.

The Māori nationalists ideological victory will not, however, be costless. Just as the leaders of Pakeha New Zealand were required to make a choice about the use of force, so, too, will the new rulers of Aotearoa.

It is difficult to see how a system of government permitting 15 percent of the population to determine the fate of the remaining 85 percent can end anything other than badly. Pretty early on in the piece, the Māori nationalists, like the Pakeha liberals of the 1980s and 90s, will also be forced to choose:

Do we preserve our ideological victory and defend our hard won political supremacy by force – or not?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 18 January 2022.

Riding 2022's Revolutionary Tiger.

Get Ready For A Wild Ride: 2022 will be dominated by two “C” words: “Covid” and “Co-Governance”. Both are certain to spawn variants of unpredictable virulence from the original strain. But, as happened with the Pandemic, the unfolding of the Co-Governance Debate is proceeding in ways determined by the decisions of Jacinda Ardern’s Government.

2022 WILL BE a revolutionary year. The deliberative processes begun in 2021 on how best to reconfigure the New Zealand state in conformity with the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will expand and intensify throughout 2022. New Zealanders will not be able to escape the consequences of their government’s decision to set these processes in motion. Nor will that Government be able to stop what it has begun. Over the course of the next twelve months we will discover how well the people of Aotearoa-New Zealand can ride the revolutionary tiger.

Personally, I would not have unleashed the deliberations attendant upon the revolutionary He Puapua Report in the midst of a global pandemic. Profound structural and constitutional changes are, surely, best left for calmer circumstances, when the population is less distracted and agitated. Then again, revolutions could hardly have happened if the times in which they occurred were calm and devoid of social tensions. In Karl Marx’s trenchant aphorism: “Men make history – but they do not make it just as they please.”

The authors of He Puapua would have been wise to think about Marx’s words before applying their eager fingers to their collective keyboard. As the hapless King Louis XVI (1754-1793) discovered to his cost, asking the people what they want their rulers to do for them is fraught with all kinds of dangers. As any historian who has poured over the ordinary people of France’s Cahiers de doléances (Lists of Complaints) knows full well, once freed from his bottle, the Genie of Change will not be persuaded to return until the world is changed indeed.

2022, therefore, looks set to be dominated by two “C” words: “Covid” and “Co-Governance”. Both are certain to spawn variants of unpredictable virulence from the original strain. But, as happened with the Pandemic, the unfolding of the Co-Governance Debate is proceeding in ways determined by the decisions of Jacinda Ardern’s Government.

For many months now a group of distinguished Māori leaders have been formulating a detailed response to the ideas and proposals contained in He Puapua. This response, as per the Government’s wishes, will be presented to Ministers first. Only after its official receipt will the rest of the New Zealand population be asked for its view of how to best give expression to the principles of te Tiriti. You can put a ring around the prediction that the Māori and Pakeha views of how New Zealand should be governed will not be the same.

It is possible (but by no means certain) that the Māori response will be characterised by both its intellectual coherence and unmistakeable unity of purpose. If the principal Pakeha response is anything but a hot mess of outrage and anger, however, it will be a major miracle. Some Pakeha (many of them academics, public servants and, regrettably, journalists) will attempt to avoid doing the intellectual and cultural mahi inherent in the fraught processes of constitutional change by simply adopting the Māori proposals in toto. Others will decry the whole exercise as an unwanted and electorally unmandated pretext for sowing cultural division and conflict. They will not shrink from calling it treason, and branding its promoters – Māori and Pakeha – as traitors.

The great problem with the Government’s almost careless decision to foist this debate upon the nation is that, already, in the minds of just about all its participants, existential issues are at stake. Nothing less than the life, or death, of everything they hold dear is seen to turn on its outcome. Men and women will stop at very little to emerge victorious from such a struggle. History makes it chillingly clear that, if the end is a people’s survival, then all means are permissible.

What, then, is to be done? Having tossed the dragon’s teeth of co-governance into earth already ploughed-up by the divisions of Covid-19, how can Jacinda’s Government pluck from this nettle, danger, this flower, constitutional safety?

My own answer, for what it’s worth, is to make it clear that co-governance is just one more means towards the historic end that has always united the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders: a fair go for everyone.

A “revolution” that delivers co-governance to self-selecting ethnic elites, accountable to neither Māori nor Pakeha, will not stand.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 December 2021.

Equality, Equity & The Great Race Of Life.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis: For many – perhaps most – people, the word ‘equity” is a synonym for the word “equality”. And, to be fair, this is very often the way politicians expect the word to be understood. But the assumption that “equity” and “equality” mean roughly the same thing could not be more wrong. The difference between these two words is as important as the difference between “reform” and “revolution”.

THE WORD “EQUITY” is appearing more and more frequently in New Zealand’s political conversations. It is the new “go to” word for activists, journalists and, inevitably, politicians. It peppers political speeches, media releases, newspaper articles, television interviews and, naturally, it’s all over social media.

For many – perhaps most – people, the word ‘equity” is a synonym for the word “equality”. And, to be fair, this is very often the way politicians expect the word to be understood. But the assumption that “equity” and “equality” mean roughly the same thing could not be more wrong. The difference between these two words is as important as the difference between “reform” and “revolution”.

Most New Zealanders believe in and expect to enjoy “equality of opportunity”. They recoil from the idea of people receiving preferential treatment. Everybody is expected to line-up straight behind the start-line before the starter’s pistol sets them off and running in the great race of life. Very few people, however, expect the runners to cross the finish line at the same time. Most accept that in a contest someone comes first and someone last. A race in which everyone crosses the finish-line at exactly the same moment is not a race – it’s a jack-up.

But “jacking-up” the race (also known as “affirmative action”) is precisely what the proponents of “equity” believe in. What they are seeking is not “equality of opportunity”, but “equality of outcome”. If there are people in the race who have had the advantage of professional coaching, then those denied that advantage need to be advanced several metres ahead of the start-line. If there are runners who have enjoyed excellent nutrition all their lives, then those who have been poorly nourished since childhood must be similarly advanced along the track. If there are competitors who, on account of their ethnicity, enjoy a greater measure of confidence in their ability to win the race than those whose ethnicity has accustomed them to coming last, then those so afflicted also deserve advancement. Calculate these handicaps correctly and every runner should cross the finish-line simultaneously. Hey Presto! – Equality of Outcome!

Except, of course, that’s not the way it would go – not unless the people calculating the handicaps had guns. What sort of seasoned runners are going to accept others being positioned so far ahead of themselves? Rather than compete on such terms, many athletes would simply walk away from the contest altogether. Those awarded handicaps in the name of equity would then have to be reassessed and assigned a new handicap. How else could everybody be guaranteed to cross the line together? Not that anyone would be there to applaud them when they did. If the outcome of a contest has already been thoroughly engineered, why would anyone turn up to see it? Life is uncertain. So is sport. That’s why people watch.

The partisans of equity insist that their only goal is “fairness”: all they are seeking is a society in which everyone gets to enjoy life’s bounties; a society without “winners” and “losers”; a society in which the very idea of some people being allowed to “succeed” while others “fail” is regarded as obscene.

“Team Equity” will always get a hearing in New Zealand, where “fairness” is celebrated as the Prince of Virtues. What they will not find so easy to sell, however, is the idea that fairness requires people to be treated differently. That’s because Kiwis understand “fairness” to mean everybody being treated the same. Just watch what happens to someone who tries to jump a queue in New Zealand, or is given more than others are getting. Those responsible will be told in no uncertain terms that while everyone is entitled to a “fair go”, that does not mean they’re entitled to receive special favours from people who don’t know the meaning of the words.

This is where the propensity of New Zealanders to treat equity and equality as synonyms leaves Team Equity facing an enormous problem. In regard to Māori-Pakeha relations particularly, the argument has shifted well beyond the generally accepted notion that the indigenous people and the beneficiaries of colonisation were guaranteed, and continue to receive, equal treatment. But, “equal treatment”, in this context, can only mean that all the advantages accruing to the destroyers of Māori sovereignty must be left untouched, while the tangata whenua, stripped of their autonomy by “the imperial project”, are condemned to play a never-ending game of catch-up. Team Equity is demanding a solution considerably “fairer” than that.

What that fairer solution might look like is set out in the He Puapua Report. Its authors have come up with a twenty-year plan to give effect to what they see as the promises of equity (not equality) embodied in Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Essentially, they see Māori and Non-Māori running in the same race, but on separate tracks, until such time as both sets of runners become genuinely competitive. And the handicap? Well, that will come in the form of a more “equitable” distribution of the New Zealand state’s fiscal resources, achieved by the construction of a more equitable, te Tiriti-based constitution. He Puapua is much more than a blueprint for reform, it’s a road-map to revolution.

An exciting plan, then, but the chances of selling it to Pakeha New Zealand are as slim as the chances selling the idea of some runners being advanced ahead of others on the great racetrack of life. Its only possibility of success lies in selling equity as equality – which was the great achievement of the First Labour Government. How did they do it? Not by saying they were going to advance the interests of exploited working-class New Zealanders ahead of privileged middle-class New Zealanders, but by promising to build a nation in which everybody had the same access to a job, a home, universal public healthcare, and an education system which gave every citizen the best possible start in life. How did they pay for it? By handicapping the rich through progressive taxation. What did they call it? Equality of Opportunity!

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 9 September 2021.

Labour Must Uphold The Rule Of Law

The Equal Application Of The Laws: There is only so much a judicial system, or any other important part of the state apparatus, will stand before it moves to defend itself. Judges and lawyers cannot be expected to turn a blind eye to egregious breaches of legal norms. As Officers of the Court, it is their sworn duty to uphold the law. They cannot be asked to treat one category of citizen better or worse than another, nor are they permitted to stand back and see injustice done without taking steps to prevent it.

WHEN DAILY BLOG Editor, Martyn Bradbury, says Labour’s lucky the country’s currently distracted by the Covid-19 Delta Variant, he’s right. Were New Zealand safe and out of Lockdown, it would be in the midst of a dangerously divisive row about Oranga Tamariki, the Judiciary, Race, and the Rule of Law.

Given that the matters at the heart of this controversy are sub judice (i.e. under the authority of the court) I shall forbear from discussing the particular case in question. What must be discussed, however, is the direction in which Māori-Pakeha relations are travelling, and exactly what it would take for this government to intervene.

There is only so much a judicial system, or any other important part of the state apparatus, will stand before it moves to defend itself. Judges and lawyers cannot be expected to turn a blind eye to egregious breaches of legal norms. As Officers of the Court, it is their sworn duty to uphold the law. They cannot be asked to treat one category of citizen better or worse than another, nor are they permitted to stand back and see injustice done without taking steps to prevent it.

Attempts to racialise New Zealand’s courts are bound to provoke significant public disquiet. So, too, will any attempt by the Crown to influence the outcome of trials, or civil cases, by exerting unwarranted pressure on judicial officers. Any government made aware of such behaviour has a duty to act decisively to uphold the Rule of Law. Those responsible must be held to account for their actions.

Though the mere mention of the He Puapua Report will elicit the usual protests from the usual suspects, the events highlighted by The Daily Blog’s editor raise vital issues about what inferences the Crown is allowing and/or encouraging Māori to draw from its recommendations.

Any failure to uphold the equal application of the laws, on the grounds that a separate Māori justice system will soon replace the long-established principle of “one law for all”, will be taken as proof that this government intends to change profoundly the constitutional and judicial arrangements of the New Zealand state.

Such a fundamental change to the manner in which justice is administered in New Zealand, especially one predicated on ethnic and cultural considerations, could have no legitimacy without having first secured the endorsement, by way of referendum, of a majority of New Zealand citizens.

To suggest that the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi in some way obviate the Crown’s need to obtain the consent of the New Zealand electorate before changing the way justice is administered, and by whom, is tantamount to suggesting that the Treaty legally entitles the Crown to extinguish democracy in the Realm of New Zealand without reference to its citizens and in defiance of its laws.

Such action would constitute a declaration of war upon the people of this country. Any government participating in such an open attack on the civil and political rights of its citizens would immediately identify itself as their enemy, and forfeit all claims to their continuing loyalty. It would be responsible for unleashing civil war upon New Zealand.

The Labour Government’s silence on these matters is indefensible. A clear statement of its determination to uphold the Rule of Law and protect the democratic rights of all New Zealanders is long overdue.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 24 August 2021.

Re-Writing The Rules of the Game: Where Chile is Leading, Can Aotearoa-New Zealand Follow?

People Power: Ending neoliberalism requires massive and militant action on the ground. Between 2019 and 2020, the young and the poor made Chile ungovernable. Engaging in running battles with the Police and facing-down the army’s bullets, they rendered the political class and its mainstream media mouthpieces increasingly irrelevant to what was happening in the streets, offices, shops, factories, schools and universities of the nation. 

THE EYES OF THE LEFT, all around the world, should be on Chile. Over the next twelve months a Constituent Assembly, comprised of 155 elected Chilean citizens, will draft a new constitution  for their battered and abused country. New constitutions are not written very often. South Africa, post-apartheid, wrote one – to world acclaim. So did Venezuela – and the rest of the world ignored it. Undaunted, the left-wing Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, had the Constitution’s key provisions printed on milk cartons, so every citizen, even the poorest, could know their rights.

Chile’s new constitution, however, is being written from scratch, an exercise that has not been attempted in a well-established nation state for more than twenty years. What’s more, with the Constituent Assembly dominated by the Left (in New Zealand, they’d be branded “Far Left”) the constitution which emerges from its deliberations will likely break new ground. Already, the members of the Constituent Assembly (MCA) are committed to ensuring that the rights of Chile’s indigenous people (roughly 10 percent of the population) are constitutionally protected.

The legislation establishing the Constituent Assembly mandated an equal number of male and female members. Interestingly, so radical was the popular mood that considerably more women ended up being elected to the Assembly than men – requiring the men’s numbers to be topped-up! Clearly the rights of women – in all political, economic, social and cultural spheres – will constitute a central pillar of the new constitution.

Given Chile’s tragic post-1973 history, it is also widely anticipated that the new constitution will explicitly repudiate the neoliberal tenets embedded in the constitution imposed upon the Chilean people from above by the military dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, in 1980. Chilean political commentators are predicting the inclusion of a slew of “social chapters” restoring to the state its key responsibility for maintaining the welfare of the people. The privatisation of key utilities – most particularly the water supply – may well be reversed as constitutionally untenable.

Essentially, Chile is engrossed in an extraordinary exercise aimed at reimposing the status-quo ante. Taking the nation back to the point it had reached under the socialist Popular Unity government of President Salvador Allende immediately prior to the military coup d’état of 11 September 1973. Allende died in that coup, and thousands more Chileans were murdered in the months and years that followed.

In the early 1970s, Allende’s government had been one of the most progressive in the world, making it that most dangerous of things – an example other peoples might feel inclined to follow. The USA, in particular, was terrified that Allende’s brand of democratic socialism might spread across Latin America. US President, Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, summed-up the Administration’s position when he declared: “I don’t see why the United States should sit back and watch a country turn communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

With the Left crushed, Chile became the proving ground for the neoliberal theories of Professor Milton Friedman. All the measures with which the rest of the world would soon become agonizingly familiar: deregulation, privatisation, regressive fiscal policies, abandoning economic protectionism and opening the economy to foreign investors, dismantling the welfare state and destroying the trade unions; were tested out on the politically defenceless Chilean people.

Although a measure of democracy was restored to Chile in 1990, it was heavily circumscribed by the point-blank refusal of the political class in general (and the armed forces in particular) to countenance the slightest attempt to dismantle the neoliberal order Pinochet had so firmly established. It required nothing less than the global Covid-19 pandemic to generate the massive popular rising necessary to force the Chilean powers-that-be to sanction the calling together of a constituent assembly to re-write the rules of the political game.

There are a number of lessons here for Aotearoa-New Zealand – providing its progressive forces are ready and willing to learn from the Chilean example.

The first of these is that ending neoliberalism requires massive and militant action on the ground. Between 2019 and 2020, the young and the poor made Chile ungovernable. Engaging in running battles with the Police and facing-down the army’s bullets, they rendered the political class and its mainstream media mouthpieces increasingly irrelevant to what was happening in the streets, offices, shops, factories, schools and universities of the nation. In the course of making this uprising, the young and the poor learned “on the job” how to conduct their own politics – independent of the political parties which had traditionally represented their interests. (In the elections for the Constituent Assembly, the ruling right-wing party received fewer that 30 percent of the votes, and the equivalent of our Labour Party was outpolled by a combination of communists, anarchists, feminists, indigenous Chileans and environmentalists.)

The second lesson to be drawn from recent events in Chile, is that changing the rules of the game – i.e. drawing up a new constitution – is not something to be left to elite theorists meeting behind closed doors. New ideas, revolutionary ideas, cannot be imposed upon the population from above and remain progressive ideas. (Never forget that Rogernomics was a revolution imposed from above – with disastrous results for workers and beneficiaries.) If what the radicals and revolutionaries who pulled together the He Puapua Report are proposing is any good, then the young and the poor will make it their own. When that happens, all the rest will follow. Demand the election of a Constituent Assembly to write Aotearoa-New Zealand’s bi-cultural constitution. Let the young and the poor chose their own candidates. For the first time in decades give them the chance to cast a vote that matters. Throw an additional 700,000 votes onto the electoral scales – and see what happens.

There’s a third lesson to be drawn from Chile’s experience. Not, this time, from its recent experience, but from the experience of 1970-1973. And that lesson is: Make sure you have someone watching your back. Because who, in the end, can protect the work of Chile’s Constituent Assembly from the same forces that destroyed the work of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government? Who will stand between the people and the armed forces – guided and resourced by the United States? That’s not just a question for Chileans. Were the young and the poor of Aotearoa-New Zealand to successfully outmanoeuvre their own political class, where should they look for protection? Australia? The United States?

In the end, it’s the question that all revolutionaries must be ready to answer: “Having made the revolution, how do we keep it?”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 10 June 2021.

Working Alongside Maori Capitalism To Enrich “Aotearoa Inc.”

Culture Clash: The Samoan Chief Justice, in his very English ceremonial robes, tests the locked doors of the Samoan Parliament. The crisis now gripping Samoa is the product of an almost entirely unanticipated collision between the traditional Samoan way of doing politics, and the formal requirements of Samoa’s democratic constitution. Would the recommendations contained in the He Puapua Report produce a similar collision of political cultures?

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS currently gripping Samoa calls into question John Minto’s optimistic conclusions regarding the He Puapua Report. Underlying the political stand-off in Samoa is the as yet unresolved tension between the democratic institutions inherited from New Zealand, and the much older set of political and cultural expectations inherited from pre-colonial Samoan society. So long as democracy was able to accommodate traditional leadership hierarchies and decision-making customs, the two traditions rubbed along together with minimal friction. The crisis now gripping Samoa is the product of an almost entirely unanticipated collision between the traditional Samoan way of doing politics, and the formal requirements of Samoa’s democratic constitution.

John’s core argument in favour of the recommendations contained in He Puapua is that they will give Maori and Pakeha more democracy – not less. He quite correctly points to the anti-democratic motives driving New Zealand’s nineteenth century colonial governments’ efforts to contain the potential political power of Maori – in deliberate contravention of Article III of the Treaty of Waitangi. Successive settler regimes were determined to do no more than was absolutely necessary to keep the peace between the two peoples. The four Maori seats (established in 1867) were a reluctant acknowledgement of the decisive role played by kupapa Maori (also known as “Friendly Maoris” or “Queenites”) in the recent armed conflicts over land and sovereignty.

The question raised by New Zealand’s 2010 decision to sign up to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is: To what degree is it possible for a colonial regime, founded on “a revolutionary seizure of power” (the phrase used by the New Zealand legal scholar, Professor Jock Brookfield, to describe the effective nullification of the Treaty of Waitangi occasioned by the establishment of on-the-ground settler supremacy in the 1850s and 60s) to unpick the political and cultural needlework of nation building? Helen Clark’s straightforward answer was: No. It’s not possible. Which is why she refused to sign New Zealand up to the Declaration. John Key, under pressure from the Maori Party, not only decided to sign the document, but in 2014 agreed to produce some sort of roadmap towards its eventual implementation. He Puapua is that roadmap.

The first stage of the He Puapua journey is, as John suggests, all about bringing Maori into the places where important decisions are made about their health, housing, education and employment. But, is this equation of participation and democracy justified? Although every Pakeha citizen enjoys exactly the same political rights as every other Pakeha citizen, how common is it for poor, working-class Pakeha to be found in the places where critical decisions about the allocation of economic, social and cultural resources are being made? The answer, of course, is: Not very often – if ever. Our capitalist society, like the feudal society which preceded it, reserves seats at the decision-making table for members of its ruling class, their most trusted servants – and bugger-all others. Are the exclusively Maori power structures proposed by He Puapua likely to prove any less careful about who gets invited to sit at their tables?

An answer, of sorts, is provided by the fate of Maori Television. When it began, Maori TV was based in Auckland, staffed by an outstanding bunch of extremely talented journalists and broadcasters. Its news and current affairs section was particularly effective at bringing the stories of Maori and Power to its viewers. Too effective – as it turned out. In retaliation for turning the media spotlight on the management of Kohanga Reo, Maori Television was gutted of its best and its brightest talent and relocated to Rotorua. As in Samoa, the expectations of democratic scrutiny and accountability ran head-first into traditional cultural expectations of discretion and respect.

Over the course of the past 30 years, the brutal imposition of neoliberalism on Maori communities has required the colonial New Zealand state to do all within its power to thwart the rise of effective Maori resistance. It has done this in two ways. First, by working closely with traditional Maori power structures to foster the development of what the academic writer Elizabeth Rata calls “Neo-Tribal Capitalism”. (Treaty Settlements have played a crucial role in this process.) Second, by facilitating the growth of the educated Maori middle-class needed to run this new “Maori Economy”.

There is scant evidence, to date, that Neo-Tribal Capitalism is any more inclined to encourage democratic participation than the common-or-garden Pakeha variety. It is, almost certainly, no accident that the radical recommendations contained in He Puapua owe a great deal to the ideas contained in Matike Mai Aotearoa – the report on “constitutional transformation” commissioned by the neo-tribal capitalist “Iwi leaders Group”.

If any more evidence is required for the essential incompatibility of traditional and democratic expectations within Maoridom, one has only to consider the fate of the participatory governance structures set up to co-manage the resources handed over by the Crown in the Tainui Treaty Settlement. This brave attempt to hold chiefly power accountable did not end well.

In his post, John makes much of what he calls “the dictatorship of the majority”. This is, indeed, an aspect of the democratic process that has come in for much criticism over the centuries. In almost every case, however, those complaining most loudly about the tyranny of the majority are those most likely to suffer a reduction in power and wealth should the needs of the many ever be permitted to outweigh the greed of the few.

John simply does not admit the possibility that this might also be the case in Maoridom. He seems to see Maori as an undifferentiated mass of poor and oppressed people, held permanently in that condition by the undifferentiated racism of their colonial masters. Unaccounted for in his description of the problem are the power structures – both traditional and modern – which have been encouraged to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of tribal capitalist elites.

It is these elites who have most to gain from the changes proposed in He Puapua. Allied to the elites attached to the Crown, and the elites which still control Pakeha society, the Maori elites will be well placed to enjoy the rewards, and strengthen the defences, of “Aotearoa Inc”. The prospect of ordinary New Zealanders, of any ethnicity, working alongside the Maori, or any of the other elites, in this enterprise, is neither anticipated, nor desired.

As the people of Samoa are discovering, when push comes to shoves, it’s those with the power already in their hands who push and shove the hardest.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 25 May 2021.