A Time For Unity.

Emotional Response: Prime Minister Christopher Luxon addresses mourners at the tangi of King Tuheitia on Turangawaewae Marae on Saturday, 31 August 2024.

THE DEATH OF KING TUHEITIA could hardly have come at a worse time for Maoridom. The power of the Kingitanga to unify te iwi Māori was demonstrated powerfully at January’s national hui, where upwards of 10,000 people answered King Tuheitia’s summons to the Turangawaewae marae. But now, at this fractious historical hour, the power of the Kingitanga is passing into untested hands.

If the traditional “kingmakers” of the royalist iwi choose unwisely, then the divisions and tensions between Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti may widen further. In the weeks and months that lie ahead, rash and angry words from King Tuheitia’s successor have the potential to ignite a political conflagration. In these circumstances, Māori and Pakeha have an equally pressing need for the Kotahitanga [Unity] that was the late King’s guiding star.

This need for unity was expressed with affecting sincerity at the King’s tangi by someone many New Zealanders would regard as its most unlikely champion. As the leader of the conservative coalition government responsible for sharpening the points of Māori-Pakeha difference, Christopher Luxon’s participation in the King’s funeral ceremonies could easily have been construed as perfunctory, or, even worse, provocative. That he spoke of his relationship with the King with such obvious emotion, his voice close to breaking, unquestionably impressed his Tainui hosts. That said, the thought surely crossed their minds: “What is it with this Pakeha, who weeps with us, even as his ministers assault us?”

What indeed? The most obvious answer is that Luxon, like all politicians, is a complex mixture of emotion and calculation; sincerity and subterfuge. What’s more, though reason reels from the thought, Luxon, like many politicians, can be both at the same time. Very few Pakeha New Zealanders are immune to the extraordinary, almost magical, power which Maoridom is able to summon at moments of great historical significance. It brings our emotions suddenly, and often unexpectedly, to the surface, catching us off-guard.

This blending of the spiritual with the material was a skill which, until relatively recently, was manifest in all cultures. Those over the age of 70 will recall the state funeral of the slain President, John F. Kennedy: the soldiers slow-marching with arms reversed; the riderless horse, its master’s boots facing backwards; and that unforgettable image, almost unbearably poignant, of Kennedy’s young son innocently snapping his father a filial salute as the funeral cortege passed by.

Symbols, and the powerful feelings they evoke, were much more available to Westerners sixty years ago. New Zealand, now one of the world’s most secular societies, was then an emphatically Christian nation. Pakeha religiosity was strong in the 1950s and 60s, and, come Sunday morning, most of the nation’s churches were full. Back then, the spiritual world and the material world overlaid each other and intermingled in ways that today’s secular Pakeha would struggle to accept.

But not today’s Māori. In te Ao Māori the spiritual infuses the material in ways that at once entrance and confuse Pakeha. A cynic might say that this spirituality, this affinity for the metaphysical, is Maoridom’s secret weapon, and that Christopher Luxon is as susceptible to its magic as any number of his equally entranced compatriots.

Why, then, does he not take advantage of it? Why impress Tainui and the Kingitanga with your tears, and then return to a Parliament where Act and NZ First continue to drag the National Party down the path of “pernicious polarisation?

Typically, “pernicious polarisation” is initiated by political elites that have been electorally sidelined and are willing to do almost anything to get back in the game. They deliberately stoke class, racial and/or religious divisions – often in cahoots with more extreme groups. Their hope is to extend their electoral reach by advancing under the cover of their new allies’ more inflammatory political rhetoric, and by quietly promising to introduce at least some of the extremists’ most radical policies as soon as power has been reclaimed.

Clearly, the National Party, alongside Act and NZ First, has been drawing heavily from the pernicious polarisers’ playbook. Equally clearly, it has worked: National has reclaimed the Treasury Benches and is sitting pretty as the dominant party within a conservative coalition government.

National’s problem, now, is that, having been assisted into office by its more extreme coalition partners, it is required to deliver on the promises made to get them (and keep them) onside. Since these commitments are mostly bound up with Act’s and NZ First’s determination to rein-in what both parties believe to be an over-mighty Maoridom, New Zealand’s politics risk becoming convulsed to a degree not seen since the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Such convulsions are most unlikely to spare the National Party. Its record on race-relations is a proud one, and trashing it to keep David Seymour and Winston Peters happy is not a course of action a significant number of National Party MPs and members are likely to accept with equanimity. Indeed, the louder the chorus of protest from Māori and progressive Pakeha New Zealanders grows, the more misgivings National is likely to experience.

There will be some in the party who look to National’s past and argue that civil unrest has always been the Right’s friend. Certainly, National romped back into office after the 1951 Waterfront Dispute, and Rob Muldoon’s facilitation of the 1981 Springbok Tour saw National returned (narrowly) to power. But, the past is not always prelude, sometimes it represents an end, not a beginning.

With the King’s tangi as a backdrop, Christopher Luxon could earn considerable praise from across the country if he was to announce that, as a coronation gift, he was giving the new Māori monarch his solemn promise that the National Party would not allow Act’s Treaty Principles Bill to reach the floor of Parliament.

Would David Seymour respond by breaking up the Coalition? Quite possibly. Luxon should let him. National still has plenty of money. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Maori are in no position to mount a credible threat to National’s re-election chances. Indeed, the parties of the Left would be hard-pressed not to cheer Luxon on!

Moreover, if National categorically ruled out entering into another coalition with Act and NZ First, and Luxon, taking inspiration from Kamala Harris’ playbook, declared it time to “turn the page” on the politics of racial division, then he and his party would likely be rewarded with a runaway electoral victory. Kiwis don’t like political confrontation at the best of times – especially not with their own friends and whanau.

Kotahitanga, in addition to being King Tuheitia’s guiding star, could very successfully double as National’s campaign slogan.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 2 September 2024.

By The Time We Got To Turangawaewae ...

... We Were Ten Thousand Strong: The activists know that for the next few weeks, at least, the advantage lies with te iwi Māori and their Pakeha allies. Their most effective tactic – at Ratana, the Waitangi Tribunal, and at Waitangi, itself, on 6 February – will be to up the pressure on the Coalition Government and the Prime Minister. After Saturday, 20 January, they’ll be confident that Christopher Luxon will blink first.

KING TUHEITIA’S HUI was an impressive demonstration of the power of te iwi Māori. The Kingitanga had planned for 3,000 attendees – 10,000 showed up. Since those present on the Turangawaewae Marae at Ngaruawahia on Saturday, 20 January 2024 were likely to be the most powerfully motivated defenders of te Ao Māori, it is reasonable to regard that number – 10,000 – as the core of Māori resistance to the Coalition Government’s policies.

Significantly, that number, 10,000, is greater than the active strength of the New Zealand Defence Force (currently around 9,000) and only slightly fewer than the current muster of sworn Police officers (10,549). Small wonder that veteran Māori nationalists Hone Harawira and Tame Iti, both present at Turangawaewae, invited the Coalition Government, via the news media, to “bring it on”.

The activists know that for the next few weeks, at least, the advantage lies with te iwi Māori and their Pakeha allies. Their most effective tactic – at Ratana, the Waitangi Tribunal, and at Waitangi, itself, on 6 February – will be to up the pressure on the Coalition Government and the Prime Minister. After Saturday, they’ll be confident that Christopher Luxon will blink first.

In the National Party, blinking may already be the preferred option. It is, after all, the party that kicked-off the Treaty settlement process more than 30 years ago. It was National’s John Key who brought the Māori Party into his coalition government (alongside Act!) in 2008. And it was Key who sent Pita Sharples to New York to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. National’s record, vis-à-vis Māori Sovereignty and te Tiriti o Waitangi, is more than competitive with Labour’s.

If Christopher Luxon, like Jacinda Ardern, had led his party to an absolute majority in the House of Representatives, then Kingi Tuheitia would never have had to hold his hui.

But, that is not what happened.

With its final Party Vote stalling at 38 percent, it was clear that those on the right of the political spectrum harboured significant doubts about National. The share of the vote secured by National’s rivals, Act (8 percent) and NZ First (6 percent) indicated that National’s MPs would not be permitted to simply shrug off all responsibility for giving voice to the political rage holding so many voters in its grip. The smaller right-wing parties were there to ride alongside National and make sure it didn’t veer-off to the left like John “Labour-Lite” Key. At the slightest sign that National was about welch on the Coalition Agreement, Act and NZ First were expected to shoot the Coalition Government in the head.

What’s more, if Act and NZ First succumb to the same political pressures currently spooking National’s MPs, and simply abandon the commitments made to their followers on Te Reo Māori, co-governance, and te Tiriti, then the rage that propelled them into the House of Representatives will be forced to construct a new vehicle in which to carry the defenders of “New Zealand – as opposed to “Aotearoa” – into battle.

This will not be pretty.

Far too few New Zealanders fully appreciate what it took for 10,000 Māori to answer King Tuheitia’s summons. Inculcating the confidence needed to openly defy the policies of an elected government has been the work of decades. Tireless advocates of Māori sovereignty like the late Moana Jackson understood that the ultimate reclamation of their people’s patrimony would only become possible when Māori developed a political narrative that a significant percentage of educated Pakeha could be persuaded to endorse.

At the heart of that process was a wholesale revision of the meaning of te Tiriti. So long as the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders looked upon the document signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 as a simple treaty of cession, te iwi Māori could not hope to treat with the Crown as “partners”. That could only happen if the entire notion of an historical cession of sovereignty was overturned. Only when the claim that Māori never ceded sovereignty to the British Crown was accepted by the New Zealand state and its key institutions could “indigenisation”, “decolonisation” and co-governance become realistic political propositions.

Among a great many young, tertiary-educated Māori and Pakeha, the claim that Māori never ceded sovereignty has become an article of cultural and political faith. If one believes that the indigenous people of New Zealand never ceded sovereignty to their colonisers, then a constitutional revolution becomes not only morally desirable but politically necessary. Moreover, if right-wing political parties convinced that sovereignty was ceded back in 1840 are elected on a platform hostile to Māori claims, then forces unsympathetic to the “cession myth” will feel justified in opposing that right-wing platform by any means necessary.

And, you get 10,000 people answering King Tuheitia’s summons.

But, if Act is prevailed upon by National to back away from its promise to let the voters revise the Māori revision of the Treaty of Waitangi; and if it then refuses to step away from the coalition and move to the cross-benches; then somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the electorate – and possibly a lot more – will find themselves in the market for a political champion who rejects entirely the niceties of traditional Māori-Pakeha relations, in favour of a new and unabashed ethno-nationalist vocabulary and manifesto.

In exactly the same way as Māori intellectuals undermined the “cession myth”, this new political movement would aim to undermine the “sovereignty myth”, and, in a distressingly short period of time, the leader of this aggressive ethno-nationalist populist movement could well be in a position to successfully summon 10,000 followers to his own … rally.

Exactly how Christopher Luxon chooses to navigate his government’s passage through these treacherous waters remains to be seen. He may be tempted to tear up the Coalition Agreement, call a new election, and seek an unequivocal mandate in support of decency, racial peace, and economic common-sense. But that would only work in circumstances where the rage of “traditional” Kiwis, the very same anger that propelled him into the prime-ministership, was subsiding. An unlikely turn of events, it must be said, with Ratana, with the Waitangi Tribunal looming and, beyond them, Waitangi Day.

Then again, Luxon might decide to do what Slobodan Milosevic did as Yugoslavia started coming apart at its ethnic seams: make himself the leader of the biggest and meanest sonofabitch in the ethnic valley.

As the person calling himself “Ricardo” commented on the author’s “Bowalley Road” political blog recently:

Massey’s Cossacks could reappear in any number of forms. There are approximately 100,000 to 200,000 ex-territorial soldiers (of all ages going back to the 1970s) who can still field strip an M16, make a bivouac, put up with rain and place the correct side of a claymore towards the enemy. Last reports say up to a million firearms are still to be registered. A direct threat to home and hearth could release basic impulses among their owners.

When the drift of politics encourages this kind of speculation, it is difficult to feel optimistic about New Zealand’s – or Aotearoa’s – future.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz on Monday, 22 January 2024.

When Push Comes To Shove.

Emerging From The Shadow Kingdom: So devastating was the British victory over the Kingitanga that the movement tacitly foreswore any further assertions of political will. Henceforth, the Kingitanga would represent a shadow kingdom. What also remained unspoken, however, was the Kingitanga’s understanding that if the settler state’s ability to enforce its dominance ever faltered, then the substance of Māori power would return, and the shadow kingdom would turn into something much more solid.

ONCE AGAIN, the New Zealand state must decide if it should answer a Māori push with a Pakeha shove. The Māori King, Tuheitia, has summoned the leaders of Maoridom to the Kingitanga marae at Turangawaewae to formulate a response to the Coalition Government’s “de-Maorification” agenda. It is doubtful whether most New Zealanders, back at work now and already missing the sunshine and surf, are at all aware of the potential for disaster inherent in the King’s hui of Saturday, 20 January 2024. Not since the early 1860s have Māori and Pakeha risked so much over the meaning and status of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The big difference this time is that the New Zealand state cannot count on brute military force to enforce its will. In the original stand-off between Māori and the Crown, the settlers were supremely confident that if push came to shove, then they would have access to massive military force. Rather than see their new colony compromised by an indigenous rebellion, the British Government was willing to deploy considerable military resources. Indeed, it was the arrival of approximately 12,000 imperial troops under Lieutenant-General Duncan Cameron that kicked-off the Pakeha invasion of the Waikato in 1863.

So devastating was the British victory over the Kingitanga that the movement tacitly foreswore any further assertions of political will. Henceforth the Kingitanga would represent a shadow kingdom. The kingdom of what might have been if the Pakeha settler government had been willing to keep faith with the letter and spirit of Te Tiriti. What also remained unspoken, however, was the Kingitanga’s understanding that if the settler state’s ability to enforce its dominance ever faltered, then the substance of Māori power would return, and the shadow kingdom would turn into something much more solid.

Small wonder, then, that the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, is said to be seeking an urgent private audience with King Tuheitia. [It took place on Monday, 15 January 2024. - C.T.] The Coalition Government needs to know just how pushy the Kingitanga and its allies are prepared to get if the National-Act-NZ First de-Maorification agenda is not abandoned. If, as seems likely, the King replies “wait and see” , then Luxon’s and his cabinet’s next step will be to assess the New Zealand state’s current capacity to enforce its will. One thing’s for certain: In 2024 the British will not be sending the New Zealand Government 12,000 troops!

If Luxon hasn’t convened a meeting of the Officials Committee for Domestic and External Security (ODESC) in response to the Kingitanga’s ominous re-entry into New Zealand politics, then he’s not doing his job. Like the rest of the country, Māori leaders would have observed the enormous difficulties experienced by the New Zealand Police in assembling sufficient non-lethal force to clear Parliament Grounds of anti-government protesters in March 2022. Were such occupations and disruptions to be replicated all over the country, the ability of the Police to both keep the peace and enforce the law – without recourse to deadly force – would be seriously compromised.

According to Wikipedia, ODESC “comprises the chief executives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Defence Force, the Ministry of Defence, the Security Intelligence Service, the Government Communications Security Bureau, Police, the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, the Treasury and others. The group is headed by the head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, [Rebecca Kitteridge].”

On paper, at least, this group looks formidable. The presence of the security services and the Police should guarantee a continuous and accurate feed of political intelligence to the politicians. In reality, however, it is most unlikely that the SIS, the GCSB and Police Intelligence personnel have been monitoring the communications of the Māori king, other iwi leaders, Te Pāti Māori and/or Māori activists generally. The political fallout, should such interceptions be exposed, would be politically catastrophic.

Ever since the Christchurch Mosque Massacres of 2019, the eyes of the spies have been firmly fixed upon New Zealand’s tiny community of Far Right extremists. Spying on Muslims and/or Māori would be construed by a large number of New Zealanders as evidence of state-sponsored white supremacism. ODESC’s ability to predict with any confidence the tactics and strategies of the rapidly coalescing Māori resistance movement is, therefore, negligible.

It is also probable that New Zealand’s defence chiefs would urge caution when assessing the capacity of the Military to come to the aid the Civil Power. Morale in the NZDF is said to be at an all-time low. Intense dissatisfaction with successive government’s underfunding of the armed forces is reportedly running very high. Called onto the streets to reimpose civil order through the application of deadly force, the willingness of servicemen and women to open fire on their fellow citizens must be rated as exceedingly doubtful. The great danger would be the soldiers going over to the people – thereby transforming nationwide protests into a full-blown revolution.

The New Zealand state has been here before, of course, back in the 1980s and early-90s, when Māori nationalist activists were tootling off to Libya and Cuba to pick up the rudiments of “freedom-fighting”. Back then, however, there were still plenty of concessions in the state’s briefcase: action on Te Reo, forests and fisheries, Māori health and education, cultural production of all kinds and – most important of all – the Treaty Settlement Process.

Taken together, these concessions bought the state three more decades of peace between Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti. When “indigenisation” and “decolonisation” became the order of the day, however, all bets were off. Should those two projects become entrenched Crown priorities, then the economic, institutional and cultural dividends flowing from the Pakeha victories of the 1860s will be threatened, and the ability of the state to concede its way out of trouble will diminish towards zero.

So, what will Messrs Luxon, Seymour and Peters do to placate the Kingitanga and settle down the angry rangatahi that are Te Pāti Māori’s nation? If they are wise, they will either defer, or scrap altogether, their de-Maorification agenda. Erect those bi-lingual road signs. Keep calling Hamilton “Kirikiriroa”. If necessary, retain the Māori Health Authority. Then, having secured the peace, spend the next five years pouring resources into the Police and the armed forces.

As the bicentenary of the signing of Te Tiriti looms ever nearer, the Pakeha settler state faces two, equally unpalatable choices. It will either have to accede to a Māori-led constitutional revolution, or find its own, twenty-first century equivalent of General Cameron. A Pakeha military leader prepared to shove back harder than the movement for tino rangatiratanga can push.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 15 January 2024.

Two Kings, One Country.

A Meeting Of Minds On The Treaty: The ultimate irony of a radical Māori nationalist push for a republic would be an answering surge towards monarchical institutions. A Māori-Pakeha alliance forged between members of the Professional-Managerial Class in pursuit of a radically identarian republic may yet find itself opposed by a Māori-Pakeha alliance embracing all social classes and dedicated to installing not one, but two, monarchs over New Zealand.

IT MUST BE TWENTY YEARS since a bunch of well-meaning Pakeha attempted to hold a serious constitutional conference. Republicanism, a topic making a comeback following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, was on this long-ago gathering’s agenda, but so, too, was the Treaty of Waitangi.

That was the problem.

Once the Māori nationalists had laid down the wero of incorporating the Māori version of the Treaty into a reformed New Zealand constitution, the conference was over. As arranged, the good and the great delivered their thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of New Zealand’s ramshackle constitution, but nobody was really listening. Everybody understood that te Tiriti o Waitangi, if accepted as the true constitutional blueprint of New Zealand, would act like the most powerful acid on the institutions and principles of the colonial state.

Those attending the conference also understood that the Māori nationalist position was effectively non-negotiable. All future deviations from the constitutional status-quo would be in the direction indicated by the Māori nationalists and their Pakeha enablers in the judiciary, academia, the public service, the major political parties, and – now – the mainstream media.

In their heart-of-hearts, the Pakeha conference organisers understood that, henceforth, constitutional reform in New Zealand could only be a matter of the slow and incremental advance of te Tiriti to the heart of the New Zealand state. This transformation would be accomplished without the widespread popular debate, or validating public referenda, generally considered essential to the making of new constitutions. Indeed, it was clear that any te Tiriti-based transformation could only be accomplished by stealth, and only forestalled by force.

For all but the most naïve republicans, therefore, the Queen’s death was an event to be feared: inevitable, but fraught with danger.

The Māori Party’s recent ideological shift from monarchism to republicanism signalled the growing confidence of the Māori nationalist cause. Among the radicals, the Crown has lost its magic. The cosy relationship between the House of Windsor and the Kingitanga – which the Prime Minister was at pains to shore up by taking King Tuheitia with her to the Queen’s funeral – is as unlikely to withstand the drive towards a radical decolonisation of New Zealand as the “Settler State” itself.

With their Green Party enablers adding their voices to the Māori Party’s call for the indigenisation of the New Zealand constitution – a process which would begin with the repudiation of the name “New Zealand” in favour of “Aotearoa” – and Labour’s Māori Caucus determined not to be outflanked on the left by their Māori Party challengers, the Labour Party will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the position that the republican “conversation” can be put off to a later date.

That said, the radical agenda of the Māori nationalists will not be without its opponents. Quite how the Kingitanga is supposed to retain any vestige of ideological credibility in an Aotearoa shaped by the requirements of comprehensive decolonisation is a question bound to create serious division. Without the presence of the British Crown, the Māori Crown may strike the radicals as an embarrassing exercise in colonial emulation. The Māori King and his subjects are unlikely to take kindly to such an insulting characterisation.

The Iwi Leaders Group may, similarly, respond with growing alarm to the radicalism inherent in the Māori and Green parties’ decolonisation and indigenisation agenda. The curious blending of aristocracy and capitalism that has grown up under the auspices of the Crown makes precious few concessions to the poverty-stricken Māori masses living in the major cities.

Indeed, the blending of traditional Māori leadership with corporate capitalism, was the Crown’s inspired solution to the dangerous political potential of the uprooted urban Māori population. (Those with a working knowledge of Scottish history will recognise the origins of the model in the transformation of traditional clan chiefs into modern capitalist landlords that followed the final defeat of the Jacobite cause in 1745.)

The Māori Party, the Greens, and the Labour Māori Caucus may soon find their radical constitutional plans opposed by an alliance of Māori and Pakeha forces that traverses Left and Right. Included in the opposition, the tertiary-educated and largely middle-class Māori and Pakeha radicals may find not only those Māori who identify primarily as New Zealanders (the nearly half of Maoridom who opt to go on the General Electoral Roll) but also the very poorest and most marginalised Māori.

Young Māori, tertiary qualified, fluent in te reo, and earning a six-figure salary from a government agency, may find that they are not received all that warmly by Māori who are crammed into motels, micro-managed by MSD, forced to work for the minimum wage at jobs that don’t pay the rent, and then made to feel worthless on account of their inability to speak their own language, feed their families, or make sure their children attend school. Race and nationality are powerful markers of identity – but so, too, is socio-economic status. So is class.

The ultimate irony of a radical Māori nationalist push for a republic would be an answering surge towards monarchical institutions. A Māori-Pakeha alliance forged between members of the Professional-Managerial Class in pursuit of a radically identarian republic may yet find itself opposed by a Māori-Pakeha alliance embracing all social classes and dedicated to installing not one, but two, monarchs over New Zealand. Their unifying slogan, harking all the way back to the formation of the Kingitanga in the 1850s, could well be: “King Charles III in his place, King Tuheitia in his, and the Treaty of Waitangi over them both.”

It is not difficult to imagine the said King Charles, and King Tuheitia, at Turangawaewae, jointly signing a new covenant, in which the common rights and privileges of all New Zealanders, and the resources and treasures of both its peoples, are reaffirmed, protected and guaranteed by the two Crowns, and the democratically elected bi-cameral parliament, of the dual monarchy of Aotearoa-New Zealand.

The radical, Māori nationalist drive towards a te Tiriti-driven, identarian republican constitution, written to advance the interests of both the Māori and the Pakeha members of the Professional-Managerial Class, may end up driving the traditional defenders of capitalism, liberal democracy, and the rights and aspirations of working people, into a set of constitutional arrangements as odd as they are innovative.

Radical, identarian republicanism may yet make royalists of us all.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 15 September 2022.

The Maori King's Over-Mighty Subject.

Kingmaker - Or Breaker? Buoyed, perhaps, by the growing economic power of the Iwi Leadership Group, and encouraged by the willingness of first John Key, and now Bill English, to pay lip-service to the Maori Party’s grandiose schemes for constitutional reform and post-democratic power-sharing, Tukoroirangi Morgan is intent on organising a clean-sweep of the Maori electorates and then leveraging his party’s “kingmaker” status into a full-scale revolution in Maori-Pakeha relations.

 

TUKOROIRANGI MORGAN’S AMBITIONS for his king are huge. But are the shoulders of his King, Tuheitia Paki, broad enough to carry them? The Maori Party President’s chances of success would, undoubtedly, be greater if he was able to entrust the realisation of his plans to a more experienced sovereign. But, would a more experienced Maori monarch have been as willing to put the Kingitanga in harm’s way?

 

Because the potential for the Kingitanga to be harmed by Morgan’s ambitious electoral strategy is considerable. King Tuheitia has thrown the prestige of his title behind Rahui Papa, one of his leading counsellors – and the Maori Party’s pick for the parliamentary seat currently occupied by the King’s cousin, Nanaia Mahuta.

 

The insult to Mahuta is both implicit and explicit. Not only has the King broken with his mother’s, Queen Te Ātairangikaahu’s, practice of maintaining a careful neutrality vis-à-vis party politics – to the obvious disadvantage of his kinswoman – but he has also seen fit to garnish Papa’s royal endorsement with the extraordinary charge that Mahuta no longer has any mana in Parliament.

 

This unprecedented foray into electoral politics is reckless on at least two counts. First, the King’s disparaging reference to Mahuta’s current status betrays an inadequate grasp of the intricacies of Pakeha politics. Second, it assumes a willingness to be directed on the part of the voters of Hauraki-Waikato which may not, in practice, extend anything like as far as the polling booth.

 

Mahuta’s fall in Labour’s caucus ranking reflects nothing more than the political exigencies of the 2014 leadership transition from David Cunliffe to Andrew Little. Any change of leader will, inevitably, be accompanied by a reordering of the caucus hierarchy. While the friends and allies of the former leader are eased down, the friends and allies of the new leader are eased up. That Mahuta is still to be found among the top twelve Labour MPs in 2017 is actually a tribute to her enduring mana – not proof of its loss.

 

The King, along with his chief political strategist, Morgan, may also be misreading the character of the Waikato and Maniapoto people’s relationship to the Kingitanga. Throughout his mother’s long reign, the Maori monarchy underwent a subtle but crucial shift from representing the scorched banner of colonial era resistance to symbolising the enduring dignity and resilience of New Zealand’s indigenous culture.

 

Morgan’s determination to see himself as the re-incarnation of Wiremu Tamihana, “The Kingmaker” and to conceive of his political mission as the fulfilment of Tamihana’s dream: the reconstitution and preservation of Maori sovereignty in New Zealand; moves the Kingitanga out of Dame Te Ātairangikaahu’s symbolic realm and into the all-too-real world of cut-and-thrust power politics.

 

Clearly, Morgan is convinced that the outcome of this second attempt to establish dual sovereignties within a single, unitary state will turn out very differently from the first. Moreover, he has been successful in persuading the Maori King to test his hypothesis.

 

Buoyed, perhaps, by the growing economic power of the Iwi Leadership Group, and encouraged by the willingness of first John Key, and now Bill English, to pay lip-service to the Maori Party’s grandiose schemes for constitutional reform and post-democratic power-sharing, Morgan is intent on organising a clean-sweep of the Maori electorates and then leveraging his party’s “kingmaker” status into a full-scale revolution in Maori-Pakeha relations.

 

The Labour Leader, Andrew Little, and Labour’s Maori caucus, are betting that Maori voters on both the Maori and General electoral rolls are nowhere near ready to indulge the Maori Party President’s political fantasies to this extent. They are convinced that if the choice presented to Maori voters is between restarting the Land Wars of the Nineteenth Century, and winning improved access to employment, housing, education and health services in the Twenty-First, then they will opt, overwhelmingly, for the latter.

 

And if they do – especially if they vote that way in the Maori seat of Hauraki-Waikato – then the mana of the Maori King will be diminished to the point where abdication becomes the only remaining dignified response. His successor, if there is one, will then be faced with the challenge of reconstituting the Kingitanga to more closely correspond to the cultural aspirations of Twenty-First Century Maori.

 

King Tuheitia would be wise to familiarise himself with how the kings of old dealt with “over-mighty subjects” – because he has one.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 March 2017.

A Political King.

Birds Of A Feather: If Edward VIII had been a less enamoured sex-slave to Wallis Simpson and a more convinced fascist, it is entirely possible that he could have completely upended the British constitution. Royal words, and deeds, still matter - as the political impact of the Maori King's, Tuheitia Paki's, intervention earlier this week attests.

 

IT’S AN INTRIGUING COUNTERFACTUAL to contemplate. What if Edward VIII had been a less enamoured sex-slave to Wallis Simpson and a more convinced fascist? It is entirely possible that a highly politicised King, ably assisted by Winston Churchill (who, in real life, fought right up until Edward’s abdication speech to keep him on the throne) David Lloyd-George (Britain’s Prime Minister during World War I) and Sir Oswald Mosley (leader of the British Union of Fascists) could have completely upended the British constitution.

 

Early in 1936 Edward had given hope to millions of unemployed workers, and heart palpitations to the Conservative Government of Stanley Baldwin, by declaring that “something must be done” about the appalling poverty he had just witnessed on a royal visit to South Wales.

 

British monarchs were not supposed to say such things. But, let us suppose that Edward had continued to speak out against poverty and mass unemployment. Let us further suppose that his younger brother, George, the Duke of Kent, had used his contacts with Nazi-sympathising German aristocrats to forge an alliance with like-minded members of the British upper-classes? With the additional assistance of the brilliant outcast politicians mentioned above – all of them desperate to restore their dwindling political fortunes – a more intelligent and dynamic Edward VIII would have had every chance of successfully carrying-off a royal coup d’état.

 

Even today there are elements within the British establishment who dread the ascension of the Prince of Wales. Unlike his remarkable mother, who has maintained the constitutional proprieties impeccably for the whole of her 64-year reign, it is feared that King Charles III may not be content to remain above the political fray. Imagine a King who tweeted? A King who to read his own Speech from the Throne? In the throes of another economic crisis, and unwilling to be ‘rescued’ by a political class they both despise and distrust, what might Charles III’s subjects not do?

 

What has prompted these musings on the residual power of the monarchy? Obviously, it was the extraordinary, and apparently impromptu, political observations of Tuheitia Paki, the Maori King. The latter’s disparaging remarks about the Labour Party, coupled with his de facto endorsement of the Maori and Mana parties, have garnered the Kingitanga movement considerable media coverage. It is a matter of some significance that, to date, media coverage has offered little in the way of criticism of the King’s actions. Maori and Pakeha journalists, alike, have not thought it necessary to condemn Tuheitia for stepping into the fraught arena of electoral politics.

 

The NZ First Leader, Winston Peters, has had no such qualms. “It is disappointing the Maori King has been used in such a sad way,” said Mr Peters. “There is no way his predecessor, the Maori Queen, would ever have done that.”

 

Perhaps not. But was his predecessor’s reticence born of what she perceived to be her purely ceremonial status? Or, was her silence on electoral matters merely a concession to the prevailing political realities of her reign. For the past 153 years, the Kingitanga has maintained a respectful distance from the Settler State. This is hardly surprising: military invasion and land confiscation tends to dampen even the most courageous people’s political ardour.

 

The Kingitanga’s long-standing recognition of the Settler State’s power to do it harm, indicated by its dignified silence, has been misinterpreted by Pakeha politicians as indigenous acceptance of the rules of constitutional monarchy. Like his British counterpart’s, the Maori monarch’s status is regarded as purely symbolic and ceremonial. That he or she might aspire to being an independent political actor, wielding real political power, is not something Pakeha New Zealand has seriously contemplated since 1863.

 

Much has changed since that violent period of our history. The Settler State is no longer the predatory beast that assailed the earthworks at Rangiriri. The need for Kingitanga reticence is not so great now as it was during the reign of Dame Te Atairangikaahu, King Tuheitia’s predecessor. In his keynote speech to mark the tenth anniversary of his ascension, the Maori King spoke of Maori exercising dual sovereignty over Aotearoa-New Zealand by 2025. This is less constitutional monarchy than it is constitutional revolution.

 

Royal words matter. If you doubt it, then just imagine the effect on Jeremy Corbyn’s fortunes if Queen Elizabeth II declared herself a life-long Labour supporter.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 August 2016.