Questions Of Sovereignty: Who Has The Final Say In New Zealand? – And Should We Be Frightened Of Finding Out?

Day 506: On 25 May 1978 a massive Police operation, backed by the NZ Army, evicted 218 protesters from their occupation village on Bastion Point. This was the last time a Kiwi prime minister unequivocally answered the question: "Who has the final say in New Zealand?"

 

ONLY A FOOL would attempt to portray sovereignty as an unimportant issue. (See The NZ Herald, Editorial, 11/2/15) It takes a special sort of smugness and a huge amount of ignorance to suggest that “practical” people don’t really care who has (or should have) the final say in their country. Only someone for whom the idea of not having the final say is genuinely inconceivable would make so absurd a claim. And only someone with no real knowledge or understanding of the past could possibly believe that sovereignty is ever acquired cheaply or relinquished lightly.

 

The question of precisely where sovereignty is located in Aotearoa/New Zealand is by no means an easy one to answer. Indeed, it has been many years since anyone seriously tried. The first instinct of our politicians, bureaucrats, and even of our police officers, whenever the question of sovereignty raises its deeply problematic head, is to fudge, fudge, fudge, and, if necessary, fudge again.

 

The last time a New Zealand political leader unequivocally asserted the indivisible sovereignty of the post-colonial Settler State was Rob Muldoon. Faced with the refusal of Ngati Whatua protesters to abandon their 506-day occupation of Auckland’s Bastion Point, Prime Minister Muldoon ordered their forcible eviction.

 

This was by no means a straight-forward exercise. Hundreds of Police, supported by the NZ Army, were required to remove the 218 people who refused to vacate their ancestral land. The images broadcast to New Zealand on the evening news of 25 May 1978 were deeply disturbing to a great many of its citizens – so much so, that no similar operation was authorised until the ill-starred “Operation Eight” of 2007.

 

Certainly, when confronted with the Whanganui people’s occupation of Pakaitore (Moutoa Gardens) in 1995, the government of Jim Bolger steadfastly refused to authorise the use of force to secure their eviction. Nearly 20 years on from Bastion Point, and with many Maori openly asserting tino rangatiratanga, or Maori Sovereignty, it was by no means certain that the protesters and their supporters would “go quietly”.

 

Fortunately, for the peace of the realm, the Whanganui people were equally unwilling to answer the question: ‘Who has the final say in New Zealand?’ Instead, like their warrior ancestors, they quietly “abandoned the Pa” – slipping away into the night and leaving the gardens empty.

 

Though the ill-fated “Operation Eight” was not launched in response to a land occupation, the manner of its execution left a great many New Zealanders – Maori and Pakeha – with a bitter taste in their mouths. The television images of heavily armed Police manning road-blocks and carrying out property searches and interrogations throughout the tiny Tuhoe settlement of Ruatoki revealed just how high the sovereignty stakes had been raised since 1978.

 

Any New Zealand government intending to assert state power over Maori in the second decade of the twenty-first century must anticipate considerably more than the passive resistance of Bastion Point, and the self-restraint of Pakaitore. It must be ready to use deadly force.

 

The Herald’s editorial writer would, of course, reject all such statements as alarmist. He is quite certain that “practical” Kiwis will never let things come to such a pass. But that is only because a willingness to compromise has always been the strongest component of the Maori-Pakeha relationship. Faced with stepping forward into open and uncompromising confrontation, Maori and the Crown (some disgruntled Pakeha might say ‘especially the Crown’) have, for the most part, chosen to step back.

 

But it requires an heroic leap of faith to accept that one’s country’s rulers are going to be lucky all the time. A day may come when New Zealand is again ruled by a person with the same autocratic temperament as Rob Muldoon. When the issue in dispute is too important for compromise. When neither side feels able to step back from the brink without suffering a catastrophic loss of mana. It is on that day that the all-important question: “Who has the final say in New Zealand?” will be answered. And the only “practical matters” to be considered on that day will be: Who’s will is the stronger? and, Who has the most guns?

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 11 February 2015.

Fast Forward: What Will New Zealand Look Like In 2040?

Conflicting Expectations: On the day the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, Maori enjoyed complete cultural, economic and military hegemony in "Niu Tirani" [New Zealand]. In such circumstances their cession of sovereignty to Great Britain was likely regarded as being more strategic than immediate. Within 25 years, however, the Maori situation had changed dramatically. With the experience of the Maori in mind, we should ask ourselves: "What will New Zealand look like 25 years from today?"

 

IT WAS 175 YEARS AGO, today, that Queen Victoria’s representative, Captain William Hobson, secured these islands for the British Empire.

 

According to the Waitangi Tribunal, however, that is not what the chieftains of the North believed was happening. The Tribunal’s historians flatly reject the idea that, in signing Captain Hobson’s treaty, the chiefs had voluntarily ceded all political authority to these pale-skinned men in their uncomfortable woollen coats, starched collars and feathered hats.

 

Personally, I’m not so sure this was the case. Contemporary records of the debates at Waitangi on 5-6 February 1840 make it clear that everybody present knew exactly what was going on.

 

And one of the more important things that Maori knew in February 1840 was that when it came to the disposition of cultural, economic and military power in Niu Tirani (as they called New Zealand) Maori were very much in charge.

 

Sure, the British were powerful. Indeed, there were Maori leaders present at Waitangi that day who had seen for themselves just how powerful the British were. But, those same Maori were equally aware of how very far away Britain was, and of how much effort it required to successfully navigate the 12,000 miles that separated the River Thames from the Bay of Islands. It would be a very long time, they calculated, before the treaty they’d just signed amounted to anything more than words on paper.

 

They were wrong about that.

 

Just a quarter-of-a-century later, in 1865, there were as many British soldiers serving in New Zealand as there were miles separating them from their homeland. And they weren’t just here for show. General Cameron’s 12,000 imperial troops were slowly but surely demonstrating to the Maori King, Tawhiao, and his allies, that, when it came to the disposition of cultural, economic and military power, the tangata whenua were no longer in charge.

 

The pale-skinned men in their uncomfortable woollen coats, starched collars and outlandish head-gear were rapidly taking the Maori’s place – and their land. Since 1840, tens-of-thousands of Pakeha had made the journey to Niu Tirani – and they had come to stay.

 

Fast-forwarding 150 years to 2015, let’s put ourselves in the same position as those Maori leaders at Waitangi on the day the Treaty was signed. Looking forward a quarter-of-a-century, to the bi-centenary of the Treaty’s signing in 2040, how much will have changed, and how much will have stayed the same?

 

Something tells me that the changes of the next 25 years will be as great – if not greater – than those which overwhelmed Niu Tirani between 1840 and 1865.

 

There will, of course, be plenty of New Zealanders, Maori and Pakeha, who disagree: foreseeing no serious alteration to the status-quo. Like the Maori leaders of 1840, they are confident that the balance of cultural, economic and military forces will endure. Some on the Maori side may even predict a strengthening of the indigenous people’s position.

 

I do not share their confidence.

 

The New Zealand I foresee taking shape in 25 years’ time will be profoundly different. Its ethnic composition and cultural preoccupations will reflect the burgeoning regional dominance of the People’s Republic of China. Long before the bi-centenary of the Treaty, the number of New Zealanders with familial connections to China will have easily surpassed the numbers identifying as tangata whenua. Mandarin will be the second language of New Zealand – not Maori.

 

Rising sea levels, due to global warming, will also have driven hundreds of thousands of Pasifika to New Zealand’s shores. By 2040, their numbers, too, will exceed those of Maori.

 

In 25 years, Pakeha New Zealanders will still constitute a majority of the population – but only just. And these will be much changed from the Pakeha of 2015.

 

The world-wide economic crisis of the 2020s, during which New Zealand abandoned its historical relationships with Britain and the USA, and the threw in its lot, irrevocably, with the People’s Republic, will have driven New Zealand’s political elites steadily towards the tightly-managed form of democracy currently observable in Hong Kong.

 

The generous bi-culturalism of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, with its Treaty Settlements and co-management of key resources, will have fallen among the first casualties of New Zealand’s strategic turn from West to East.

 

Indeed, so much may have changed by 2040 that the Treaty of Waitangi’s bicentenary passes unnoticed and unmissed.

 

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, 6 February 2015.

Name Recognition

Slave Driver! Sixty-five years ago the name Simon Legree was synonymous with a cruel and tyrannical individual. Harriet Beecher Stowe's slave driving villain was familiar to all who had read Uncle Tom's Cabin - or heard about him in church sermons or at the local union hall. Are we loosing purchase on a cultural repertoire familiar to our grandparents' generation but virtually unknown to their great grandchildren?

WHO IS SIMON LEGREE? Sixty-five years ago just about everybody had heard the name of Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s villainous slave-owner. Nearly a hundred years may have passed since the publication of her celebrated anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but people were still reading it.
 

To summon up the image of a tyrannical slave-driver one had only to invoke Simon Legree’s infamous name. Which is why the vast crowd rallying in support of locked-out Auckland carpenters in February 1949 was so quick to roar its approval when the trade union leader, Jock Barnes, thundered: “We will not bend the knee to the Auckland Employers’ Federation – these upstart Simon Legrees!”

Jock Barnes could have invoked the names of any number of historical and fictional characters in front of that working-class crowd and been entirely confident of their recognition. He could have quoted from Shakespeare or Dickens; made reference to Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte; and his audience would not have wondered who or what he was talking about.
 

Most of all, however, he could have quoted the Bible – the book everybody knew. Had he invoked the characters of Moses and Pharaoh, and called upon the Auckland employers to “Let my people go!”, his listeners would have responded every bit as lustily.
 

On Christmas Day, 1814, above the bright Bay of Island’s beach of Oihi, the Reverend Samuel Marsden conducted the first ever Christian service on New Zealand soil. More than any other import from the European-dominated world, Christianity has defined the cultural evolution of New Zealand society.
 

It was the Christian faith which ensured that Maori and Pakeha would, eventually, come to espouse a set of common moral purposes. Its complex web of insights and values was powerful enough to restrain both the colonisers and the colonised; tempering the inevitable conflicts associated with colonisation and speeding-up the processes of reconciliation afterwards. Indeed, in the Bible’s Book of Exodus Maori prophets found a source of both inspiration and hope that, ultimately, the Pakeha Pharaoh might also be prevailed upon to “Let my people go!”
 

Samuel Marsden was an Anglican missionary, and his Church of England was to play a decisive historical role in Christianity’s spread throughout the North Island. The gospel of peace did not, however, spread as rapidly as the military impact of the musket. Indeed throughout the 1820s and 30s the missionaries and the musket-bearers seemed to be involved in a grim competition to discover who could reap the larger harvest.
 

Historians put the toll of death and displacement arising out of the Musket Wars at between twenty and thirty thousand (out of a Maori population of, at most, 150,000). By the late 1830s, as more and more tribes acquired firearms, the slaughter was slowed by the emergence of a rough balance of terror. Equally important to the cessation of hostilities, however, was the power of the Christian message of love and forgiveness. Conversion lifted the traditional burden of utu (reciprocity and restitution) from Maori shoulders. Had the tribes not converted it is difficult to say when, or even if, the killing would have stopped.
 

The intimate historical relationship between Maori and the Anglican Church continues into the present day in the form of the Church’s unique constitution. Inspired by the provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi, the Anglicans have accorded Maori a decisive role in the governance of their Church. Some, like Professor Whatarangi Winiata, have argued that the Church’s constitutional innovations should become the model for a reconstitution of the entire New Zealand State.
 

Were the whole of New Zealand as seized of Christian principles as the Anglican Church and all the other denominations, such a prospect would not sound so politically far-fetched. Since the 1970s, however, Christianity in New Zealand has been in steep decline – to the point where, in the last census, less than half the population was willing to identify as such.
 

Now, it might be objected that although only 49 percent of New Zealanders currently identify themselves as Christians, a much larger percentage of the population continues to subscribe to Christian values. But, in the face of what might best be described as New Zealand’s “moral restructuring” can such an optimistic view be sustained?
 

Between 1984 and the present, the prevailing Neoliberal ideology has waged an unceasing war against the Christian values of compassion, forgiveness, solidarity and redistribution. The New Testament’s rejection of wealth and power sits very uneasily with a system whose values are best displayed in the moral squalor of “reality television”.
 

In 1949 New Zealanders could still be roused to moral indignation by a reference to Simon Legree. Their easy familiarity with their society’s religious and literary traditions made them powerfully responsive to moral appeals.
 

Is that still true in 2014?
 

Sixty-five years from now, how will Kiwis answer: “Who is Jesus Christ?”
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 23 December 2014.

Nothing Wrong With John Key's History.

Done Deal: The Prime Minister's comments regarding the peaceful settlement of New Zealand have been ridiculed by his detractors, but they were considerably less controversial than the Waitangi Tribunal's assertion that Maori never ceded sovereignty to the British crown. (Image drawn from the TVNZ docudrama About Waitangi: What Really Happened?)

THE PRIME MINISTER, John Key, has been much mocked over the past week for his claim that New Zealand was settled peacefully. Hoots of derision have echoed through the Twittersphere from those who profess to know their New Zealand history a great deal better than the Prime Minister.

 

Are they right? Is Mr Key wrong?

 

It might help to place the Prime Minister’s comments in context. His remarks followed the Waitangi Tribunal finding that the tribal chieftains of the far-North did not cede sovereignty to the British Crown when they signed the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840.

 

This finding is considerably more controversial than anything the Prime Minister decided to offer by way of commentary. The Auckland-based historian, Paul Moon, has already derided the Tribunal’s historical conclusions, and his intervention is unlikely to be the last.

 

Indeed, it is extremely difficult to understand how the Waitangi Tribunal’s latest finding could be so provocatively definitive. The Tribunal’s enabling legislation allows the Crown to test the evidence presented to it by cross-examining witnesses and by introducing evidence of its own. It may also commission professional historians to assess evidence presented in support of radically revisionist interpretations of New Zealand history.

 

Did the Crown take full advantage of its interrogative powers in this case? Did it seize the opportunity to open up the vital constitutional issues under consideration to wider public scrutiny and debate? Apparently not. The strongly held beliefs of those bringing the claim were accorded a decisive credibility. The settled view of more than 150 years of historical research? Not so much.

 

A crucial element of the settled view is that the Maori chieftains who signed the Treaty, many of whom had enjoyed long and mutually beneficial relationships with the Europeans who had taken up residence in New Zealand since Cook’s exploratory voyages of the late eighteenth century, knew exactly what they were agreeing to at Waitangi on 6 February 1840.

 

Captain William Hobson was guaranteeing them the inviolability of their traditional territories and the safety of their people. In the light of what had befallen the iwi and hapu of Niu Tirani (New Zealand) between 1769 and 1840, the existential value of these guarantees is readily appreciated.

 

The indigenous population of these islands at the time of first European contact is estimated at 100,000. Between 1800 and 1830 as many as 30,000 Maori were killed and/or driven from their traditional lands by enemy iwi and hapu armed with the devastating military technology of the Pakeha. The protection of Queen Victoria (symbolising the world’s most powerful nation) was what they needed. Hobson offered it. The chiefs grabbed it with both hands.

 

So, in the sense that New Zealand was gazetted as a possession of the British Crown by virtue of a treaty of cession, rather than by outright military conquest, the Prime Minister’s assertion that “New Zealand was one of the very few countries in the world that were settled peacefully” is not only historically uncontroversial but also, in general terms, correct.

 

That correctness is bolstered when we compare the wholesale slaughter, land seizure and population displacement that accompanied the so-called “Musket Wars”, with the death-toll of the Land Wars of 1845-1872. Over the course of those three tumultuous decades roughly 2,000 Maori and 2,000 Pakeha fell victim to fatal violence. On the Maori side of the ledger, a significant proportion of those fatalities were inflicted by Maori fighting for the Crown. And, if we divide the total number of fatalities by the 28 years the conflict lasted, then the average fatality rate is 143 deaths per annum – less than the 2013 road toll.

 

Even the relatively large-scale conflict encompassing Taranaki, the Waikato and the Bay of Plenty between 1860 and 1863 was more of a civil war than a war of conquest. The Kingitanga’s brave attempt to re-define the terms of Hobson’s deal, by proposing a two crowns/one flag formula, was deemed to be unacceptable by Governor Grey; antagonistic to the fast-expanding settler interest; and a doomed attempt to wind back the clock by those Maori leaders who knew that, for better or worse, the Pakeha had come to stay.

 

In the smaller flare-ups of the late-1860s and early-1870s, it was these “Loyal Maoris” who played a crucial role in extinguishing the isolated bush-fires of iwi and hapu resistance. That the Waitangi Tribunal masks their participation by subsuming their contribution under the all-encompassing rubric of “The Crown” says it all really.

 

Accordingly, I will not be participating in the condescension and derision of the Twitter handle #johnkeyhistory.

 

Is the history of Maori-Pakeha relations entirely free of violence and injustice? Of course not. There’s blood in the foundations of every state. But, if John Key’s saying there’s a lot less in ours than most, then I, for one, agree.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 25 November 2014.

The Kowhai And The Birch: Chris Trotter's 'From The Left' Column, Election Eve, 2005.

A Plea For Tolerance: On the eve of the 2005 General Election - an election which threatened to plunge New Zealand into bitter racial conflict, I penned the following column.

YESTERDAY morning, as I turned into the driveway of my daughter’s school, a shaft of sunlight broke through the fog, and the first flowers of the Kowhai tree standing by the gate blazed forth like fiery flakes of gold. A stand of Silver Birches framed the forward Kowhai, their white trunks tapering into a fine filigree of bare branches. It is too soon in the season for their buds to burst.

 

It was a pretty sight and, it occurred to me, a highly symbolic one. The indigenous Kowhai, with its lustrous flowers, holds much in common with the exotic Birch. They are both trees, after all. But the Kowhai and the Birch are also very different. The indigenous tree remains much closer to the earth than its exotic neighbour, spreading its soft brown arms wide across the forest floor. The Birch, by contrast, is a questing tree – its graceful limbs forever raised towards the sun.

 

But the gardener at my daughter’s school has made room for both of them at this gateway to learning: the hugger and the reacher; the brown limbed and the white.

 

And so it has been in the larger garden that is our homeland. In the vast forests that greeted the Maori stood the mighty children of Tane – the Kauri, and Kahikatea – silent and strong, rich with years, and only to be felled with the greatest of reverence and ceremony. But to those who came after the Maori, Tane’s children were for many years no more than things to be used. The vast indigenous forests were felled and out of their dismembered bodies arose a nation.

 

Far from their northern homes, the new citizens of this nation sought to soothe the pain of distance by surrounding themselves with the familiar foliage of childhood gardens. The Oak, the Elm, the Poplar and the Birch: old friends from a forsaken hemisphere – but strange and unfamiliar company for the Kowhai and Pohutukawa.

 

As indigenous gave way to exotic, the ancient wisdom of the trees was lost. And soon a grey-green army of ramrod-straight, fast-growing California Pines was marching across every plain and up every hillside. In place of wild diversity we raised a featureless monoculture, laid out in straight lines, sown and reaped without ceremony, leaving nothing to memory and threatening to turn the sacred wilderness of Tane into a vast factory of indistinguishable timber.

 

But, as the indigenous forests retreated into the fastnesses of the Ureweras and the Southern Alps, something strange began to happen in the suburban gardens of the nation. More and more New Zealanders began to question the wisdom of their grandparents who had filled the parks and reserves of their towns and cities with the flora of Mother England. In more and more gardens people began planting indigenous flowers and trees.

 

Perhaps it was because the seed of the Maori and the Pakeha were becoming as intermingled as the seeds of the Kowhai flowers and the catkins of the Birch: blown together in the great storms of change that were remaking the nation of New Zealand.

 

For now the call was to halt the advance of the grey-green army and to preserve what was left of the family of Tane. The time had come for the descendants of homesick settlers to learn, at last, the true names and the long lineage of their homeland’s native trees.

 

Because here, at the end of the Earth, exotic flora and fauna are prone to dangerous explosions. Freed from the natural constraints of their true homes, they burgeon forth with terrifying enthusiasm. Gorse, rabbits, possums: the list is carved into the bones of this country, and the lessons of their depredations must never be forgotten.

 

Because what is true of our ecology is also true of our ideology. We New Zealanders have a dangerous habit of letting our imported ideas get as out of control as our imported plants and animals.

 

We must be much more careful about what seeds we plant – and where. A monocultural empire of Pinus Radiata is as unacceptable as the pristine forests of Tane are unrecoverable.

 

Tomorrow, then, as you go into the polling booth, remember the wise practice of the gardener at my daughter’s school. And remember, too, the wise words of the poet Kahil Gibran, who cautioned us to stand together, yet not too near together:

 

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

 

And neither, I think, do the Kowhai and the Birch.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post of Friday, 16 September 2005.

More Than A Maori Problem

Fronting For Dysfunction: The finger of blame has been pointed at Hekia Parata for her mishandling of the investigation into the Te Kohanga Reo National Trust Board. But is the blame hers alone? According to the young Maori blogger, Morgan Godfery: "The behaviour of the board and its subsidiary has been dreadful. Perhaps it’s the predictable effect of lifetime appointments. But I think it goes deeper. There’s a rot in Maori governance. From poor governance at Maori TV to the Kohanga Reo board, Maori aren’t being served."

 

THERE IS A STRONG TEMPTATION to dismiss the Te Kohanga Reo Trust scandal as something for Maori to sort out. Strong because there is currently a real reluctance on the part of Pakeha journalists to intrude upon Maori disputes. Charges of colonialist insensitivity, even outright racism, are easily levelled, and not so easily refuted.

 

The person who has paid the highest price for this reticence, over the past week, is the Minister of Education, Hekia Parata. Digging deeper into the Kohanga story; attempting to tease-out its broader political ramifications, entails cross-cultural risk. A Cabinet Minister’s political fumblings, on the other hand, is a much more familiar and, therefore, safer story.

 

What is it that underlies both the scandal itself and the news media’s less-than-thorough presentation of it?

 

The answer, I believe, lies in the series of critical changes in the generational, cultural, economic and political propellants of Maori development.

 

Forty years ago the future of the Maori language was in doubt. A generation of Maori had thought it wiser for their offspring to immerse themselves in and acquire the skills of the dominant Pakeha culture. Mastering English and learning how to operate and succeed in Pakeha institutions (especially its education system) was central to the survival strategy of those Maori who migrated from rural Aotearoa to urban New Zealand in the two decades following World War II.

 

It was this, the “Assimilation Generation”, that laid the foundations for what was to become the Maori middle-class. And it was their offspring – the first generation of Maori to enter tertiary education in any numbers – who constituted the political core of the “Maori Renaissance” – a movement of uncompromising cultural assertion which would, between 1975 and 2005, radically alter the expectations and aspirations of tangata whenua.

 

Te Kohanga Reo, the pre-school Maori language “nests”, and Kura Kaupapa, the Maori immersion schools, are both products of those three decades of Maori revitalisation and rebirth. And those who were instrumental in their creation have grown old alongside the institutions they brought into existence.

 

Pressure from this new, young, well-educated and politically assertive generation of Maori activists was also responsible for transforming the Waitangi Tribunal into an historically responsive instrument for the redress of Maori grievances. Between 1990 and the present, the Tribunal was to supply not only the moral and legal rationale for the establishment of Maori broadcasting, but would also set in motion the Crown’s ambitious Treaty-settlement process. These settlements, in their turn, provided the financial base for the rise of neo-tribal capitalist corporations.

 

The Maori cultural renaissance was thus transformed into a political and economic revolution. Institutional opportunities have been created which offer Maori (or, at least their middle-class leaders) a secure position in the future governance and development of New Zealand society and economy.

 

Like all revolutions, however, its consolidation phase has required a series of compromises and accommodations to be made between the old and the new way of doing things. The hierarchical, deferential and familial aspects of traditional Maori governance structures have, therefore, been grandfathered into the new. The results have become a source of both anger and embarrassment to the sons and daughters of both the renaissance and the revolution.

 

In the words of the young Maori blogger, Morgan Godfery:

 

“The behaviour of the [Te Kohanga Reo Trust] board and its subsidiary has been dreadful. Perhaps it’s the predictable effect of lifetime appointments. But I think it goes deeper. There’s a rot in Maori governance. From poor governance at Maori TV to the Kohanga Reo board, Maori aren’t being served.

 

“Would a rational and skilled [Maori Television] board re-attempt to appoint Paora Maxwell after the staff revolt? Clearly the board didn’t consider rudimentary factors like workplace culture and staff satisfaction. Would a rational and skilled board sanction a $50,000 koha to a board member? That’s more than triple the median income for Maori. I’ll tell you what kind of board would – one that isn’t fit for the job.”

 

Godfery’s harsh judgement of the governance compromises agreed to by his parents’ generation in order to consolidate the gains made in the 1980s and 90s identifies the nature of the next big challenge facing Maori. Either the gains of renaissance and revolution will be captured by an increasingly authoritarian and self-protective Maori middle-class, or they will be extended to all Maori people – especially those young Maori trapped in the poverty-racked and crime-ridden ghettoes of New Zealand’s major cities.

 

The Kohanga Reo scandal (itself the result of young Maori journalists from Maori Television’s Native Affairs refusing to be intimidated by the trust board’s networks of patronage and protection) is, therefore, much more than an issue for Maori to sort out on their own.

 

The fruits of renaissance and revolution in Aotearoa-New Zealand cannot be secured for Maori in the face of Pakeha indifference.

 

This essay was originally published by The Press of Tuesday, 25 March 2014.

A Precise Moment In History: Pondering The Legacy Of Waitangi

Mixed Historical Motives: The simple clauses of the Treaty of Waitangi masterfully embraced the complex agendas of both its British and Maori signatories.

 

IT’S JANUARY 1840, two sailing vessels are fast approaching the North Island of New Zealand. His Majesty’s Ship Rattlesnake carries Captain William Hobson bearing instructions from the Colonial Office to organise the voluntary cession of the islands of New Zealand to the British Crown. The other ship, Aurora, carries settlers to the newly established settlement of Port Nicolson. It has been chartered by the privately owned and organised New Zealand Company.

 

Captain Hobson’s instructions are not unrelated to the purposes for which the Aurora and her passengers set sail. The islands of New Zealand, conveniently located in the temperate zone of the southern hemisphere, are large but sparsely populated (the indigenous Maori population numbers approximately 125,000). Not surprisingly, therefore, they have begun to loom large in the sights of European entrepreneurs, missionaries and imperialists.

 

Under pressure from the aristocratic backers of the New Zealand Company, and wary of the pretensions of competing powers – particularly the French – the Colonial Office in London is determined to regularise the confused situation then prevailing in Australasia. If the land titles being sold to settlers by the New Zealand Company are to be legally enforceable, the question of sovereignty must be settled – and quickly. By fair means or by foul, New Zealand is to be annexed to the British Crown.

 

The cheapest, the most politically expedient, and (in the face of the Missionary Society’s strenuous submissions) the most morally defensible means of securing possession of New Zealand is to persuade the indigenous Maori tribes to cede sovereignty to her Britannic majesty, Victoria, voluntarily.  Indeed, British agents and missionaries in New Zealand have been assiduously laying the groundwork for just such a solution since the mid-1830s. The British Resident, James Busby, has even secured a “Declaration of Independence” from his purpose-built “Confederation of Chiefs” so the Crown has something to sit down with when the time to negotiate a plausible treaty of cession finally arrives.

 

As HMS Rattlesnake drops anchor in the Bay of Islands in February 1840, this is exactly what Hobson and his confreres, Busby and Freeman, are preparing to do.

 

THE MAORI LEADERS gathered at Waitangi to korero with Captain Hobson have come with an equally clear set of priorities.

 

First and foremost, they are seeking protection.

 

From the early 1830s a rough “balance of terror” has prevailed among the indigenous people as more and more of them acquired firearms. Even so, the slaughter and dislocation of the so-called “Musket Wars” are still a very recent memory, and nobody’s ready to wager the lives of their whanau and hapu on the blood-letting never breaking out again. Information gleaned from Maori who’ve travelled to Australia – and further afield – suggests that the British Empire holds out the best hope of keeping the peace between the tribes.

 

They’re also keen for the British to keep the roughly 2,000 unruly Europeans who’ve settled amongst them to trade, hunt whales and seals, or simply to outrun the writ of whoever’s justice system is after them, under some semblance of control. There’s a lot of wealth to be had from these folk, but only if the tribes can enlist the aid of an entity with sufficient power to make sure they keep their side of any bargain – and pay up.

 

Having learned the hard way how skittish the Pakeha become when Maori exercise their own robust forms of tribal justice, they reckon it will make things a lot easier if their “guests” are forced to live under their own laws.

 

Among the shrewder Maori – including the wily Hone Heke – there is also a nagging fear that the ever-increasing inward flow of European settlers will not stop. They’ve learned that these new arrivals are different – not the usual traders, whoremasters, grog-sellers, whalers, sealers and fugitives that the tribes have grown used to accommodating.

 

More than anything else, the settlers arriving on the New Zealand Company ships desire land – Maori land. And as more and more of them arrive, that hunger for Maori land can only increase. That’s why the better educated and more travelled Maori are determined to secure their tribal possessions against settler pressure by placing them under the protection of the world’s most powerful nation – Great Britain.

 

Also at Waitangi are the Christian Maori – the products of more than twenty years of missionary effort. To these men and women the Pakeha have vouchsafed an entirely different understanding of the human condition. Christianity has conferred upon its native converts a new kind of power: a new mana.

 

They understand that the Pakeha’s morality, knowledge and technology offer their people a way-in to a world their ancestors could never have imagined. For them the future lies in a voluntary melding of their own and the newcomers’ cultures – and that melding cannot happen soon enough.

 

THE SIMPLE CLAUSES of the Treaty of Waitangi masterfully embraced the complex agendas of both its British and Maori signatories. It is, however, naïve in the extreme to characterise the document as a contract.

 

Treaties are not contracts: at least not in the sense that a mortgage or hire-purchase agreement is a contract. What a treaty actually amounts to is a description of the power relations existing between two peoples at a precise moment in history.

 

Almost always (and the Treaty of Waitangi is no exception) the relationship between the signatories is an unequal one (usually reflecting the stronger party’s military victory over the weaker). What makes the Treaty of Waitangi so interesting is that it was signed in anticipation of – and as a way of avoiding – the military clash which would have become inevitable if a voluntary cession of sovereignty to the British Crown had been refused.

 

But Maori did not emerge from the negotiations of February 1840 empty-handed. The quid pro quo, in return for making things easy for the Colonial Office, was the guarantee of what they had been seeking all along – the protection of the Crown. Protection against any return to the slaughter of the Musket Wars; protection against social disorder and commercial trickery; and protection against the Pakeha they were most afraid of: the ones who were coming to stay.

 

This was the real partnership enshrined in the Treaty: the partnership between the Maori tribes and the Colonial Office, or, to put it more precisely, with the executive arm of the British Government in London. This was the power the chiefs had aligned themselves with: a power which, in the person of the Governor, would stand between them and the predatory approach to land acquisition represented by the New Zealand Company and its growing body of imitators.

 

And there’s no question that the chiefs’ fears in regard to the settlers were entirely justified. Here, for example, is how one of the Governors of the New Zealand Company viewed the Treaty:

 

“We have always had very serious doubts whether the Treaty of Waitangi, made with naked savages by a consul invested with no plenipotentiary powers, without ratification by the Crown, could be treated by lawyers as anything but a praiseworthy devise for amusing and pacifying savages for the moment.”

 

THAT OMINOUS “for the moment” offers us a chilling reminder of just how historically contingent all treaties are. Certainly the Treaty of Waitangi – as a means of protecting the things Maori treasured – did not long survive the moment when the settler population reached a size sufficient to persuade London to grant it a measure of self-government (1852).

 

It was at that point that the Crown effectively ceased to be the protector of New Zealand’s indigenous inhabitants, and became, instead, the protector of the new settler state. In vain did the chiefs appeal to the Governor to uphold the Crown pre-emption clause of the Treaty. And when, in growing desperation, they crowned their own king and attempted to defend what remained of their tribal lands, the Settler Government promptly declared them rebels and traitors, and the British Government in London dispatched a vast army to crush the resistance of the nascent Maori state.

 

It is difficult to envisage any other outcome. The moment London acquiesced in the formation of a New Zealand State, they set in place an entity which could only grow and prosper at the expense of the country’s original inhabitants. Because, as the chiefs rightly apprehended back in February 1840, if the new breed of settlers came to stay – it could only be on Maori land.

 

 

TO SAY that the Treaty of Waitangi was breached is, therefore, an accurate but ultimately trivial historical observation. Had it not been breached, New Zealand – as a colonial society inextricably enmeshed in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the British Empire – wouldn’t have existed. For the Settler State to become real, the Treaty had to become, in Chief Justice Prendergast’s brutal phrase: “a simple nullity”.

 

Was that wrong? Should the undertakings given by Captain Hobson on 6 February 1840 have been honoured? Removed from its historical context, the question is easily answered in the affirmative. Except that those who go in search of such unencumbered moral judgements, do so without understanding that such questions can never be extracted from history.

 

To judge the dead may give some comfort to the living, but no matter how fervently the misdeeds of previous generations are condemned, they cannot be undone. Therefore, whatever justice we seek to do here and now, let it be to right the wrongs of the present – not the past.

 

We fair-skinned Polynesians are not – and can never be – “Europeans”. Just as contemporary Maori are not – and can never be again – the Maori who inhabited these islands before colonisation. Both of us are the victims of historical forces too vast for blame, to permanent for guilt.

 

And both of us have nowhere else to go.

 

This essay was originally published on the Bowalley Road blogsite on 12 May 2011.

A Study In Exhaustion

A Hard Act To Follow: Dr Pita Sharples' contribution to what success the Maori Party has enjoyed is difficult to over-estimate. Compared to the mature Totara he is replacing, Te Ururoa Flavell, is a political sapling.

 

THE MAN LOOKED EXHAUSTED. Hardly surprising really – given the drama of the preceding days. In was November 2008: the Labour-led Government had fallen; Winston Peters was no longer a Member of Parliament; and the Maori Party had just won five of the seven Maori Seats. Slumped on a chair in the corridors of Parliament Buildings, Dr Pita Sharples was looking every one of his 68 years.

 

Perhaps it was my imagination, but as I sat across the corridor from him, waiting to take my turn on Maori Television’s live broadcast from the Maori Affairs Committee Room, I couldn’t help speculating that there was something more to be gleaned from Dr Sharples’ expression that mere physical fatigue. The thought crossed my mind that I was looking at a man who had fought a long battle with himself – and lost.

 

And that could only mean one thing: that Tariana Turia had prevailed, and that the Maori Party would be signing a coalition agreement with the victorious National Party.

 

“Don’t settle for anything less than a seat at the Cabinet Table”, I volunteered. “Make sure you’re where the decisions are being made.”

 

He smiled wanly, knowing already that this was beyond his own, Ms Turia’s, and the whole of the Maori Party’s power. They would receive portfolios, yes, even the highly symbolic title of Minister of Maori Affairs, but in terms of real power they would, like so many of their people, remain outside the door. The Maori Party may have talked its way into the room where the spoils of victory were being divvied up, but Dr Sharples knew already that they would not be offered a seat at the table – not by the Nats.

 

I would like to think that had the choice to collaborate (or not) with the National Party been Dr Sharples’ decision to make, then he would have held the Maori Party aloof.

 

But, it was not his decision.

 

That the whole of Maoridom has become entangled in Ms Turia’s utu upon the Labour Party is a tragedy only New Zealand politics could produce. Those who diminish the role of individuals in moving our history forward – or backwards – would do well to consider Ms Turia’s career.

 

These fierce old kuia, wreathed in the mysteries of their people’s blood and soil, emerge from time-to-time to trouble the deliberations of men. Advised by voices no one else can hear; protected by guardians no one else can see; they are not to be gainsaid or refused. And, when their work is done, they fade back into the mist and silence of the rivers and mountains that made them.

 

Yet, for all of Ms Turia’s formidable strength, it was Dr Sharples’ straightforwardness – his infectious good-humour and grandfatherly wisdom – that allowed the Maori Party to accomplish such good deeds as are worthy of being remembered.

 

Ms Turia may have been Maoridom’s frightening sybil, but it was Dr Sharples who re-built the relationship between Maori and Pakeha, which Labour’s Foreshore & Seabed Act and National’s Orewa speech had so badly damaged.

 

It was Dr Sharples who accustomed Pakeha to the idea that a Maori-based political party could participate in the affairs of government without igniting a civil war. And, in the Iwi Leadership Group, it was Dr Sharples who introduced his people to an alternative model for influencing the colonisers: one that did not involve loud-hailers or hurled fistfuls of Waitangi mud.

 

And now, for his trouble, Dr Sharples has been shown the door by Te Ururoa Flavell. Gone will be the kaumatua’s openness; his refreshing disposition to speak the truth freely, rather than waste everybody’s time by laboriously constructing a lie. In place of the avuncular smiles and chuckles, we shall all have to get used to Mr Flavell’s gloomy monotone.

 

The perfect symbol of the Maori Party in decline: Te Ururoa Flavell

 

Has anyone ever seen Mr Flavell smile?

 

No matter. The Waiariki MP’s passive aggression: his cultural conservatism; make him the perfect symbol of the Maori Party in decline.

 

A study in exhaustion.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 July 2013.

Sting In The Tail

Road To Ruin: If New Zealand is to remain a successful modern nation it must make the elimination of the "Tail" - the failing 15-20 percent of its people - the nation's No. 1 priority.

IT’S THAT PERSISTENT fifteen to twenty percent of the population which stubbornly refuses to disappear from all the wrong kinds of statistical data. Without the drag of its sorry performance New Zealand’s achievements would rival those of the most successful Scandinavian societies. Without the need to provide for its sustenance and support we’d be looking at budget surpluses – not deficits. And without the need to contain its propensity for crime and violence, the state could be funding much more positive and creative endeavours. It’s why, in any discussion of New Zealand’s future, one cannot avoid mentioning the “Tail” – because its sting is poisoning us all.
 

Getting rid of the Tail should be New Zealand’s No. 1 priority. The energy and imagination of our finest scholars – augmented by the unwavering support of our political class – should be applied unstintingly to its elimination. So much depends upon it.
 

As the nation ages, the mostly young constituents of the Tail will be called upon to take up the slack of its maintenance. Sullen, envious and hostile; as unmotivated as it is poorly educated; the Tail is simply not equal to that task. But if we cannot find a way to make it so. If we cannot conduct the Tail from the margins to the centre of our national life, then New Zealand as a successful modern nation is finished.
 

The task would be easier if the Tail was entirely white – but it is not. Overwhelmingly, the ethnic composition of the Tail is Maori and Pasifika. It is comprised of the children and grandchildren of those we hauled into our major cities to do the jobs we no longer wanted. From the farthest reaches of rural New Zealand and the most distant islands of Polynesia we marched these migrants into our factories and warehouses, set them to work on our roads and railways, asked them to clean our schools, hospitals, shops and offices. And then, when the economic game changed and their labour was no longer needed, we simply tossed them away. Pacified with welfare benefits, stupefied by alcohol and drugs, we simply cut them loose from “mainstream” New Zealand society. Instantly, they became the “Other”; the “Enemy”; the “Undeserving Poor”. And their children became the “Tail”.
 

And nobody, it seems, wants anything to do with them – except the promoters of the so-called “Partnership Schools”, who are quietly confident that, alongside the liquor retailers, the loan sharks, the pubs with the pokies and the private prisons, they, too, have found a way to turn the Tail into a paying proposition.
 

Certainly our politicians regard the Tail as a phenomenon of limited utility. Because so few of them vote their principal political function is to hone the resentments and bolster the self-esteem of the working poor.
 

Listen to Labour’s David Shearer as he reads his autocue to last weekend’s Young Labour Summer School. (Yes, he even needs an autocue for that!)
 

“[T]his Government has forgotten the hard-working and inspiring people I come across every day. In a pub in Napier, a guy came up and said to me ‘I’m working harder than ever, I pay my taxes, we’re trying to bring up our kids the best we can, but we simply can’t seem to get ahead’ … They’re not asking for an easy ride or a hand-out … They’re doing their fair share. Playing their part.”
 

He might just as well have added: “Not like those bludgers on the dole, DPB or sickness benefit!”
 

A Michael Joseph Savage or a Norman Kirk would have used all his persuasive powers to convince his audience that nothing is worth having if getting it means denying it to others. He would have warned them that either we enter the promised land together, or we do not enter it at all.
 

What hope have we of ridding ourselves of its malign influence – or protecting ourselves from its sting – if even the Labour Party has nothing to offer the Tail?
 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 February 2013. 

A Short-Lived Illusion: Assessing The Impact Of The Maori Party

Sometime A Great Notion: The fate of the Maori Party offers stark confirmation that ethnic identity, alone, offers an insufficient foundation for enduring electoral success.

THE SWING VOTE. With the formation of the Maori Party in 2004 many Maori looked forward to wielding a permanent “balance of power” over New Zealand politics. With the Maori birth-rate considerably higher than the Pakeha, the wisdom of enrolling on the Maori Roll was thought to be obvious: a demographic guarantee of many more Maori seats. The Maori Vote, overwhelmingly loyal to the Maori Party, would thus become the decisive factor. Neither National nor Labour would be able to govern without its support. The potential for advancing Maori interests seemed limitless.
 

Eight years later, the political prospects for Maori have significantly diminished. The Maori Party is a dwindling political force, riven by personal jealousies and ideological confusion, and likely to lose at least two (and quite possibly all) of the three Maori Seats it currently holds in 2014.
 

The two parties most likely to pick up the seats of Te Tai Hauauru, Tamaki Makaurau and Waiariki: Labour and Mana; are both positioned on the left of the political spectrum, making them ideological non-starters as potential National Party allies. The Maori Party vision of constituting a permanent, ideologically agnostic, component within all future coalition governments has vanished. The Maori Swing Vote, it turns out, was a short-lived illusion. Why?
 

The answer lies in the misapprehension that ethnic identity alone is an unqualified determinant of political allegiance. The founders of the Maori Party: Tariana Turia, Pita Sharples and Professor Whatarangi Winiata all appeared to believe that simply placing the word “Maori” in front of the word “Party” was enough. Regardless of which social class they belonged to or how much education they’d received, and putting aside all personal experiences and aspirations, the Maori voters’ “natural” cultural affinities would make them unwaveringly loyal Maori Party supporters.
 

For a few years it looked as though the Maori Party leadership’s assumptions were substantially correct. By 2008 the party held all but two of the Maori Seats and the prospects seemed good for capturing all seven. But the cultural glasses through which the party insisted on observing the Maori electorate had failed to register the brute political facts of their situation.
 

In the quarter-century since the breakthrough Court of Appeal decision establishing the notion that the Treaty of Waitangi establishes a “partnership” between the Pakeha State and Maori, cultural considerations have increasingly been deployed to mask the embarrassing social gulf which has opened up between the elite wielders of tribally-based, Treaty-settlement-funded corporate power; the narrow layer of well-educated and well-remunerated functionaries who service that power; and the expanding mass of urban and rural Maori who eke out a marginal existence within a New Zealand economy that, increasingly, has little to offer them.
 

It was the Maori Party’s misfortune to enter into a confidence-and-supply agreement with the National Party just as the Global Financial Crisis was hurling tens-of-thousands of young Maori into joblessness and under-employment. Foolishly, Mrs Turia and Dr Sharples had allowed the overwhelmingly working-class Maori electorate’s eighty-year association with Labour and the New Zealand Left to slip their minds. Of the five Maori Party MPs, only Hone Harawira seemed to appreciate the tremendous damage their association with National was inflicting on the notion of permanent Maori participation in government.
 

The result was the Mana Party, whose pursuit of the bi-cultural ideals of the 1970s is predicated on first meeting the material needs of Maori and Pakeha working-class New Zealanders. Only when the marginalised, exploited and excluded of both communities have ready access to good jobs, warm and dry homes, and well-resourced hospitals and schools will Mana’s decolonising policies attract the mass support necessary for their success.
 

The Maori Party’s ambition of exercising a permanent swing vote over New Zealand politics was as short-sighted as it was undemocratic. Throughout human history the universal cry for justice has always attracted more followers than the mystical whisperings of blood and soil. In the end, it isn’t our ethnic origins that determine our electoral choices – it’s our all-too-material interests.
 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 4 January 2013.

A Proprietary Interest

To Name Is To Own: Now known as Trotter's Creek this little river in North Otago was originally called Te Awakakokomuka. What became of the customary rights attached to the Maori users of this waterway after its name was changed? 

 

TROTTER’S CREEK tumbles out of the Horse Range, chuckles through Trotter’s Gorge, and empties itself into the Pacific Ocean under the looming cliffs of the Moeraki peninsula at Katiki Beach. Along the way the little river runs (in the remarkably poetic language of an Otago Regional Council pamphlet) “with large slow, deep pools combined with shallow riffles.”

 

I would be lying if I said that on the rare occasions I drive over and alongside Trotter’s Creek I do not feel a proprietary tug. The coast of North Otago is and will always be my turangawaewae – my place to stand – and the geographical features that bear my family’s name only reinforce this sense of belonging. It’s where I was born. It’s where I hope to be buried.

 

But is Trotter’s Creek really Trotter’s creek? Can a family – or an individual – really lay claim to the water that falls from the sky, or the riverbeds over which it flows back to the sea? My family took possession of the land through which Trotter’s Creek flows in 1851. As the years passed, the name it bore before their arrival, Te Awakakokomuka, gradually fell into disuse. What cannot be disputed, however, is that the people who lived along the North Otago coast before the Magnet dropped anchor at Waikouaiti in 1840, also knew those “slow, deep pools” and “shallow riffles”. Wading between the Koromiko bushes, bearing home the river’s bounty, they, too, would have felt a proprietary tug.

 

A thousand miles to the north and thirty-eight days before my great-great-great-grandfather, William Sinclair Trotter, was rowed ashore from the Magnet, Captain William Hobson of the Royal Navy, acting on behalf of England’s Queen, Victoria, had promised the Maori tribes of New Zealand: “the full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of the Lands and Estates, Forests, Fisheries, and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess, so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession”.

 

William Sinclair Trotter: Lands and estates, forests and fisheries of his own.

 

I doubt if William cared very much what promises Captain Hobson had made in the Bay of Islands. Waitangi was a long way from Waikouaiti, where the population of the local tribes had been thinned by war and disease, death and dispossession. In Caithness, in Scotland’s far north, he had helped the local squire, Sir John Sinclair, instruct his tenants in the husbandry of the hardy Cheviot sheep that William's father, Alexander, had driven up from the Scottish borders. He planned to turn these shepherding skills to his own advantage in this new country. Here he would carve out lands and estates, forests and fisheries of his own.

 

We call it “property” and fence it ‘round, not only with No.8 wire, but also with laws, covenants, easements and abstraction rights. This is “ours” we say, and all those things that we cannot fence-in or pin-down – like the sunlight and the wind, the rivers and the waves – we declare common property. But the products we make from the commons: grass, milk, electrical energy; they remain ours to buy and sell.

 

We have forgotten that Trotter’s Creek was once Te Awakakokomuka. Our laws, covenants, easements and abstractions have little to say about the customary rights attached to its waters in the years before it ran through the “property” of my hardy forebears. Before the Magnet’s anchor dropped, Te Awakakokomuka was something else, not “property” exactly, but something very close. The tangata whenua who paddled canoes along its banks; who had names for each of its “slow, deep pools” and “shallow riffles”; who snared the birds that flitted among the koromiko bushes lining its banks and trapped the eels which lurked beneath them; they had a stake in Te Awakakokomuka.

 

The difference between a little creek in North Otago and Waikato’s mighty river is really only a matter of scale. The Waitangi Tribunal recommends these long-neglected questions concerning water be answered – definitively. Proprietary “tugs” are transitory. Proprietary “interests” may prove more enduring.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 August 2012.

Unimpeachable Credentials

And So It Begins: Co-Leader of the Maori Party, Tariana Turia, is "red-eyed" by John Ansell as part of his "Colourblind New Zealand" campaign. Mr Ansell has pledged to affix his red eye-patches to all those who adhere to and/or promote the bi-cultural revisioning of New Zealand history. Mr Ansell insists that he is operating independently, but who stands to make best use of the formidable political weapon he is fashioning?

EVERY STUDENT EDITOR dreams of a scoop: a major story that nobody else (especially the “mainstream media”) knows anything about. And that’s exactly what “Treatygate” is – a scoop. Joe Stockman, Editor of the Otago University student magazine, Critic, and his News Editor, Callum Fredric, were first off the mark with a story that has potentially huge ramifications.

In Mr Fredric’s own words: “Critic has obtained documents from controversial race campaigner Louis Crimp, setting out a plan for a $2 million campaign aiming to make New Zealand a ‘colourblind’ (racially neutral) state.”

According to Critic, the man with the plan is John Ansell – mastermind of the National Party’s very-nearly-successful “Iwi/Kiwi” billboard campaign of 2005. If he manages to lay his hands on anything like $2 million, Mr Ansell’s proposed campaign to “expose the 40 year state brainwashing campaign that has distorted the history of Crown-Maori relations” could gain considerable political traction. Whatever you may think of him, Mr Ansell’s credentials as a propagandist are difficult to dispute.

The involvement of Mr Crimp is another matter. The elderly Invercargill millionaire’s only foray into national politics could hardly be described as an unqualified success. The media outlets through which Mr Ansell’s propaganda would, presumably, be communicated to the public might balk at associating themselves with such a controversial duo. There’s also the very real possibility that one, or all, of the Press Council, the Advertising Standards Authority, the Broadcasting Standards Authority and the Human Rights Commission might intervene to ban or modify messages intended to: “expose the bias [in favour of Maori] and enrage the public”.

Herein lies the difficulty confronting those who remain unconvinced by the bicultural orthodoxy of New Zealand’s political establishment. It has spent the best part of forty years surrounding itself with laws and conventions, tribunals and authorities, to the point where it is virtually unassailable from without. Messrs Ansell and Crimp are, therefore, very likely to discover that any full-scale frontal assault on its institutional walls is easily repelled.

The bicultural consensus is, however, acutely vulnerable to subversion from within. Thinking back over the past eight years, Mr Ansell should ask himself: “Why was my 2005 campaign so effective?” The simple answer is: Dr Don Brash. The mass racial animus that Mr Ansell is so skilful at arousing remains politically accessible – but only to a person bearing unimpeachable establishment credentials. Someone like the former Governor of the Reserve Bank. Someone like the Leader of the Opposition. Someone the opponents of biculturalism can credibly envisage moving into a position of power strong enough to bring the forty-year bicultural consensus crashing down.

Neither Mr Ansell, nor Mr Crimp, is that someone.

There is, however, something already in the political pipeline that just might provide the impetus for a politician bearing unimpeachable establishment credentials to avail himself, or herself, of Mr Ansell’s skills and Mr Crimp’s dollars. Something that could very easily be dubbed “Treatygate”. The report of the Constitutional Advisory Panel, due no later than September 2013, may prove to be a bicultural bridge too far for the Pakeha majority.

Set up at the insistence of the Maori Party following the 2011 General Election, the Constitutional Advisory Panel is dominated by individuals sympathetic to the bicultural cause. Their recommendations are, therefore, likely to be … challenging. Messrs Ansell and Crimp would probably describe them as a ticking time-bomb. But, if so, their casualties will not be found in the National Party.

Indeed, a cynic might say that the National Party could hardly have constructed a situation more certain to rebound to its advantage. Just think about it. A report no National, NZ First or Conservative Party voter will accept, but which no Labour, Green, Mana or Maori Party MP can reject. And who bears a more unimpeachable set of establishment credentials than the Prime Minister of New Zealand?

Get ready for another scoop, Critic. The story exposing National’s 2014 contract with “Treatygate Productions” and anonymous donations totalling two million dollars.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday 17 August 2012.