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| By Their Deeds Shall Ye Know Them: When the defeated Reform and United parties were persuaded to unite under the rubric of “National” in 1936, the values advanced were unashamedly imperialist and white supremacist. Eighty-eight years later, National is at pains to distance itself (coalition agreements permitting) from the most obvious forms of racism. Even so, its attachment to the substance of racial oppression remains disturbingly strong. |
THE NATIONAL PARTY has, with an unmistakeable measure of pride, distanced itself from David Seymour’s “Treaty Principles Bill”. The narrative presented by the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, is of a party acting under the duress of MMP.
According to Luxon, his first responsibility, as the leader of the largest party represented in the House of Representatives, was to give New Zealand a stable government. To achieve that objective, he and his party had no choice but to negotiate with Act and NZ First. The resulting coalition agreements were, inevitably, a collection of compromises.
Had National won an absolute majority, Luxon argues, the Treaty Principles Bill could only ever have made it to the floor of the House as a Private Members Bill. As such, it would not have been given a First Reading, and New Zealand would have been spared months of divisive debate.
But, National did not win an absolute majority, and so Seymour got his debate. Short of calling a second election, Luxon insists, compromising with Act was his only other choice. New Zealand may rest assured, however, that the Treaty Principles Bill will not be read a second time.
It’s a good story, made all the better for being true. In possession of an absolute parliamentary majority, National, the party of Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, John Key and Chris Finlayson, wouldn’t have dreamed of assaulting te iwi Māori with a weapon as crude and obvious as Seymour’s proposed legislation.
That does not mean, however, that te iwi Māori are not being attacked by National ministers wielding weapons every bit as inimical to the interests of tangata whenua as Seymour’s bill. As a political party, National has always worked for a society based on the rigid hierarchies of class, race, and gender. Its purpose continues to be the promotion and protection of private property and private advantage. Such relationships as National has been compelled to form with Māori have invariably reflected the party’s conservative political values.
When a cabal of former army officers and erstwhile members of the quasi-fascist New Zealand Legion persuaded the defeated Reform and United parties to unite under the rubric of “National” in 1936, the values advanced were unashamedly imperialist and white supremacist. Eighty-eight years later, National is at pains to distance itself (coalition agreements permitting) from the most obvious forms of racism. Even so, its attachment to the substance of racial oppression remains disturbingly strong.
Understandably, given the white supremacist assumptions built into the conservative political movements of the British dominions (Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) National only interacted seriously with Māori when it became politically inescapable.
Labour’s close association with the morehu (remnants of the tribes, survivors) drawn to Ratana, prompted National to cultivate equally close relationships with the chiefly elements of Maoridom. Like National, these rangatira were strong believers in the principles of hierarchy and lineage. They also tended to be the richest and most powerful personalities in their communities. Patriarchal beliefs were similarly shared. For conservative Māori and Pakeha, alike, it was a man’s world.
The post-war mass migration of Māori from the rural periphery of New Zealand to its largest towns and cities presented multiple affronts to conservative Pakeha sensibilities. The sheer proximity of so many brown faces triggered deep-seated fears and prejudices – many of them traceable to the colonial violence and corrupt land acquisitions of the Nineteenth Century. These were in no way relieved by the new arrivals’ easy assimilation into the workforces, unions, and sports clubs of the Pakeha working-class. The political threat represented by this potential Māori augmentation of Labour’s urban electoral base was considerable.
Small wonder, then, that National Governments, from the 1950s to the 1970s, used their command of state-housing policy to concentrate as many Māori (and, later, Pasifika migrants) in as few electorates as possible. Under the First-Past-the-Post system it didn’t matter that Labour racked up huge majorities in a few seats. Much more dangerous was the possibility that Māori and Pasifika voters, unconcentrated, but registered on the General Roll, might tip the balance of votes in the so-called “marginal” seats where New Zealand elections, prior to MMP, were lost and won.
By the 1980s it had become a race between the socio-economic pressures bearing down on an increasingly brown – and bolshie – working-class, and the cultural/political aspirations of the small, but fast growing number of Māori middle-class professionals. These latter had as little to gain from an assertive brown working-class, inspired by the ideals of New Zealand’s idiosyncratic brand of socialism, as the economic interests represented by National. That the neoliberal policies imposed by the Fourth Labour Government were exacting an appalling toll on Māori families up and down the country, immiserating thousands, only made the choice facing Māori leaders more urgent. The political stakes had been raised to dangerous levels.
When Labour finally fell in 1990, National faced two daunting challenges. Meeting and defeating the threat of an angry brown proletariat, while diverting the energies of the burgeoning Māori middle-class into cultural politics. Disconnected from the urban Māori poor, these new leaders’ capabilities could be redirected towards resurrecting the claims of traditional iwi and hapu, and transforming them into vehicles for what the Auckland academic, Dr Elizabeth Rata, calls “neo-tribal capitalism”.
The Employment Contracts Act took care of the first challenge, while the Treaty Settlement Process more than met the second. Not only was the old Māori aristocracy given a new lease on life, but the new, settlement-funded, Māori corporations were fast creating a new one.
This elevation of Māori interests and issues was received uneasily by National’s electoral base. Where would it end? Leading Māori intellectuals spoke openly of reclaiming all the lands lost to the Pakeha. Bolger and Graham described a “fiscal envelope” containing one billion dollars! Where was National taking New Zealand? Were the conquests of the 1860s and 70s secure? Farmers and businesspeople needed to know.
It is doubtful whether the Māori cultural renaissance, or the economic compensation awarded to iwi by the Treaty Settlement Process, would have happened had the grim process of pressing down upon the Māori and Pasifika poor not unfolded alongside it. The National Government’s Finance Minister, Ruth Richardson’s 1991 “Mother of All Budgets” may have been billed as the long overdue curtailment of a welfare-state grown large enough to defeat its own purposes, but, looked at another way, it was also a brutal reimposition of economic, racial and gender hierarchies.
Just as the Victorian division of the lower orders into the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor enjoyed a state-assisted come-back in 1990s New Zealand, so, too, did the Nineteenth Century division of tangata whenua into “friendly Maoris” and “rebels”. Not that they were identified as such by late-Twentieth Century National Party politicians. In the 1990s, troublesome Māori were identified as: “gangs”, “welfare fraudsters”, “solo mothers”, and, even less subtly, the incorrigible perpetrators of domestic violence, child abuse, and illegal drug consumption. A dysfunctional collectivity referred to as the “Māori Underclass”.
As “progressive” Pakeha oohed and aahed over the Te Māori exhibition, life in New Zealand’s Māori and Pasifika communities endured all the cruelties and indignities of which a systemically racist state apparatus is capable.
White South Africans fleeing the final demise of Apartheid in the early-1990s were astounded at the ease with which Pakeha had established something very similar in New Zealand – and all without resorting to pass-laws, tear-gas, water-cannon, or live-rounds. They found “brown towns” and “white towns”, “brown schools” and “white schools”, and nobody not raised amid signs saying “Blankes” and “Nie-Blankes”, or reminded daily of the dishonoured promises of the Treaty of Waitangi, seemed capable of seeing, let alone acknowledging, New Zealand’s racially bifurcated system.
Only under the leadership of Don Brash did the National Party adopt a policy programme that attempted to meld the racially-charged socio-economic divisions with which it placated its atavistic base, with a disarmingly honest attempt to roll back the divide-and-conquer policies embodied in the Treaty Settlement Process. The neo-tribal capitalism of the Māori corporations; the positive discrimination measures that had fed the steady growth of the Māori middle-class; all of it was to go. That Brash’s “Iwi/Kiwi” campaign lifted National’s Party Vote from 20.9 percent in 2002 to 39.1 percent in 2005 indicates just how deeply embedded the question of race has always been in National’s political philosophy.
John Key’s reversion to the Bolger/Graham strategy was as swift as it was successful. His coalition government even included the Maori Party, an inspired MMP manoeuvre which provided him the political cover he needed as the immiseration of Māori and Pasifika proceeded without significant government remediation. The state houses National had built in the 1950s and 60s were either sold-off or allowed to decay. Raw sewerage ran down the walls of “brown” hospitals. Crime and drug addiction in the “brown” towns and suburbs grew steadily worse. National was, however, willing to sanction New Zealand’s adherence to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That Luxon would have attempted to steer a similar course to Key’s is certain. Unfortunately, the “decolonisation” and “indigenisation” policies of the Sixth Labour Government were sufficiently radical to re-animate the electoral coalition that had so nearly won power in 2005 – only this time in numbers sufficient to place the racially-agitated right on the Treasury Benches.
National’s – and Pakeha New Zealand’s – problem, in 2024, is that the Māori of the urban slums, the Māori of the iwi corporations, and the Māori of the public sector commissariat, are fast approaching the critical political mass, the kotahitanga, that will make them one, unstoppable, force for change.
The Treaty Principles Bill may not be read a second time, but in the battle between Iwi and Kiwi that now seems inevitable, there is absolutely no doubt that National will be found fighting alongside the white supremacist forces it has always led.
This time, minus the mask.
This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday, 19 September 2024.
