Te Pāti Māori Are Revolutionaries – Not Reformists.

Way Beyond Reform: Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer have no more interest in remaining permanent members of “New Zealand’s” House of Representatives than did Lenin and Trotsky in remaining permanent members of Tsar Nicolas II’s “democratically-elected” Duma. Like the Bolsheviks, Te Pāti Māori is a party of revolutionaries – not reformists.

THE CROWN is a fickle friend. Any political movement deemed to be colourful but inconsequential is generally permitted to go about its business unmolested. The Crown’s media, RNZ and TVNZ, may even “celebrate” its existence (presumably as proof of Democracy’s broad-minded acceptance of diversity). Should the movement’s leader/s demonstrate a newsworthy eccentricity, then they may even find themselves transformed into political celebrities. The moment a political movement makes the transition from inconsequentiality to significance, however, then all bets are off – especially if that significance is born of a decisive rise in its parliamentary representation.

Te Pāti Māori (TPM) is currently on the cusp of making that crucial transition from political novelty to political threat. The decision of the former MP for Waiariki, Labour’s Tamati Coffey, to step away from his parliamentary career at the end of the current term will be welcome news to TPM’s male co-leader, Rawiri Waititi, who took the seat from Coffey in 2020. There is a good chance, now, for Waititi to turn the Māori seat of Waiariki into TPM’s anchor electorate.

Certainly, without Rawiri’s 2020 victory in Waiariki, TPM’s female co-leader, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, would not have been able to occupy the additional seat to which TPM became entitled under MMP’s convoluted rules of representation. Ngarewa-Packer’s presence in Parliament alongside Waititi did a lot more than simply double the party’s representation. The two politicians have grown into a powerful double-act: their flair for performative politics (a.k.a showmanship) both complementing and augmenting the pair’s uncompromising radicalism.

Waititi’s signature black Stetson makes him instantly recognisable in a House of Representatives tending towards the sartorially beige. Couple this cowboy persona with his bravura transformation of the humble necktie into a symbol of colonial oppression, and Waititi’s political style is nothing if not memorable. But, there is substance beneath the style – as evidenced by the critical role the only-just-elected Waititi played in defusing the Waikeria prison riot of January 2021.

Ngarewa-Packer is a similar mixture of style and substance. Beneath the radical-biker-chic lies a tireless worker for whanau, hapu and iwi, and a better-than-average grasp of the intricacies of indigenous politics – both foreign and domestic. Even more than Waititi, Ngarewa-Packer understands the dual mandate of TPM.

The party’s purpose is not simply to put runs on the board for Māori by playing the Pakeha’s parliamentary game to the tangata whenua’s best advantage, but to translate TPM’s presence in the Crown’s most important political institution into a revolutionary transformation of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements. Not since Harry Holland’s Labour Party first entered Parliament in 1919 has the Crown been confronted by such an uncompromising threat to the status quo.

And now, after a succession of polls documenting a four-fold increase in TPM’s share of the Party Vote, the Crown and its institutional defenders (what Māori nationalists describe, with considerable historical justification, as the “Settler State”) are having to come to terms with the alarming possibility that, post-October 14, TPM may have it in its gift the installation of a Labour-Green coalition government – on certain, non-negotiable conditions. What alarms the elite defenders of the status-quo the most, of course, is that they cannot be certain that Labour and the Greens will not accept those conditions.

Much will depend on how many, and which, Labour MPs survive the October cull. That, and the ultimate truth or falsity of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins’ post-Jacinda Ardern transformation from Woke Warrior to Waitakere Man (via the Hutt Valley). Certainly, it is difficult to accept the Press Gallery’s positioning of Hipkins on the right of Labour’s Caucus. In the words of political journalist Graham Adams:

Hipkins taking the lead role as “The Man Who Wasn’t There” in Labour’s election script — hastily rewritten to accommodate Ardern’s resignation in January — is preposterous. It beggars belief that anyone would fall for his double act in posing as both a political innocent and a simple Westie (“I’m Just Chippy from the Hutt”) but our mainstream journalists appear to have. Certainly they do not seem keen to point out that Hipkins is an ideologue who has been radically reshaping New Zealand education policy alongside Ardern for years, without any explicit electoral mandate to do so.

Exactly which of these two, very different, political personalities Hipkins inhabits may turn out to be critical. If innocent “Chippy From The Hutt” turns out to be the political confection Adams clearly believes it to be, and “Hipkins The Ideologue” is the real Chris, then a Labour-Green Coalition – critically supported by TPM from the cross-benches – may herald the beginning of something really big.

TPM’s most sensible political strategy would be to resolutely reject becoming part of a formal coalition agreement, and to demand instead Labour-Green support for a tranche of constitutionally transformative legislative initiatives. The strategic virtue of binding TPM’s support to the passage of “Tiriti-centric” legislation is that any failure on the part of Labour and the Greens to facilitate such a transformation would immediately place TPM’s agenda at the heart of the next election, which its abstention on the Opposition’s inevitable Vote of Confidence would precipitate.

A suicidal strategy? Only if the party adopting it is indissolubly wedded to the constitutional status-quo. But, very clearly, this is not the position of TPM – even if it turns out to be that of Labour and the Greens. Representation in the House of Representatives is very far from being the ultimate objective of TPM. Both Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer have made it clear that their presence in the Settlers’ parliament should be regarded as a purely transitory state-of-affairs. The parliament TPM envisages will have an upper house composed, 50:50, of Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti. In the lower house, meanwhile, Māori representation will be legally entrenched – just one of many “basic laws” passed to give effect to the foundational promises of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer have no more interest in remaining permanent members of “New Zealand’s” House of Representatives than did Lenin and Trotsky in remaining permanent members of Tsar Nicolas II’s “democratically-elected” Duma. Like the Bolsheviks, TPM is a party of revolutionaries – not reformists.

As this reality explodes, like a grenade, in the consciousness of the Crown and its creatures, the days of patronising TPM will come to an abrupt halt. Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer will no longer be treated as entertaining eccentrics – but as serious threats. More and more reasons for them to be hurled from the House in October will be presented to the electorate. All this is likely to communicate to Māori voters, however, is that the Crown is frightened of TPM. It is difficult to conceive of a more compelling reason for Māori voters to come out in record numbers and vote for Te Pāti Māori.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 20 March 2023.

The First Rule Of Radicalism.

Radical As: Māori healers recall a time when “words had power”. The words that give substance to ideas, no matter how radical, still do. If our representatives rediscover the courage to speak them out loud.

THERE ARE RULES for radicalism. Or, at least, there are rules for the presentation of radical ideas intended to become a part of our daily lives. The most important of these rules requires radical ideas to be explained and justified. Failure to make clear why radical solutions should be embraced and implemented will only ensure their rejection by a decisive majority of the population. Radical ideas and policies are only ever adopted when that same majority has been convinced that refusing to adopt them will only make matters worse.

It is difficult to imagine a more radical idea than the abolition of prisons. And yet, along with a proposal to establish a Māori Education Authority, the abolition of the New Zealand prison system is one of the key recommendations of the iwi-based group charged by the Labour Government with responding to the controversial He Puapua Report on the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Asked by Q+A’s Jack Tame whether they supported the call for prisons to be abolished, the co-leaders of Te Pāti Māori, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, both replied “absolutely”. The question now, having signalled their support for this radical policy, is whether Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer are prepared to explain and justify it to the voters of New Zealand.

On the answer to that last question will turn the broader electorate’s view of Te Pāti Māori. With the last three public opinion polls indicating that the party could well end up holding the balance of power after the 2023 general election, its ability to spell out clearly what it expects to receive in return for its support on confidence-and-supply motions – and why – has become a matter of acute political interest.

A serious response will likely generate increased support from angry and alienated tangata whenua – quite possibly at Labour’s expense. But a flippant, “we’re more radical than you are” response risks cementing in the voter’s mind an image of Te Pāti Māori as a collection of vainglorious political flakes, who should be kept as far away from power as possible.

Te Pāti Māori’s public support for the abolition of prisons cannot now avoid becoming part of the right-wing parties’ argument for giving the potential “Red-Green-Brown” coalition the widest of berths. With so many of National’s and Act’s supporters alarmed at what they see as a sharp rise in violent crime – due largely to the growth of gangs – the very idea that a party in Parliament is willing to countenance radical reforms that would see the Māori perpetrators of serious crimes escape incarceration, leaves the Right with no option but to go on the offensive against the entire He Puapua prescription.

This, in turn, will inspire all manner of fears and doubts within the ranks of Labour and the Greens. While neither party will be anxious to alienate Te Pāti Māori, the so-called “Centre-Left” will, nevertheless, be extremely loathe to endorse a policy as radical as the abolition of prisons. For most Labour and Green candidates the whole concept will appear so outlandish as to be dismissed out-of-hand as “nuts”. For Te Pāti Māori, however, such a reaction would only confirm the “colonialist” mindset of their putative partners – making the formation of a stable coalition even more problematic.

All of which makes clear why it is never enough to simply announce one’s support for a radical policy. Indeed, what the above considerations reveal is the huge potential for an electorally fatal backlash against such radical protestations.

That is not to say that radicalism should be avoided at all costs. As Simon Bridges told Parliament only last week in his valedictory address, there is little point in seeking a political career if the only forces driving you are focus groups and opinion polls. Members of Parliament should come to Wellington on the wings of ambition – not the plodding feet of caution. What the above considerations should reinforce, however, is the crucial importance of the rule about explaining and justifying radical change.

The template for successful radical reform is there for all to see in the unceasing explanations and justifications for the radical economic changes proposed by the “Free Marketeers” of the 1970s and 80s. When these latter “policy aggressors” first emerged on the scene, they, too, had to endure hearing their ideas dismissed as “extreme” and/or “nuts”.

Were they discouraged? Not a bit! As the 70s wore on, and the economic situation deteriorated across the Western World, “Free Market” explanations acquired an ever-expanding audience, and its justifications for a fundamental rearrangement of the way modern industrial economies are run began to sound increasingly reasonable.

The way forward for Te Pāti Māori is clear. It has to demonstrate that the regime of crime and punishment that has grown up in New Zealand over the past 180 years is no longer fit for purpose. The recidivism rate, alone, offers proof that the experience of incarceration is anything but rehabilitating. Similarly, the disproportionate number of Māori behind bars points to there being a great many more factors at work in our justice and corrections systems than straightforward criminality. All of the scientific evidence confirms the proposition that criminals are made not born.

Debbie Ngarewa-Packer observed to Jack Tame that there were no prisons in pre-colonial Aotearoa. A cheap point, some might say, but one worth following up. Obviously, in the centuries prior to European settlement, Māori who offended against the customs and practices of their tribal and sub-tribal communities were required to atone and/or make recompense for their “crimes”. Explaining to Pakeha how that worked would be a good place for Te Pāti Māori to start in its quest to reform fundamentally this country’s treatment of offenders.

Those Pakeha convinced that Te Pāti Māori’s support for the abolition of prisons confirms it as being “soft on crime” might be very surprised to discover the fate of those who breached the norms of Māori society before the arrival of the Europeans. The concept of “utu” – the making of proper restitution for harms done – was manifested in many ways. “Soft” wasn’t one of them!

A more courageous Labour Party might also feel inspired by Te Pāti Māori’s advocacy for fundamental penal reform to interrogate its own history.

There was a time when Labour leaders were not unacquainted with the interiors of prison cells. When the working-class people whose votes they solicited did not universally condemn such familiarity. On the contrary, it made Labour’s claims to represent them all the more authentic. When Jack Lee wrote Children of the Poor, he was speaking from bitter personal experience.

There were times, too, when a Labour Shadow Attorney-General, all-too-well-acquainted with the bleak and soulless quality of Her majesty’s prisons argued that no jail should be escape-proof. The urge to be free, said Dr Martyn Finlay, was what made us human. To render that urge impossible of fulfilment was, accordingly, to make the state complicit in the crushing of the human spirit.

Māori healers recall a time when “words had power”. The words that give substance to ideas, no matter how radical, still do.

If our representatives rediscover the courage to speak them out loud.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 9 May 2022.

Will Labour Defuse The "He Puapua" Time-Bomb?

Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s current political strategy of artful prevarication has a strictly limited lifespan. The time-bomb that is He Puapua continues to emit a relentless tick-tock, tick-tock. Sooner or later – and preferably before that ominously silent crowd massing outside the parliamentary arena lends its voice to National and Act – the Prime Minister is going to have to defuse it.

THE NUMBER of people outside keeps growing. Where there had once been a harmless handful, there is now a good-sized crowd. And they keep coming. More and more of them. You can hear car doors slamming, footsteps, the soft murmur of exchanged greetings. These people can’t quite believe what they’ve been told, so they’ve come to see for themselves if the story is true.

It was unavoidable: this growing chorus of disquiet. The moment Nanaia Mahuta set the wheels in motion; the moment the relevant Cabinet Committee signed it off. From that moment the logic of te Tiriti began to unfold like a coiled fern. That’s the thing about documents like He Puapua: once written, they can’t be unwritten. Once they are in the world, you only have two choices. Either you embrace their conclusions and make them your own. Or, you cast them away from you like sin.

And, please, don’t blame Labour’s He Puapua problem on John Key. The advice he received on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was that it was a statement of good intentions – not firm intentions. New Zealand could take it – or leave it in a drawer. That made it a ploy – not a promise. A sop to that irritating old Cerberus, Pita Sharples. The equivalent of beads and blankets to keep the Maori Party sweet. For God’s sake! The man is a former currency trader. If the price is right, he will cut you a deal, make it happen, move on.

No, it wasn’t Key’s fault, or National’s. It’s always been an article of the Tory faith: you do what you have to do to win. Political transactions are about today, not tomorrow.

That’s always been the problem with the parliamentary left: it’s never been entirely sure what game its playing, or what the rules are. Spoiler alert: They have nothing to do with truth or justice. The game is called political survival; it’s about making it to – and hopefully through – the next election. So, the one thing you must never do is offer up hostages to Fortune. Why? because Fortune always ends up killing them. He Puapua is living on borrowed time.

What the hell was Labour thinking? That it could commission a report, pre-programmed to deliver a set of radical Maori nationalist conclusions, and no one would notice? Is the caucus really so far gone in its wokeness that it genuinely believed the New Zealand people were ready to embrace the revolutionary changes mandated by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People? Christ on a bike! The same Labour MPs who refused to pass a Capital Gains Tax, are now, apparently, happy to be crucified for a te Tiriti approved tricameral parliament!

And naturally, their good friends in the Greens and Te Paati Maori are only too happy to drive the nails through their wrists. It was laughable really, watching Rawiri Waititi and Marama Davidson deploying in the New Zealand House of Representatives the same tactics that brought them success among gaggles of frightened Pakeha leftists.

Where a charge of racism can ruin a person’s career, the mere threat of its use is generally enough to secure ideological conformity. What a shock it must have been for Waititi and Davidson to discover that, on the floor of the House, that particular pistol is prone to misfire. It won’t stop them from pulling the trigger again and again, however. You just wait and see, it won’t be long before they’re accusing National and Act MPs of indulging in “hate speech” and demanding that Parliament’s Standing Orders be changed to shut them up.

Over the top? No. Silencing the Opposition’s investigative effort into the meaning of He Puapua, and its querying of the ultimate trajectory of the Labour Government’s “Maori separatist agenda”, was what Waititi appeared to expect of Speaker Trevor Mallard. And from his perspective, it’s easy to see why. Parliament has power – real power. What happens there matters. What’s more, Members of Parliament have privileges – real privileges. The most important of these being the privilege to speak freely without the threat of being bludgeoned into silence by defamation writs – or woke fatwas.

The crazy thing is, neither the Greens, nor Te Paati Maori, appear to have the slightest idea of what would happen if they got their wish: if, for some unknown reason, the Speaker did decide to muzzle the Opposition. They seem to have forgotten that the National and Act parties, between them, secured the votes of nearly one million New Zealanders. Do they honestly believe those million Kiwis will just shrug their shoulders and say: “Oh, well, that’s too bad. The Government has just thrust a dagger into the heart of parliamentary democracy, and our parties, but we’re not going to do anything about it.” 

Honestly?

Labour knows what would happen. Almost overnight, the 400,000 former National Party voters who swung in behind “Jacinda” in 2020 would swing back. Deep down Labour knows that He Puapua should never have been written; that it has the potential to kill their chances of re-election in 2023. That’s why Jacinda is slip-slip-sliding all over the place. She knows she risks a God Almighty row with her Maori caucus if she disowns He Puapua, and an even bigger one with Pakeha New Zealand if she doesn’t.

Unfortunately, Jacinda’s current strategy of artful prevarication has a strictly limited lifespan. The time-bomb that is He Puapua continues to emit a relentless tick-tock, tick-tock. Sooner or later – and preferably before that ominously silent crowd massing outside the parliamentary arena lends its voice to National and Act – the Prime Minister is going to have to defuse it.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 14 May 2021.

The Revolution All Around Us.

Revolutionary Formula: "A new Aotearoa is on the rise. Tangata Whenua (Māori) + Tangata Tiriti (all other ethnicities who are committed to a tiriti centric Aotearoa) = the Aotearoa I believe in fighting for." - Rawiri Waititi, Co-Leader of the Maori Party.

NEW ZEALAND is in the early stages of a revolution. No, not one of those revolutions. The streets are not overflowing with revolutionary crowds. The factories have not been taken over by the workers. The old constitutional order has not been cast aside. The nation’s historical time-line has not been reset to Year Zero. But, make no mistake, a revolution is underway.

At the heart of this revolution is an evolving understanding of what sort of country we live in – and would like to live in. The clearest description of this revolution and its ultimate objectives that I have read so far is contained in a tweet posted in the name of Maori Party co-leader, Rawiri Waititi. To describe the tweet as jarring would be something of an understatement:

The cau casity of Caucasian’s and their ‘active assimilation agenda’. Pay them no attention, their archaic species is becoming more extinct as new Aotearoa is on the rise. Tangata Whenua + Tangata Tiriti = Aotearoa > Tangata Whenua + Pakeha = Old Zealand.

Waititi was quick to distance himself from this message, describing it as the work of someone in his office who acted without his authority. Setting to one side the obvious question: “What kind of office is Waititi running?”, the tweet’s content offers New Zealanders a raw and unmediated synopsis of the Maori Party’s revolutionary agenda. “Transformative” barely covers it!

The first element to note is the highly charged racial vocabulary. “Caucasian” is being used, rather than Pakeha, in much the same way as the latter once referred to Maori as “Polynesians”, and for the same purpose. To subsume a geographically and culturally specific identity into a much larger and more general racial category.

Very clearly, it is not a nice category. In the exercise of their “caucacity”, Caucasians are accused of pursuing an “active assimilation agenda”.

This is a curious charge. Historically, “assimilation” was very much on the agenda of the New Zealand state. In the years after World War II, as Maori began migrating from the countryside to the big cities in large numbers, doing everything possible to turn them into “ordinary” New Zealanders was generally regarded as the most “progressive” policy response available to the authorities. Think of it as an early iteration of the “They are Us” formulation.

The intention was to create a “colour-blind” society. The key category was “citizen” – with all that implied about equality of access to gainful employment, housing, health and education. An excessive focus on racial identity was seen as unhelpful in this regard. The objective was a nation in which the terms “Maori” and “Pakeha” counted for much less than “New Zealander”. It is to the policy of assimilation that the members of “Hobson’s Pledge” pay homage with their insistence that we must all become “one people”.

What makes the tweet’s claim that an “active assimilation policy” is still part of the New Zealand state’s agenda so odd, is that the term “assimilation” long ago became a very dirty word in the corridors of power. From the 1980s onwards the clear policy of successive governments has been to support and strengthen the unique features of te ao Maori. From the Treaty of Waitangi Act of 1975 to the establishment of Kohanga Reo and the recognition of Maori as an official language, the direction of travel has been all one way: from mono-culturalism to bi-culturalism.

It was Donna Awatere, author of the seminal series of Broadsheet articles entitled “Maori Sovereignty”, who rejected this new goal of a bi-cultural New Zealand as insufficiently ambitious. Inspired by the irredentist national strategy of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, she argued for a sovereign Maori nation, freed from the constitutional, economic, political and cultural hegemony of the colonial culture which had, through the judicious application of force and guile, supplanted her own.

Following the Palestinians, Awatere argued for a strategy which is best described as “reverse colonisation”. On the one hand, delegitimise the colonisers’ occupation of lands that were never theirs; on the other, offer them the opportunity of assimilating themselves into Aotearoa, the sovereign Maori state that would slowly, surely, and non-violently, replace the colonial relic known as New Zealand. (Those with long memories will recall that for as long as it remained a revolutionary socialist organisation, the creation of a unitary, secular, Palestinian state, continued to be the PLO’s ultimate goal.)

Although Awatere’s personal evolution took her further and further away from the revolutionary vision that inspired “Maori Sovereignty”, her ideas and perspectives were taken up and developed by Maori nationalists across the country.

Perhaps the best way to get an idea of the revolutionary processes at work in this country, is to conduct a thought experiment involving another one.

Imagine that the Palestinians living in the occupied territories, rather than descending ever deeper into terrorism and religious zealotry, had adopted the non-violent civil-disobedience tactics of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Further imagine that the progressive Israeli political parties, urged on by the Americans, had responded by negotiating seriously with the PLO.

Consider the speed with which the whole situation in Israel/Palestine might have been transformed; the exciting possibility that young Jews and Arabs, together, might have mapped out a future in which the land of Israel/Palestine was deemed to have physical and cultural space enough for both peoples. Who knows, they may even have persuaded their political leaders to set up a permanent tribunal to hear and settle the many grievances arising out of the excesses of Zionist colonisation.

Gradually, thanks in no small part to the state education system and state media, the fearless elucidation of Zionism’s manifest injustices might have persuaded a critical mass of young Israelis to abandon their country’s name altogether. Slowly, surely, non-violently, “Israel” might have come to be known, once again, as “Palestine”.

Impossible? Certainly, Israel/Palestine has a great many more obstacles to overcome than New Zealand/Aotearoa. Still, if Jew and Arab had stopped firing bullets at each other way back in the 1870s and started marrying each other in great numbers – who knows where that unfortunate land might be today?

Which brings us back to that interesting tweet: and to what is undoubtedly its most objectionable sentence: “Pay them no attention, their archaic species is becoming more extinct as new Aotearoa is on the rise.”

Now, viewed from the perspective of those whose ancestors were, at the turn of the 19th Century, confidently expected to become “die out”, this sort of gloating racism is, perhaps, forgivable. From the perspective of the descendants of the colonisers, however, it sounds unnervingly like a direct challenge – an existential threat.

That sentiments like these could so easily put the chant of the White Supremacists at Charlottesville: “You will not replace us!”; into the mouths of angry Pakeha, clearly never occurred to whoever sent out the tweet in Rawiri Waititi’s name. Or (and this is a much more distressing thought) maybe it did?

Waititi is, therefore, to be commended for the speed with which he moved to defuse this political IED. Within a few hours, he had re-written the tweet, and clarified his own position on the slow revolution unfolding all around us:

A new Aotearoa is on the rise. Tangata Whenua (Māori) + Tangata Tiriti (all other ethnicities who are committed to a tiriti centric Aotearoa) = the Aotearoa I believe in fighting for.

Strewth! When you put it like that, Rawiri, so do I.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 5 March 2021

Correcting Corrections - And Its Minister.

My Department Right Or Wrong: Far from “politicians involving themselves in some Corrections matters” being a bad thing, their involvement – along with that of the Ombudsman – constitutes a necessary check upon the unreasonable and unlawful exercise of authority over prison inmates by prison staff. A Corrections Minister who lets it be known that he has his prison officers’ backs – no matter what they do, or have done – makes the correction of Corrections well-nigh impossible.

KELVIN DAVIS is a deeply conservative Minister of Corrections. His response to the Waikeria Prison Riot was one of cold fury, and if his behaviour in the House earlier this week is any guide, that fury has not subsided.

During Question Time on Tuesday, Davis arranged for a “patsy question” to be put to him concerning a pamphlet distributed among prisoners by People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA). The group’s February newsletter praised the Waikeria rioters for “reforming the prison to the ground” and its authors quoted approvingly the Maori Party co-leader, Rawiri Waititi, for insisting that: “When injustice becomes law, defiance becomes duty.”

Davis’s parliamentary reply constituted a cutting reproof of Waititi’s words and actions: “I said from the beginning that politicians involving themselves in some Corrections matters would only serve to embolden and encourage more events that endanger the lives of prisoners and staff.”

There was more to the Minister’s reaction than mere rhetoric. Concerned that the content of the PAPA pamphlet was sufficiently inflammatory to “incite a riot”, the Department of Corrections passed it on to the Police.

This could prove embarrassing if the matter ever comes to court. The words attributed to Waititi were, as he himself acknowledged, very far from being his own. The quotation, “when injustice becomes law, defiance becomes duty”, is usually attributed to Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, and was often to be found in the statements and speeches of the Black Civil Rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King. In his own words, Dr King also observed that “rioting is the language of the unheard”.

None of which cut any ice with Davis. Even after Rawiri Waititi had negotiated the peaceful surrender of the 17 prison rioters back in January, and personally led them to safety, the Minister of Corrections pointedly refused to acknowledge the role played by Te Paati Māori in bringing the six-day stand-off to an end. As he has done so often during his time as Minister, Davis very publicly aligned himself with the Department of Corrections and its staff, heaping praise upon their professionalism and backing their response to the uprising.

Davis’s deep-seated conservatism has undoubtedly contributed to this “my department right or wrong” approach to the fraught issues of crime and punishment. It is not, however, the correct ministerial response.

The real and constant danger of those charged with running our prisons behaving badly is recognised by the fact that all Members of Parliament are legally empowered to respond to the complaints of prisoners and must be given access to them. These powers would not have been conferred upon the people’s representatives, by the people’s representatives, if they had not recognised the potential for cruel and unusual punishments being inflicted behind high walls and razor-wire – where few sympathetic eyes are watching, and help is very far away.

Far from “politicians involving themselves in some Corrections matters” being a bad thing, their involvement – along with that of the Ombudsman – constitutes a necessary check upon the unreasonable and unlawful exercise of authority over prison inmates by prison staff. A Corrections Minister who lets it be known that he has his prison officers’ backs – no matter what they do, or have done – makes the correction of Corrections well-nigh impossible.

Just how far Davis has strayed from the path of impartial ministerial oversight was revealed in his response to a recent judicial finding that Corrections staff at Auckland Women’s Prison had treated inmates in a “cruel, degrading and inhumane manner”. (Note well, this is the judgement of a New Zealand court, formulated after hearing and weighing the evidence of both sides, and that it has the force of law.)

The Minister’s response to the judgement was shocking. Rather than holding the persons responsible to account and insisting that such behaviour must never happen again, the Minister instead opted to treat the judge’s findings as mere “allegations” and asked Corrections to provide him with “their side of the story”.

With the possible exception of the Ministry of Justice itself, no other agency of the state has more cause to respect and uphold the Rule of Law than the Department of Corrections. If Kelvin Davis cannot accept that prison staff, as well as inmates, must conduct themselves lawfully, then he should resign.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 February 2021.

A Powerful Political Metaphor.

Lost Opportunity: The powerful political metaphor of the Maori Party leading the despised and marginalised from danger to safety, is one Labour could have pre-empted by taking the uprising at Waikeria Prison much more seriously.

AS WORD OF Rawiri Waititi’s successful intervention in the Waikeria Prison stand-off spreads, the Maori Party’s mana will grow significantly. It is difficult to think of a better metaphor with which to illustrate the party’s political mission than its co-leader, under the disdainful gaze of the authorities, leading 16 parched, burned, bleeding but unbroken prisoners out of danger and into safety. Surely, somewhere in New Zealand, a young Maori musician is already composing a song to celebrate Waititi’s success. He’s earned one.

It is difficult to imagine anyone bothering to write a song for the Corrections Minister, Kelvin Davis. Throughout the six days of the crisis at Waikeria, the Minister maintained an obdurate silence. The resolution of this crisis, New Zealanders were given to understand, was an “operational matter” – something best left to the public servants and corrections officers on the spot. The very same public servants and corrections officers whose actions – and failure to take action – were responsible for sparking the uprising in the first place.

The Ombudsman’s report of August 2020 made it very clear that conditions at Waikeria Prison left a great deal to be desired. Had the authorities responded to that report swiftly and decisively, then it is highly unlikely the uprising would have occurred.

It is very difficult for those who know nothing of life behind bars to fathom the degree of degradation required to make prisoners risk an extension of their sentences by violating the rules of their confinement. When you’re in jail, all you want to be is out. You’ll suffer an awful lot in silence before raising your voice in protest. That’s why any form of prison protest is a sure and certain sign that something very rotten is festering within its walls.

How rotten may, perhaps, be gleaned from the following passage, taken from the media release sent out by the protesting prisoners’ to (among others) Action Station and Hone Harawira:

Our drinking water in prison is brown. We have used our towels for three straight weeks now. Some of us have not had our bedding changed in five months. We have not received clean uniforms to wear for three months – we wear the same dirty clothes day in and day out. We have to wash our clothes in our dirty shower water and dry them on the concrete floor. We have no toilet seats: we eat our kai out of paper bags right next to our open, shared toilets.

If even half of these complaints are true, then New Zealand should hang its head in shame. Conditions such as these are what we associate with the hellholes of Central and South America – prisons wracked by riots, uprisings and mass escapes, and quelled by tear-gas, rubber bullets and (all too frequently) live rounds.

The pall of black smoke which, at the time of writing, still hung above Waikeria is a signal. A signal that we’re not doing it right. That we’ve got it wrong. That we have to stop listening to the people who have presided over these institutional failures for far too long. Most of all, however, it is signalling the importance of ceasing to react to the vicious messaging from our nation’s amygdala.

Crime and punishment are not issues that can be resolved successfully by our instinctive “flight or fight” reaction. They are matters for the national cerebellum, the seat of reason in the human brain. We must not leave them to the violent reptilian lunges of the Kiwi limbic system.

At times like these, however, the first political responders are almost always reptilian. Why are the authorities waiting? Where are the Police? Why aren’t we seeing the deployment of armed tactical units? Is there no pepper spray? No tear gas? No long batons? Are there no automatic weapons?

When a human-being is convicted of a crime, he or she does not cease to be a human-being. Imprisonment does not, contrary to the punitive expectations of many New Zealanders, permit the extinguishment of all the rights to which human-beings are entitled. This country is a signatory to a raft of international treaties and covenants affirming the fundamental human right to be treated decently.

These documents should have made it unthinkable for servants of the New Zealand state (which, presumably, includes the authorities at Waikeria Prison!) to refuse water and food to protesting inmates. If our soldiers refused to give prisoners water they would be guilty of a war crime.

What does it say about us as a people, that we are willing to treat the soldiers of a foreign foe with more respect than our own citizens? What does it say about our Minister of Corrections that he did not publicly repudiate the inhumane tactics of the Waikeria authorities?

More importantly, what does it say about the government of Jacinda Ardern? Why is her Cabinet so unaware, seemingly, of the acutely dangerous politics of the Waikeria Prison uprising? Yes, it’s holiday-time. And yes, Kiwis are taking full advantage of their success in defeating Covid-19. Very few people (including most of the mainstream news media) are paying much attention to events at Waikeria. But that does not excuse the Prime Minister for not noticing just how big a “win” her government has gifted the Maori Party.

Because that metaphor: the Maori Party leading the victims of the system out of danger and into safety; will speak with great force to the thousands of New Zealanders who cannot afford an expensive holiday in Queenstown. Those paying extortionate rent for substandard accommodation. Those parents working two jobs but still not making enough to keep their families fit and healthy. The New Zealanders who hear their leader talking about “kindness” and a “Team of Five Million”, but who just can’t see any evidence of it at work in their lives and neighbourhoods.

Dylan Asafo, a lecturer at Auckland Law School, put it like this:

Contrary to popular belief, the ‘centre’ isn’t a place for reasonable, measured minds who can see valid points on both sides and find a just and fair compromise. The ‘centre’ doesn’t actually exist. It’s an imagined safe space for people who are deeply invested in inequality in a settler-colonial, capitalist state but still want to be perceived as kind and decent people.

A left-wing Labour government would have reacted very differently to the uprising at Waikeria. It would have reassured all those members of the Maori working-class with fathers, brothers and sons locked away in hellholes like Waikeria, that Labour was committed unequivocally to their fair and humane treatment. Under a left-wing Labour government, it would have been the Corrections Minister leading those prisoners out of danger and into safety – and making sure every one of the Ombudsman’s recommendations was implemented.

By preferring to put their faith in an illusory political centre, Labour has ceded a crucial swathe of electoral territory to a Maori Party unafraid of placing itself at the head of an uprising much bigger than the one Rawiri Waititi just helped to end at Waikeria.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 4 January 2021

2021 Will Be About Brown Poverty And White Guilt.

Whose Priorities? If Labour MPs, under pressure from guilt-ridden white radicals, opt to offer legislative validation to the most divisive elements of the so-called “Culture Wars”, then the broad social unity needed to buttress a colour-blind programme of social uplift will be undermined. The war against poverty and homelessness will be fatally compromised by the war of the woke against the un-woke.

IN THE COMING YEAR New Zealand politics will be driven by two inter-related forces: brown poverty and white guilt. Jacinda Ardern’s government will not be given a choice on the issue of brown poverty. Dealing with white guilt, however, will be very much a matter of opting to behave wisely or foolishly. It remains to be seen whether Labour possesses the wisdom to not act like a fool.

The capital city rumour mills have recently been grinding out an intriguing story involving a head-on stoush between Grant Robertson and Willie Jackson. It seems that Robertson carelessly reassured a group of Treasury bureaucrats that spending across all portfolios would be strictly constrained for the foreseeable future. Grant’s big mistake was to say this in front of the Maori Development Minister.

As a general rule, ministers do not contradict each other in front of their departmental advisers. As Don Corleone admonished his eldest son, Sonny, in The Godfather, it is most unwise to display the slightest disunity in front of anybody other than “family” members. Apparently (and understandably) Willie called BS on that – openly contradicting Grant’s fiscal reassurances, at least as far as spending on Maori issues was concerned.

The ensuing barney was, reportedly, so intense that the whole dispute was handed-up to Jacinda for resolution. The fact that Willie is still in his post strongly suggests that if the rumour about this epic ministerial battle is true, then Grant did not win it.

What is indisputable about the current predicament of Maori New Zealanders is that if it is allowed to worsen, then some sort of explosion is likely to result. Poverty and homelessness are not improving with anything like the rapidity required to head-off major disturbances in the most deprived “brown” suburbs. One has only to read the Maori Party MP for Waiariki, Rawiri Waititi’s, maiden speech to appreciate how angry Maori are becoming:

I refuse to allow my tamariki or my mokopuna to one day sit in the same seat asking the same question. We will no longer accept this approach, as it allows the State to continue to feast on the dysfunction that it has created amongst our people. We will no longer accept that the State continues to fund itself every year to allow Oranga Tamariki to steal more of our babies, a justice system to lock up more of our people, a welfare system that keeps my people dependent and poor, an education system that keeps my people dumb, a health system that keeps my people sick, and a housing system that keeps my people homeless. This has to stop.

Willie Jackson, with his longstanding and very close ties to urban Maori, knows that if he and Labour’s Maori caucus do not produce meaningful progress on the failings enumerated by Waititi, then the Maori Party will be quick to exploit their failure. That’s why Jackson is unwilling to keep silent about the prospect of an austerity budget. If they are to make a real dent in poverty and homelessness, then he and his Maori colleagues are going to need money – lots and lots of money.

Almost against its will, Ardern’s government is going to have to engage in massive amounts of public spending. What’s more, it will not be politically acceptable for this mobilisation of state resources to be directed solely at Maori communities. Working-class Pakeha, Pasifika and other immigrant families will have to be offered the same fiscal support. Jacinda and her colleagues are going to have to become socialists in spite of themselves!

It is at this point that the so-called “woke” elements of the Professional & Managerial Class (PMC) will have to choose whether or not to make, or break, the Ardern government. This includes members of the PMC inside Labour’s caucus, as well as those outside it. If Labour MPs, under pressure from guilt-ridden white radicals, opt to offer legislative validation to the most divisive elements of the so-called “Culture Wars”, then the broad social unity needed to buttress a colour-blind programme of social uplift will be undermined. The war against poverty and homelessness will be fatally compromised by the war of the woke against the un-woke.

Sadly, there is a real possibility that the PMC will do exactly this. So great is its guilty sense of having been born with far too many advantages, and so certain is it that Pakeha workers, denied its guiding hand, will never be able to understand the true extent of their “privilege”, the PMC is perfectly capable of deciding that homelessness and poverty are second-order issues. Matters to be addressed only after the Pakeha working-class has proved itself worthy of enjoying the socially integrative benefits of warm, dry, affordable houses and well-paying jobs.

The woke are very big supporters of “intersectionality” – the concept of fighting all the ills of society simultaneously, rather than “privileging” one form of injustice over another. It’s a concept that conflicts fundamentally with the idea of politics being all about the ordering of priorities. What is often called “the art of the possible”. With Labour’s Maori caucus prioritising action on poverty, housing, education, justice and health, about the best thing the PMC’s woke intersectionalists could do to assist the Ardern government, and working-class people of all ethnicities and genders, is maintain a solidaristic silence.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 24 December 2020.