2024: A Year of Dishonouring the Past and Ignoring the Future.

Three Wise Men? Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future, along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024. Indeed, New Zealanders have seen just how badly things can go wrong when both respect for the past, and wise adjudication in the present, are lacking. It does not make for a safe future.

KIA WHAKATŌMURI TE HAERE WHAKAMUA: “I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past”. To anyone with a love of history, that whakataukī really hits the spot. It is both dangerous (as well as practically impossible) to go forward without consideration for what we leave behind. Which is not to say that watching where you’re going is a bad idea. Clearly, observation and anticipation are vital, not only when it comes to navigating the present safely, but also to keeping the future safe.

Successful political leadership embodies a keen awareness of past, present, and future, along with the wisdom to adjudicate what is owed, and should be paid, to each. Sadly, such leadership has not been much in evidence during 2024. Indeed, New Zealanders have seen just how badly things can go wrong when both respect for the past, and wise adjudication in the present, are lacking. It does not make for a safe future.

Had the National-Act-NZ First coalition government had more respect for the past, it would not now have to contend with so many besetting difficulties.

Certainly, it is difficult to comprehend how any group of politicians who hadn’t spent the 36 months between January 2020 and December 2022 living under a rock could have been so unaware of the grim fiscal legacy bequeathed to all New Zealanders by the overwhelming historical experiences of those three years – the worst years of the Covid-19 global pandemic. But, astonishingly, Christopher Luxon, Nicola Willis, and their colleagues have managed it.

Unmoved, seemingly, by the disastrous fiscal consequences of doing so when the monetary consequences of addressing the urgent needs of the pandemic were everywhere apparent, the National Party promised, and delivered, tax cuts. At the very moment when responsible economic management demanded measures to increase state revenues; measures that would not only have eased the nation’s debt burden, but also dampened demand in an economy afflicted with historically high inflation; National opted to strip the state of billions of tax dollars that might otherwise have been used to address critical social needs.

Reducing the fiscal responsibilities of the National Party’s friends and allies brought many other malign consequences. Not the least of which was the need to impose harsh, across-the-board cuts in public spending. The impact of these cuts would not be felt, or, at least, not as acutely, by National’s friends and allies, but by the friends and allies of National’s electoral opponents. That these included the poorest and most vulnerable New Zealanders did not appear to give Christopher Luxon and his colleagues pause.

A political party which respected, and allowed itself to be guided by, the past would have recalled the impact of previous rounds of drastic cost-cutting by conservative governments. It would also have been aware of the store of trouble that such historical austerity programmes had built up for future generations of political leaders.

But Christopher Luxon’s and Nicola Willis’s National Party appears not think in such terms. It seems not to recognise the overwhelming infrastructure challenges now facing New Zealand as the direct consequence of political leaders who were too afraid to impose the taxes necessary to keep a humane society functioning, and too fixated on the political needs of the present to anticipate the future disasters that such cowardice, if left unaddressed, was bound to produce.

How else to explain the Coalition Government’s fast-track legislation as anything other than the “Oh f**k!” response of Chris Bishop and Simeon Brown, the Ministers, respectively, of Infrastructure and Transport, to the discovery that their country is falling apart? (A condition, incidentally, about which ordinary Kiwis, after four decades of political indifference and neglect, were fully aware!)

Once again, National’s indefatigable “presentism” blinded it to the historical precedents for this sort of “Get-out-of-the-way!” solution to the public resistance engendered by governments attempting to do everything, everywhere, all-at-once. Is there no one left in the National Party who remembers Rob Muldoon?

Not that National stands alone in this regard. Act leader David Seymour is not the least bit afraid of austerity, indeed, he welcomes it. Slashing spending is, for Act, much more than a temporary economic necessity, it’s an ideological mission. How else is the state to be got down to the size where, in the vicious phrase of the American free-market enthusiast Grover Norquist: “we can drown it in the bathtub”?

Drowning the state is not, however, the goal of NZ First. A disciple of the nineteenth century German nationalist economist Friedrich List, the NZ First leader, Winston Peters, looks upon New Zealand’s great nation-builders, Sir Julius Vogel and, yes, Sir Robert Muldoon, as politicians to be celebrated, not shuddered-at. Peters’ deputy, Shane Jones, gleefully piles pounds of rhetorical fat on his leader’s bare theoretical bones, being only too pleased to tell Greens, environmentalists, and every other unmanly defender of Freddy the Frog to “Get out of the way!” – albeit in te reo.

That Peters has just had himself appointed Minister of Railways is no accident. It is difficult to imagine a more disreputable example of National’s reckless presentism, nor of its sublime indifference to the nation’s future, than the cancellation of the iRex Project.

That Peters and his party, in a last-ditch effort to protect New Zealand’s state-owned rail network from the truckers who would happily wave it good-bye, were willing to interpose themselves between the privatisers of National and Act is vintage NZ First. It reflects Peters’ small-c conservative conviction that those who inhabit the present are not only morally obligated to meet the needs of those who are, but also to protect the achievements of those who were. How else to deliver a world worth living in to those who will be?

But, if NZ First retains a firm grasp of the past’s importance, it is every bit as guilty as its coalition partners of failing to appreciate the scale and urgency of Climate Change. Likewise, the radical transformation of public policy that is needed to address the crisis effectively. Not to deal seriously with the ever-more-apparent consequences of global warming requires a political mindset unwaveringly resistant to looking either forward or back. A mindset which, at least historically, has been associated with political parties in thrall to ideologies, private interests, or both.

The Coalition’s failure to respond adequately to the Climate Crisis pales, however, when set alongside its treatment of tangata whenua. In no other aspect of government policy has its resistance to understanding the power and importance of the past been more evident.

As a radical, right-wing libertarian, David Seymour’s impatience with the restraints placed upon the sovereign individual by considerations of lineage and tradition is understandable – if not forgivable. But, what is NZ First’s excuse? Both Peters and Jones need no lessons in the central role of te Tiriti in shaping post-European contact New Zealand. Certainly, they would have been in no doubt as to the hurt and fury that would be sparked, not only by Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, but also by their own equally aggressive policy of removing all references to the principles of the Treaty from New Zealand legislation. The commitments insisted upon by the leaders of Act and NZ First, post-election, amounted to playing with fire – and they knew it.

And National? The party of Rob Muldoon, Jim Bolger, Dough Graham, John Key and Chris Finlayson. Why didn’t it just say “No.”? Was there really no one in its ranks capable of appealing over the heads of the Act and NZ First negotiators to that huge part of the New Zealand electorate that is proud of its relationship with Māori. The part that believes in the Treaty – or, at least, in the Treaty they learned about in school.

Was there truly no one with the courage and understanding to call Seymour’s and Peters’ bluff? To dare them to force the country to a new election on this issue, and this issue alone? Someone who understood what the American novelist, William Faulkner, meant when he said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. Someone prepared to turn his back on the nay-sayers and march towards the future facing, and drawing strength from, all those who had gone before him.

Someone resembling a prime minister.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday 16 December 2024.

Hearing Ourselves Think.

No Longer Silent: The one sound loud enough to be heard above the efforts of even the most determined makers of political noise, is the sound of the long-suffering majority making up its mind. Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar addresses the Free Speech Union AGM held at Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre on Saturday, 9 November 2024.

ARE WE LIVING in a world where, increasingly, “noise” is drowning out “sound”? A world in which it is getting harder and harder to distinguish the discrete voices of reason from the angry roar of the crowd. Where we are assailed by the deafening racket of bad political actors determined to drown out any and all opinions but their own.

Political “noise”, and its impact on society’s ability to “hear” itself, was brought to life vividly by Emeritus Professor Nigel Biggar from Oxford University in his keynote address to the AGM of the Free Speech Union, held at the Viaduct Events Centre on Saturday, 9 November 2024.

Pilloried by the Woke Left for daring to express the heretical view that colonialism wasn’t an unalloyed evil, and that the British Empire, in particular, wasn’t all bad, Biggar recalled the 2016 Oxford Union debate concerning the fate of Oriel College’s statue of Cecil Rhodes. The enemies of colonisation were determined to remove this memorial to one of Nineteenth Century Britain’s greatest imperial swashbucklers (think Elon Musk with a Maxim gun) and Biggar was on hand to argue that it makes more sense to understand your country’s history than to cancel it.

Every time an anti-Rhodes speaker sat down, Biggar told the surprisingly large audience of between 200-300 AGM attendees, the venerable debating chamber would erupt into wild and sustained applause. To the casual observer, support for the removal of Rhodes’ statute would have seemed overwhelming. Looking around the Chamber, however, Biggar noticed that the number not cheering and clapping was almost as large as the number who were. The “anti-colonialists” simply made a lot more noise. (The “Rhodes Must Fall!” motion was eventually carried 245/212.)

This is what political noise does. It renders nuance and subtlety impossible. It makes the voices of dissenters appear weak. Most importantly, deliberately amplified political noise causes those holding dissenting views to doubt the efficacy of their own judgement, intimidating them into inaction and silence. Political noise thus achieves the same result as switching-off an opponent’s microphone. The sounds made by individual contributors are lost in the deafening noise of the mob.

That Prof. Biggar’s speech to the FSU’s AGM, and the introduction of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill to Parliament, occurred in the same week could be seen as a happy coincidence. In the week ahead, a Hīkoi mō te Tiriti will set off from the Far North for Wellington. As it wends its way south, the ratio of noise to sound promises to be politically instructive.

According to the latest poll, conducted by Curia Research between 3-7 October 2024, 46 percent of those surveyed support the Treaty Principles Bill, 25 percent oppose it, and 29 percent are “unsure”. When compared to Curia’s first poll on the Bill, published on 14 March 2024, these latest results indicate a substantial drop in the number of respondents indicating assent. Back in March, the supporters of Seymour’s legislation outnumbered its opponents 3:1.

What caused this drop, from 3:1 to 2:1, has become a matter for debate. When Curia’s first poll was taken, Seymour’s principles possessed an admirable clarity. By October, however, the second of the three fundamental principles had been complicated considerably by the Bill’s drafters – to the point where its meaning was no longer readily intelligible to the ordinary voter. This would certainly explain the 7-point rise in the number of respondents indicating uncertainty.

The 7 percentage point rise in those indicating opposition to the Bill may also reflect the confusion created by the revised version of its second principle. There is certainly quite a difference between March’s Version 1:

The New Zealand Government will protect all New Zealanders’ authority over their land and other property.

And October’s Version 2:

The Crown recognises the rights that hapū and iwi had when they signed the Treaty. The Crown will respect and protect those rights. Those rights differ from the rights everyone has a reasonable expectation to enjoy only when they are specified in legislation, Treaty settlements, or other agreement with the Crown.

The hitherto staunchest supporters of Seymour’s legislative initiative may well consider the revised version of the Second Principle to be altogether too “Treaty-ish” in its wording and intent to be worthy of their continuing support.

Alternatively, the relentless demonisation of Seymour’s bill by all major media organisations, the overwhelming majority of political journalists and columnists, and – most effectively – by the nation’s leading political cartoonists, may be convincing an increasing number of the Bill’s supporters that they are indeed guilty, as charged, of being on “the wrong side of history”.

By preventing its supporters from hearing either themselves, or the clear plurality of other New Zealanders who share their views, think, the deafening political noise generated by the Bill’s institutional opponents, particularly the universities and the Waitangi Tribunal, may simply, through grinding emotional attrition, be turning the numbers around.

This is the bet that National and NZ First have taken. That, by the time the six months of select committee hearings have concluded, conservative New Zealanders will have grown heartily sick of the whole business.

It could be a shrewd bet, because the select committee hearings will doubtless be drowned out by the relentless cacophony of the Bill’s opponents. What’s more, the constant and public vilification of the Bill’s supporters will not only encourage their shell-shocked withdrawal from the debate, but also convince an ever-increasing number of New Zealanders that the political game is no longer worth the candle.

Alternatively, the actions of the Treaty Principles Bill’s opponents may provoke the same sort of angry public backlash that followed the violent end of the anti-vaccination mandate movement’s occupation of Parliament Grounds.

The Police are expecting upwards of 25,000 Māori protesters and their allies to descend upon the Parliamentary Precinct on Tuesday, 19 November. Among those allies, Police anticipate having to deal with a large number of gang members intending to defy the legal ban on public displays of gang insignia. It is also thought that a contingent of activists determined to link the “anti-colonial struggles” of Māori and Palestinians will be part of the Hikoi.

The Hikoi leaders have assured the Police that its demonstration of opposition to the Treaty Principles Bill will be peaceful. But the level of political noise, and the passions it can hardly avoid arousing, may outstrip the ability of the leaders to keep their followers under control. If the whole thing turns pear-shaped, then National and NZ First will lose their bet.

In the aftermath of the American elections, the Coalition Government would be unwise to position themselves too closely alongside a noisy – let alone a violent – minority. The one sound loud enough to be heard above the efforts of even the most determined makers of political noise, is the sound of the long-suffering majority making up its mind.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 11 November 2024.

Beyond Question?

Record Numbers: The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, on 11 November, culminated outside Parliament on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, in one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

ACCORDING TO TE ARA, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage’s Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, there were 15,000 in 2004. Protesters, that is. Gathered in front of Parliament to demonstrate their opposition to the then Labour Government’s foreshore and seabed legislation.

Twenty years later, on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, the number was 42,000 – a truly vast crowd spilling out of Parliament Grounds and into the surrounding streets. This makes the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, nine days earlier, on 11 November, one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.

On the surface, David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, seems too puny a thing to have provoked such an extraordinary outpouring of opposition. After all, no party represented in the House of Representatives – apart from Act – is committed to supporting the Bill beyond its Second Reading debate.

Seymour’s proposed legislation is a dead man walking. It will not be enacted during the current parliamentary term. Those determined to prevent the Treaty Principles Bill from becoming law – thereby precipitating a binding referendum on its content – have already won.

How, then, is it possible that a Bill with just six months left to live, has inspired 42,000 mostly Māori New Zealanders to gather outside the parliamentary complex to demand its instant demise? If they’ve already won – why are they still fighting?

They are still fighting because they know that David Seymour is right. His bill might be killed at its Second Reading, but the issues he has raised will not die. He has placed a question on the parliamentary table. A question which a great many more than 35,000 New Zealanders would like to hear answered:

Is this country to be forever constrained by the content of an agreement entered into 184 years ago, by individuals long since deceased, binding entities that have long since disappeared, in order to resolve issues that have long since been decided?

Another way of framing that question is to ask:

Should the New Zealand that was built after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, and very largely in spite of it – i.e. the New Zealand of today – be radically refashioned, constitutionally, administratively, politically, economically, and culturally, in accordance with the alleged understandings and intentions of te Tiriti’s Nineteenth Century Māori signatories?

But that question immediately raises another – and this one is much more dangerous.

With the benefit of hindsight, do the Māori of today regret the decision of their ancestors to sign the Treaty, or, at least, do they lament that their tīpuna did not make clearer what they expected to get by entering into a formal relationship with one of the Nineteenth Century’s most powerful states?

Which, in turn, raises another.

Is that what has really been going on these past 50 years: have Māori, alongside their Pakeha allies in the judiciary, the universities, and the public service, been quietly revising the Treaty’s meaning so that it better reflects, and serves, the needs of Māori living in the Twenty-First Century?

It is precisely to prevent these sorts of questions being asked – let alone answered – that Māori are so determined to “Kill the Bill”. It also explains why sending Seymour’s Bill to the Justice Select Committee has been so energetically resisted by so many Treaty “defenders”: everyone from a curious clutch of Christian clergy, to a concerned collection of King’s Counsel. The very last thing they, and the organisers of Tuesday’s extremely impressive hikoi, want, is for the meaning and purpose of the Treaty of Waitangi to be openly debated for months at a time.

David Seymour’s great sin has been to offer an alternative to this covert effort to change the constitution of New Zealand by changing the Treaty’s historical meaning. Those who argue that the Treaty Principles Bill is a blatant attempt to re-write the Treaty are quite right. What they omit to say, however, is that Seymour is only doing openly what Māori nationalists and their Pakeha allies have been doing, quietly, in legal chambers, common-rooms, and public service offices for the past 50 years.

The critical difference, of course, is that Seymour was proposing to give the rest of us a vote on his version.

Leaving us with one, final, question:

Is 42,000 enough to stop him?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 November 2024.

Unstoppable.

Too Big To Fail: Forty-three years after the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, Maori defenders of te Tiriti, by their own efforts, and using their own resources, are poised to descend on the capital with upwards of 100,000 followers at their back, and no force in front of them even remotely capable of turning them around.

THE ORGANISERS OF THE Hīkoi mō te Tiriti are predicting record-breaking numbers. As the advancing column of runners, marchers, and cars approaches the capital, its numbers are expected to swell into the hundreds-of-thousands. If these predictions are borne out by events, then the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti will, indeed, be the largest protest demonstration in New Zealand’s political history.

Although no single demonstration associated with the 1981 Springbok Tour came anywhere near 100,000 participants, the 56 days of the Tour, and the months leading up to it, indisputably witnessed in excess of 100,000 protesters on New Zealand’s streets.

Significantly, the convulsions of 1981 and the record numbers participating in the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti are not unrelated historically. The lessons drawn from 1981 by an entire generation of progressive activists have, in the intervening 43 years, resolved themselves into a seemingly unstoppable ideological narrative. That narrative now constitutes the driving-force behind the movement toward decolonisation and indigenisation.

The nationwide campaign to end sporting contacts with Apartheid South Africa began as a fight to see the guarantee of human equality embodied in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights upheld by the New Zealand Government. The Republic of South Africa had been suspended from the UN in 1974 for its refusal to observe the principles enshrined in the Declaration. Playing Rugby with a side purporting to “represent” South Africa was, accordingly, condemned by many New Zealanders as morally indefensible.

In New Zealand’s churches, universities, professional associations and trade unions, this opposition to the 1981 Springbok Tour was deeply entrenched. In the New Zealand of the early-1980s, however, the nation’s demographic structure more-or-less guaranteed that a very large percentage of the population would remain unmoved by the arguments of the Tour’s opponents. Rugby was hugely important to New Zealanders, more than half of whom, according to the opinion polls of the day, were anxious to “keep politics out of sport”.

These New Zealanders had a powerful champion in their country’s National Party prime minister, Rob Muldoon. Presenting himself as the defender of the “ordinary bloke”, he cast the Tour’s opponents as, at best, snobbish intellectuals, and, at worst, subversive communists. In this he could rely upon the nation’s news media, both private and public, to take such accusations seriously. The instincts of most publishers, broadcasters and editors in 1981 were deeply conservative. Many of them regarded protest demonstrations as potentially dangerous attempts to apply extra-parliamentary pressure upon the nation’s democratically elected representatives.

Contrast Muldoon’s strong opposition from the top in 1981 with the way in which the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti has been treated by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in 2024. National’s leader has been careful not to openly criticise or condemn the Hikoi – with whose bitter criticisms of the Act Party leader’s Treaty Principles Bill he claims to be in at least partial agreement. Luxon and his government have also been careful to affirm publicly the right of New Zealanders to engage in peaceful protest. No thought in 2024 of portraying the Hikoi participants as enemies of anything so retrograde as the “ordinary bloke”.

The behaviour of the mainstream news media in 2024 offers an even stronger contrast with the way events were covered in 1981. From the moment the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti began its long journey to Wellington, the nation’s largest media operations have presented it as something akin to the living embodiment of the nation’s best and truest instincts.

At least one editorial leader-writer has depicted the Hikoi as a powerful and much needed corrective to the “colonial” attitudes embodied in Seymour’s bill. The possibility that 100,000 angry citizens massed outside the New Zealand Parliament might constitute a serious threat to the safety and security of the country’s democratic institutions does not appear to have given the nation’s journalists pause. Or, if it has, then the prospect of Members of Parliament – especially ACT MPs – being sorted-out and set-straight by the people is not one that bothers them unduly.

Clearly, much has changed since 1981. Certainly, the three Treaty principles set forth in Seymour’s bill (the language of which carries strong echoes of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) would have been warmly endorsed by the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders 43 years ago. How, then, has this extraordinary transformation: from multiple demonstrations against the denial of human equality, to a nation-spanning hikoi denouncing its legislative affirmation; been accomplished?

The big idea driving the shift, both here and overseas, in the 1970s and 80s was that white people are blind to their own racism. In biblical terms, Europeans are very good at drawing attention to the mote in other peoples’ eyes, all the while ignoring the whopping great beam that is in their own.

How is it, demanded the Māori who’d marched alongside Pakeha anti-tour protesters, that you could become so incensed by the racism of white South Africa’s apartheid system, but had so little to say about the racist foundations of your own nation?

You took our land, built a happy little colonial state on top of it, and left us to contemplate your generous legacy of ruin and loss. The strategies we adopted for our own survival, most of which reflected our need to avoid te Riri Pakeha – the anger of the white man – you interpreted as evidence of our easy-going good-nature, and patted yourselves on the back for presiding over the “best race-relations in the world” The treaty our ancestors signed in 1840, in which the British Crown promised to protect the autonomy and resources of our tribes, your Chief Justice casually dismissed, just 37 years later, as “a simple nullity”. You’ll understand, then, if we look at you Pakeha and see nothing but a bunch of bloody hypocrites!

It was a list of charges to which the progressive Pakeha Left had no convincing answers, other than to hang their heads in guilt and shame, and promise to do all within their power to right the wrongs of colonisation, and restore to the maximum extent possible the rights of Aotearoa’s indigenous people.

That they chose to do this through the courts, rather than through Parliament, is a reflection of the fear and loathing many anti-tour protesters, university students in particular, took away from their encounters with supporters of the Springbok Tour. That these people were racists went without saying, but the vicious sexism experienced by female protesters came as a nasty shock. Male protesters were equally stunned by the homophobic slurs hurled at them by rugby supporters.

Obviously, from the progressive perspective, National Party voters could not to be trusted to do the right thing. But, sadly, neither could the party of the working class. Far too many Labour voters had been willing to abandon their democratic-socialist ideals for a game of footy. Long before Hilary Clinton came up with the description, New Zealand’s progressives made it their business to ensure that the important business of decolonising and indigenising Aotearoa was kept as far away as possible from such deplorable citizens.

A lot can happen in 43 years. New Zealand jurisprudence can be radically reoriented. The National Party can atone for the sins of Rob Muldoon by initiating the Treaty Settlement Process. Apart from its votes, Labour can give up expecting anything from, or doing very much for, the New Zealand working-class. Te Tiriti, itself, can cease to be regarded as a simple nullity and become New Zealand’s foundational constitutional document. From around 10 percent, Māori can grow to 20 percent of the population.

Most importantly, from being a noisy and morally aggravating adjunct to the anti-apartheid movement in 1981, Māori defenders of te Tiriti, in 2024, by their own efforts, and using their own resources, can descend upon New Zealand’s capital city with upwards of 100,000 followers at their back, and no force in front of them even remotely capable of turning them around.

This essay was posted exclusively on the Bowalley Road blog of Monday, 18 November 2024.

The Long and the Short: Ageing Boomers, Laurie & Les, Talk Politics.

“While a nationwide vote to confirm, or not, the public’s understanding of our foundational constitutional document would be ‘divisive’, ‘racist’, a ‘blunt instrument’, and therefore completely out of the question, a referendum to extend the life expectancy of elected politicians, which no one not deeply involved with the governing process has actually asked for, or wants, is perfectly okay.”

LAURIE WAS ANGRY. So angry, in fact, that he had assigned a small part of his brain to search back through his more than six decades of experience for a precedent.

Inevitably, he found many. The actions of politicians evoke a special sort of anger, but only rarely do they produce the same anger as a love betrayed; an unfair dismissal; or the unbelievably stupid behaviour of one’s offspring – and the cost of it. Even so, as Laurie made his way to the bar, his anger advanced before him like a sci-fi force-field.

“You look like you could use something stronger than a pale ale, Laurie”, Hannah the bartender, who had been watching his approach with a mixture of apprehension and humour, cast a knowing glance at the top shelf.

“Good idea. Give me a nip of Johnny Walker.” Glancing towards the table in the corner, where his friend, Les, was waving a hand in greeting, Laurie nodded. “And two pale ales.”

Les watched his friend toss back the whiskey. This promised to be interesting.

“What is it, mate? You seldom venture up to the top shelf.”

“Ah, it’s silly really. I shouldn’t let myself get so riled up – least of all by politicians. But, sheesh, Christopher Bloody Luxon really pisses me off.”

“What’s he done now?”

“It’s not so much what he’s done, as what he has proved, over and over again, to be incapable of doing. The man just can’t seem to assemble the pieces of his own government’s jigsaw into a coherent picture. They’re all just bits and pieces to him. A law change here, a policy reversal there. He just doesn’t seem to be able to see what his colleagues and supporters – both in and out of his government – are looking at.”

“Like?”

“Like the use of referenda.”

“The Treaty Principles Bill?”

“Yeah, let’s take a look at that piece of the puzzle. Act is asking Parliament to respond to the widespread public unease about the Treaty and its growing impact on the way New Zealand is governed. David Seymour wants to give the public a real chance to have its say about what the Treaty actually amounts to in 2024, and then to vote the outcome of that discussion either up, or down, in a referendum.”

“Which Luxon will not allow.”

“Correct. Although, he will allow six months of discussion and debate in front of a Select Committee. But, no matter what all that talking finally produces. No matter how impressive the results of the Committee’s deliberations might be. Luxon is pledged to kill the Treaty Principles Bill stone dead by denying it a second reading.”

“Yeah, that’s right. But surely Laurie, we’ve known this for some time?”

“Yes, we have. But what most of us don’t realise is that Luxon has signed National up for another referendum.”

“On a four-year term!”

“Correct. And just think about that for a moment. There’s no evidence of widespread public unease about the current three-year term. It’s an issue beloved by political scientists, policy wonks, and that’s it. As far as the public’s concerned – and this has been confirmed in two referenda already, one in 1967, the other in 1990 – three years is too short for a good government, and too long for a bad one. In other words, the status-quo represents the epitome of good, old-fashioned, Kiwi common-sense.”

“But, in spite of there being no clamour for a change,” Les continued Laurie’s thought, “Luxon and all the other politicians in Parliament will vote to increase the number of years they’re entitled to a minimum salary of $165,000 – plus perks – by one. To be confirmed by referendum.”

“You bet your life, by referendum! Because, while a nationwide vote to confirm, or not, the public’s understanding of our foundational constitutional document would be ‘divisive’, ‘racist’, a ‘blunt instrument’, and therefore completely out of the question, a referendum to extend the life expectancy of elected politicians, which no one not deeply involved with the governing process has actually asked for, or wants, is perfectly okay.”

“And Luxon doesn’t see the hypocrisy?”

“Exactly! He toddles along to some business leaders’ conflab, waxes eloquent about the deficiencies of our three-year term, more-or-less guarantees a referendum, and doesn’t for a single second recognise the double-standard he’s just set.”

“Bloody-hell, Laurie. Now I’m mad!”

This short story was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 September 2024.

Procedures, Processes and Principles: Is It Possible To Defend The Treaty Of Waitangi And Democracy?

Out Of The Loop: The great insight of sympathetic Pakeha jurists, like Sir Geoffrey Palmer, was that, suitably empowered, the judiciary and the executive branch of the state could take on the role formerly played by the non-elected governors of mid-nineteenth century New Zealand. Māori resources could be protected, and past injustices redressed, but only if the Pakeha Parliament could somehow be persuaded to take itself out of the loop.

SIR GEOFFREY PALMER has penned a two-part response to Act Leader David Seymour’s “Treaty Principles Bill”. In its essence, Palmer’s contribution reflects the growing unease of the institutions which have hitherto dominated the Waitangi discourse – the legal profession, the courts, and the universities – that they are in real danger of losing control of the narrative.

Between the lines of Palmer’s analysis one detects a profound hostility to the populist impulse, and a palpable impatience with the machinery of representative government that empowers it. The clear intention of Palmer’s intervention is to deflect the popular desire for a democratically defined Treaty away from the decisive instruments of parliamentary democracy, and towards a much more manageable set of “deliberative” options.

In many ways it is surprising that Palmer, and those who share his ideas about the Treaty, did not anticipate the current populist push for a political solution to the doubts and anxieties raised by the document’s startling legal evolution. From the 1980s to the present day, some kind of democratic revision of the Treaty’s status and meaning was always on the cards.

In an address to the Māori Law Review Symposium entitled Māori, the Treaty and the Constitution on 12 June 2013, Palmer offered his audience the following, highly revealing, admission:

“If the remedying of injustice under the Treaty could only be done by Parliament under our existing constitutional structure, then the big obstacle was what John Stuart Mill called majority tyranny. If the legislation addressed the grievances, then majority tyranny would kick in and the likelihood of the issues being addressed in a principled fashion would be reduced. Elected politicians should not be involved in the investigation and formulation of the appropriate remedy. So Parliament had to be persuaded to initiate action, but not determine the nature of the grievance. A set of procedures, processes and principles was likely to work better. Thus, it seemed to me that the aim could be achieved by having Parliament set up a body to investigate and report. That meant extending the jurisdiction of the Waitangi Tribunal back to 1840.”

As a means of drawing the fangs of this supposed tyrannous and unprincipled majority (which is an interesting way of thinking about the nation’s political leaders and the people who elected them) these “procedures, processes and principles” were to prove their worth many times over. So much so, that Palmer felt able to reassure the symposium that:

“Insulation from the ravages of extreme opinion has been achieved. The settlements have become mainstream.”

But if elected politicians were to be excluded from the investigation and formulation of appropriate remedies for the sins of New Zealand’s colonial fathers, then in whose hands should the whole fraught process be placed? What other answer could a former law professor give except – the courts:

“The courts are better protectors of “discrete and insular minorities” than the majoritarian legislature, even under MMP. I remain of the opinion that the Treaty, like the Bill of Rights, should become part of New Zealand’s new superior law Constitution. We now know a great deal about how the courts will go about the task of interpreting the Treaty, just as we know how the courts go about interpreting the Bill of Rights Act. We have had more than twenty years’ experience of both […] We cannot go backward on these issues, but we need to summon up the political courage to go forward.”

The reference to “discrete and insular minorities” comes from a 1937 judgement of the United States Supreme Court. Such minorities, the justices explained, are “saddled with such disabilities, or subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process.”

In citing this celebrated case, Palmer was signalling to his 2013 audience that he well understood the historical predicament of the Māori people.

The Treaty of Waitangi was the initiative of a British Government which, in 1840, was impelled by the political principles then guiding its Foreign and Colonial Office to secure control of New Zealand, but only after obtaining the freely given consent of its indigenous inhabitants.

This was duly achieved by recognising the full authority – tino rangatiratanga – of tribal chieftains to determine the disposition of their lands, forests, fisheries, and other valued resources, as they saw fit, and by giving Maori the same rights and privileges as the people of Great Britain.

Crucially, the chiefs’ lands could only be sold to representatives of the British Government. Thus were Māori protected from the contemporaneous depredations of the agents of the rapacious New Zealand Company – and the French.

Overseeing the evolution of this new relationship would be a Governor appointed by the British Government. Not the least of the Governor’s duties was to protect the Māori tribes from the greed and the larceny of the British, European and American settlers determined to make their fortunes in Britain’s new colony.

While the original parties to the 1840 Treaty, the British Government and the tribal chiefs, continued to be the only parties that mattered, the relationship, though often strained, endured. By the early 1850s, however, the fast-growing population of Pakeha settlers was demanding that the powers-that-be in London grant them self-government.

The settlers objective was brutally simple: to avail themselves of Māori land without having to secure the chiefs’ and/or the Governor’s permission. In other words, they wanted to construct a New Zealand state in which the Treaty could be dismissed as a “simple nullity”. Such a state could only be created by the forcible dispossession of Māori hapu and iwi, but that was a price the Pakeha settlers were perfectly willing to pay.

Putting the matter bluntly, the greatest enemy of Māori, since 1853, has been the Pakeha Parliament. While its power to make the law remained untrammelled there was nothing Māori could do to defend their fast-diminishing patrimony.

The great insight of sympathetic Pakeha jurists, like Palmer, was that, suitably empowered, the judiciary and the executive branch of the state could take on the role formerly played by the non-elected governors of mid-nineteenth century New Zealand. Māori resources could be protected, and past injustices redressed, but only if the Pakeha Parliament could somehow be persuaded to take itself out of the loop.

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable aspect of New Zealand history that, for a period of roughly half-a-century, the nation’s elected representatives were willing to do just that. They made way for the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Treaty Settlements to right as many of the wrongs done to te iwi Māori as they adjudged Pakeha voters to be willing to accept.

That turned out to be an impressively large number. But, by 2023, Pakeha voters’ – or, at least, a majority of Pakeha voters’ – willingness to go on righting the wrongs of the past had reached its limit. In response, the newly elected Pakeha Parliament, to the utter dismay of the courts, the Waitangi Tribunal, and the Office of Māori Crown Relations, determined to suddenly and dramatically re-enter the loop.

Small wonder Palmer is calling for “deliberative” alternatives to parliamentary action, such as randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, to be substituted for the deliberations of the House of Representatives. These latter, which tend to culminate in legislative action, are to be avoided at all costs lest they precipitate a head-on collision between the legislature, the judiciary, and that part of the executive branch represented by the state bureaucracy.

Palmer, and those who share his outlook, must know that in any contest between Parliament and the rest of the State only two outcomes are possible. Either the coercive agencies of the state – the armed forces and the police – put an end to representative democracy on the Executive’s/Judiciary’s behalf. Or, the key institutions of the state, with varying degrees of rage and reluctance, bow to “majority tyranny” and the “ravages of extreme opinion”.

Otherwise known as the will of the people.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Thursday, 26 September 2024.

Judge Not.

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. Matthew 7:1-2

FOUR HUNDRED AND FORTY men and women professing the Christian faith would appear to have imperilled their immortal souls. The second of the Ten Commandments could hardly be clearer: Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image. And yet, in their open letter to the nation’s legislators, these 440 clerics have made it equally clear that, by their adoration of te Tiriti o Waitangi, idolatry is precisely what they are guilty of. Worse still, by publicly bowing down before te Tiriti, and serving it so aggressively, they have called down upon their heads the wrath of a self-confessed “Jealous God”, whose punishments extend – even unto the fourth generation.

Then again, citing the Old Testament probably cuts little ice with these Christians. They do, after all, introduce their attack on Act leader David Seymour’s, Treaty Principles Bill with a quote from the Gospel of Matthew:

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

A fine old Presbyterian once described the Beatitudes (from which the above verse is taken) as “Jesus’s marching orders”. Such a pity, then, that what the clerics put their names to evinces so little in the way of elucidating the paths of peace. Counselling men and women to use their power to silence the voices of others smacks more of violence and repression than peace-making.

Certainly, David Seymour’s epistolary assailants have given him cause to seek solace in the ninth beatitude:

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

For Christ’s sake? Who among the 440 clerics would aver that David Seymour’s Bill is infused with Christian purpose? Not many, if any. Which is disappointing, since the Act leader would appear to have a firmer theological grasp of the issues at stake in this matter than the professors of theology who signed on to the open letter.

“I am not a religious person,” David Seymour tweeted. “However, I do have an enormous respect for the core Christian principle of imago dei – we are each made in the image of God. I like it because it automatically means we all have equal dignity. It is one of the foundations of liberal democracy and whether you are Christian or not, you have to be grateful for the freedom and dignity that idea has given us.”

Well, yes, it does, and we should. The idea that each soul approaches the throne of God naked and alone, no longer cloaked in the pretentions of class, or race, or gender, but only in the artistry of the Creator’s hand, is, perhaps, why the carpenter from Nazareth warned us:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

A beam in the eye of 440 clerics? Surely not?

But what else are we to call a letter which so clearly divides the people of New Zealand into sheep and goats – an exercise in separation considered by most Christians to be the privilege of Jehovah alone.

The letter’s depiction of te Tiriti as a “sacred covenant” is also troubling. No deities of any kind are invoked, or included, in the Treaty’s text. It was a document made on earth, by men, and in the nature of all man-made things its meaning has proved as difficult to pin down as quicksilver.

Is it really such an awful sin to ask the voters of New Zealand to validate, or repudiate, David Seymour’s attempt to define the essence of te Tiriti o Waitangi? After all, God leads us through history towards the future, not the past. It is surely blasphemy to suggest that he has forever bound New Zealanders’ imaginations to the confused deliberations of 6th February 1840.

Is a referendum really so unthinkable? After all, as another wise cleric (not one of the 440) memorably declared: Vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God.

This sermon was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 13 September 2024.

Luxon Rejects The “Rejection Election” At His Peril.

Fitting Right In: National retailed a reactionary manifesto of right-wing, racially-charged policies to the electorate throughout 2023. No talk back then of ignoring the overwhelming political preferences of the voting public and making a strong stand on principle. If Luxon’s pollsters and focus-groups were telling him that the public was in a mood to discipline and punish – then discipline and punish it would be.

MUCH HAS BEEN MADE of Prime Minister Chris Luxon’s definitive rejection of Act’s Treaty Principles Bill. Why? Because Luxon not only confirmed that National will vote against giving David Seymour’s bill a second reading, but at the same time acknowledged that the only reason he agreed to support it to the select committee stage was because he did not want to precipitate an unscheduled general election so soon after 14 October. In addition to providing us with a useful gauge of Luxon’s prime ministerial fortitude, Luxon’s “slap-down” of Seymour’s bottom-line policy also betrays his fundamental misreading of the election result’s meaning.

The General Election of 2023 was a rejection election, and rejection elections are powered, overwhelmingly, by popular anger. Not only was there a broad-based and vociferous element within the electorate determined to punish the incumbent Labour Government, but also a coterminous movement to roll back what was perceived to be Labour’s extreme, ideologically-driven, cultural agenda.

At no time during the election campaign did either Christopher Luxon or the National Party attempt to draw a clear distinction between themselves and the other right-wing parties – Act and NZ First – on matters relating to Māori sovereignty.

When Winston Peters announced his party’s policies in relation to removing Treaty principles from legislation, and reframing the mission of the Waitangi Tribunal, Luxon did not recoil in horror. Nor did he remind New Zealanders that it was National, under Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, that kicked-off the Treaty Settlement process back in the early-1990s. Or recall with pride that it was John Key who sent Pita Sharples to New York to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

To be sure, when questioned directly about Act’s desire to clarify the principles of the Treaty by way of a binding referendum, Luxon described his most obvious coalition partner’s policy as “unhelpful and divisive”. That this response was a sop to the liberal wing of Luxon’s party, and to its more “moderate” voters, was made clear by his promotion of policies that unequivocally aligned the National Party with the right-wing populist mood of the nation. Most notably, National’s policy of curbing co-governance by abolishing Three Waters and the Māori Health Authority.

A National Party willing to send that sort of reactionary message to the electorate was not in the least bit concerned about being seen as “unhelpful” or “divisive”. And neither was the National Party committed to reinstating English at the top of official government stationery.

But those were only the most openly acknowledged efforts to align National with the majority’s determination to reject, repeal, rip-up and remove the ideological advances of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori. Voters who understood the secret language of New Zealand conservatism were in little doubt that National had plenty more punishment in store for Māori New Zealanders.

Conservatives have long exploited the tendency of the racist Right to associate the social pathologies of drug use, domestic abuse, gun violence, aggravated robbery, juvenile delinquency, and truancy with Māori New Zealanders. That these are the pathologies of poverty, afflicting the lives of Pakeha as well as Māori, cuts little ice with right-wingers, who reject structural explanations for anti-social behaviour in favour of those highlighting personal and/or racial deficiencies.

Nor does the Right care overmuch that “cracking down hard” on crime will send Māori New Zealanders to prison in disproportionate numbers, leaving behind broken families and ruined lives. Even though, historically, “tough on crime” policies merely ensure that the cycle of crime and incarceration continues, most National Party voters regard the policy not as “a fiscal and moral failure” (as Bill English described it) but as a necessary evil.

National retailed a reactionary manifesto of right-wing, racially-charged policies to the electorate throughout 2023. Spooked by Act’s record poll numbers, and watching NZ First’s steady rise with alarm, Luxon and his team were in no mood to front-foot National’s liberal traditions. No talk back then of ignoring the overwhelming political preferences of the voting public and making a strong stand on principle. If Luxon’s pollsters and focus-groups were telling him that the public was in a mood to discipline and punish – then discipline and punish it would be.

Not that Luxon, himself, was personally suited to playing the Hard Man. Robotically positive, with his happy-chappy platitudes playing on continuous loop, Luxon left the dog-whistling to his lieutenants. The nearest he came to playing rough was when he dressed up as a pirate – and even then he had to be instructed on how to wield his sword. Even so, when all the votes had been counted and there was a three-way coalition to negotiate, Luxon struggled to locate his inner-thug. The National Party leader’s priority (in almost every setting) is to get whatever he is doing, done – whatever it takes.

And what it took was Luxon’s commitment to Seymour that his Treaty Principles Bill would be backed by National and NZ First to the select committee stage. What that meant was that Act’s coalition partners were supportive of the broad, open-ended debate that sending this particularly controversial bill to a select committee was certain to set in motion. It defies all logic to sanction this course of action if, in utter contempt for the consultation process, and regardless of what the debate reveals about the wishes of the New Zealand people vis-à-vis Te Tiriti o Waitangi, your Party’s next move is to vote it down.

Such a profoundly cynical political strategy would be dangerous at the best of times – and these are not the best of times. New Zealand is in the early stages of the same populist distemper that has polarised and paralysed the United States. Luxon and his party opted to climb on the back of this populist tiger, getting off it will be no simple matter.

To the hundreds-of-thousands of right-wing voters who backed National, Act and NZ First to bring together a government committed to disciplining and punishing Labour and its allies, it looks like Luxon’s National pony has refused its very first fence. Spooked by hui, hikoi and haka at Turangawaewae, Ratana and Waitangi, and bowing to the relentless bullying of the “legacy media”, Luxon has publicly slapped-down the Right’s young champion which, as far as they’re concerned, is the same as slapping them down – the people whose votes put National in power.

But that is not how populism works. You can’t just switch it on and off like a lightbulb. Nor can you boast about ignoring the wishes of the “overwhelming majority” of the New Zealand people. Not if you want to remain the dominant right-wing party.

The sharp up-tick in Act’s support in the latest Curia poll should be taken as a warning. So, too, should the findings of the latest Research New Zealand survey. Against all the confident prognostications of the punditocracy, a solid plurality of Men, New Zealanders aged 18-34, Kiwis living north of Taupo, and (astonishingly) Māori, are in favour of confirming the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi by referendum.

Small wonder then, that in spite of Luxon’s very public slap-down, David Seymour is not at all disposed to giving-up the fight.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 February 2024.