Losing The Working Class.

Workers' Power. The power of the NZ working-class reached its zenith in 1974, when 10,000 workers marched in protest at the Drivers Union leader, Bill Andersen's, arrest - and secured his freedom. The Labour Government of Norman Kirk was frightened of the organised working-class then. Fifty years later, there's precious little left of the private sector unions to inspire fear in anybody.

I ALWAYS WONDERED what it would take to detach the New Zealand working class from Labour. Not all of the working-class, obviously, but enough to strip the party of the demographic heft that, for more than a century, has made it a decisive electoral player. Now I know, but it took a fair few wrong guesses before I got there.

On paper, it should have been Rogernomics. After such a comprehensive betrayal of Labour’s working-class base it seemed impossible that all but the most mindless loyalists would continue to vote for the party. It was the conviction that underpinned Jim Anderton’s creation of the NewLabour Party – give the ordinary working-class voter an honest social-democratic party to vote for and Labour’s electoral base would shift en masse.

Well, that’s exactly what happened in Jim’s seat of Sydenham, but NewLabour’s message fell on deaf ears just about everywhere else. Labour’s candidates reassured the residents of working-class electorates that Rogernomics had been for them. New Zealand could not have gone on the way it had been under Muldoon. Something had to be done. Our economy had to be shaken-up and set on a new, more productive path. It had all been done for them, so their kids and grandkids to look forward to something better than freezing-works and car-plants. If Mickey Savage had been leading Labour in the 1980s, they said, he would have followed exactly the same policies.

And, you know what? It worked. In Labour’s safest seats Jim Anderton’s candidates hardly made a dent in Labour’s bodywork. The workers stayed loyal right through.

Their dogged faith in the Labour Party reminded me of “Boxer”, the indomitable draught horse of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. No matter how many times the pigs who wielded the power made the lives of all the other animals miserable; no matter how many times they slyly amended the rules of the farm (most famously from “All Animals Are Equal” to “All Animals Are Equal – But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others”) Boxer remained loyal to the Revolution, exerting all his mighty strength to keep it going. Until, at last, worn out by his ceaseless exertions, he fell ill and was sold to the proprietor of the local knacker’s yard by the self-same pigs he had always believed in and supported.

There had been other tests of working-class loyalty. The abortion issue had sorely tried the patience of Labour’s working-class Catholics of Irish descent in the 1970s. Homosexual law reform did the same, right across the Christian denominational spectrum, in the 1980s. Like the Springbok Tour of 1981, which had pitted young, mostly middle-class, university students and their liberal middle-aged mentors, against the rough-and-ready working-class lovers of Rugby, the struggle for gay rights was overlaid with an ill-disguised contempt for the morally deficient people its promoters were struggling against.

By the late-1980s, however, the issue which had bitterly divided the traditional Left in the years immediately following the Springbok Tour, and hacked a jagged wound across the trade union movement, was turning up on the conference floor of the Labour Party. The radical quest for Māori sovereignty, and its central political demand – “Honour the Treaty” – could no longer be ignored by the party whose 50-year alliance with the Ratana Movement had given it control of the Māori seats.

That was the moment at which Labour should have grappled with the political implications of Māori sovereignty and the Treaty, thrashing them out for good or ill, until its members, and (much more importantly) its voters grasped their meaning. But, that was not what Labour did. When confronted with policy remits requiring Labour to honour the Treaty of Waitangi, conference delegates and MPs nodded sagely and dutifully raised their hands in support. Very few understood that what they were receiving and passing-on was the political equivalent of a live hand-grenade, and that, one day, the pin of that hand grenade, either by accident or design, was going to be pulled out.

Anyone who has ever wondered how the Fourth Labour Government could so blithely legislate for the Waitangi Tribunal’s reach to extend all the way back to the signing of the Treaty in 1840, or how that judicially pregnant phrase “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” could so carelessly have been inserted into the State Owned Enterprises Act, should wonder no more. The leaders, and the members, of the Labour Party were so ignorant of both the Treaty’s status in Maoridom, and of their country’s morally dubious colonial history, that they simply didn’t see the harm in paying lip-service to Māori demands.

Donna Awatere had put her finger on the phenomenon in her seminal Māori Sovereignty essays, published in Broadsheet:

The strength of white opposition will be allayed by the fact that Maori sovereignty will not be taken seriously. Absolute conviction in the superiority of white culture will not allow most white people to even consider the possibility.

Lord Cooke of Thorndon, however, had no choice but to take the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi seriously. His ground-breaking judgement that the Treaty was “in the nature of a partnership” would produce a rich harvest of subsidiary judgements and policies that, as the decades passed, would draw the descendants of the settlers who made New Zealand closer and closer to the Dock of History.

One of those judgements related to the foreshore and seabed, and came frighteningly close to tipping New Zealand into fierce racial conflict. It was only Helen Clark’s up-close-and-personal interactions with the hard men and women of the Māori nationalist movement, the people she dubbed “haters and wreckers”, that prevented the 2005 General Election from anticipating the 2023 General Election by 18 years. Clark’s effective nullification of the Court of Appeal’s decision, and her unequivocal assertion that the foreshore and seabed belonged to all New Zealanders, was sufficient to hold enough of Labour’s working-class vote to defeat Don Brash’s attempt to start what Act’s David Seymour is now promising to finish.

Unfortunately, Jacinda Ardern, possessed none of her predecessor’s understanding of the Māori nationalist movement and its revolutionary interpretation of the Treaty. When asked to summarise the Treaty’s clauses by journalists in the first months of her premiership, she could not oblige. A classic example of her party’s dangerous propensity to good-naturedly wave Māori demands through Labour’s policy check-points, Ardern simply lacked the political resources to turn back the political demands of such forceful Māori politicians as Willie Jackson and Nanaia Mahuta.

Neither Ardern, nor her successor, Chris Hipkins, had the intellectual or ideological sophistication to argue either For or Against the revolutionary ideas contained in the He Puapua Report. Nor did they possess the courage to follow Helen Clark’s example of political intransigence.

Labour made no case for co-governance because it couldn’t. For the previous 40 years it had put “all that Treaty stuff” in the too-hard, or the too-scary, basket. When the sovereignty hand grenade finally exploded, in the second term of the Sixth Labour Government, the best Labour could manage was to blame the resulting injury to the New Zealand body politic on the “racism” of the people whose votes it would need to go on governing.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t get them. Almost accidentally, Labour discovered what it would take to make the working-class stop voting for it. Not the Pasefika working-class, admittedly, but the “settler” working-class – made up of Pakeha New Zealanders and the children and grandchildren of immigrant workers. Making those citizens feel as though they had, somehow, to justify their right to participate in shaping their nation’s future: that was the crucial catalyst for electoral defection.

Like their European and American counterparts, the New Zealand working-class has completed its historical journey from Left to Right.

And it ain’t going back.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project on Tuesday, 17 October 2023.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today: More at Stake Than Sun and Sand.

In The Public Domain: The territory of New Zealand is the collective possession of all the people who inhabit it, and the question of how best to dispose of its resources the responsibility of their democratically elected representatives – or so argued Helen Clark’s Labour-led Government back in 2003.

“AN UNHAPPY SUMMER” is the prediction of at least one of the Maori leaders laying claim to the foreshore and seabed in response to the Government’s declaration that New Zealand’s beaches and coastal waters lie in the “public domain” - i.e. belong to all of us.

Maori nationalists have raised the prospect of fencing off public beaches and requiring non-Maori to apply for “visas” before being granted access. Titewhai Harawira has gone even further, denouncing the Government’s proposals as another “confiscation” of Maori property rights, and threatening to organise a nationwide march on Parliament in protest.

Cooler Maori heads have expressed their misgivings in less inflammatory language, but with an equal degree of concern at what they regard as the Government’s lack of respect for due process.

The Government’s parliamentary opponents are no less vociferous in their condemnation of its proposed resolution to the foreshore and seabed problem. The National Party, in particular, is highly critical of what it sees as the legally imprecise notion of a “public domain” and is urging the Government to legislate the foreshore and seabed back under Crown ownership immediately – and unequivocally.

“Crown ownership” is, however, a highly problematic expression in the context of Maori/Pakeha relations. Hard though it may be to believe, a great many Maori still construe “Crown ownership” to mean ownership by Queen Elizabeth II (who is deemed to have inherited the title to New Zealand from her Great-Great-Grandmother, Queen Victoria).

A recent example of this constitutional wrong-headedness occurred last month when a gathering of Taranaki Hapu calling themselves Te Puraranga met at Parihaka on 26 July to discuss the foreshore and seabed issue. The hui ended with a ringing declaration of “Maori sovereignty over land and sea”. Having effectively decided to tear up the Treaty of Waitangi, the group then thought it best to send a copy of their declaration to the Queen (along with other “state leaders” in the Pacific region) presumably to let her know that the Windsors’ antipodean real estate had come under new management.

It is precisely to reduce this sort of political naiveté that the Government has introduced the concept of “public domain”. Hopefully, by dispensing with the perennially misunderstood concept of Crown ownership, and replacing it with the new vocabulary of collective ownership, groups like Te Puraranga can be released from their peculiar constitutional delusions.

The territory of New Zealand is the collective possession of all the people who inhabit it, and the question of how best to dispose of its resources the responsibility of their democratically elected representatives.

In other words, sovereignty resides in the people – all the people – and is indivisible. It cannot be reposed anywhere other than in the House of Representatives - which is constructed out of the people’s electoral choices. Nor does it subsist in any ethnic group – no matter how elaborate its genealogy. And sovereignty certainly does not lie in the courts. The New Zealand judiciary exists to enforce the will of the people – as expressed in parliamentary legislation – and has absolutely no mandate to supplant it.

Those who reject these propositions must also repudiate the entire legacy of human civilisation since the Enlightenment. To invest the monarch with anything other than purely ceremonial significance; to elevate the Judiciary above the Legislature; to deny the Executive the right to govern in the people’s name; is to embrace a species of politics engendered by superstition, fed by prejudice, and disfigured by the vagaries of arbitrary power.

Regrettably, such people do exist. In a paper entitled “Some Core Values for Resolving the Foreshore and Seabed Issue” prepared by Te Hau Tikanga - the Maori Law Commission (some of whose members advise the Associate Minister of Maori Affairs, Tariana Turia) one may read the following: “The nature and extent of Iwi and Hapu title and rights to the foreshore are aspects of te tino rangatiratanga which only Iwi and Hapu have the right to define.”

In other words, 15 per cent of New Zealanders, by virtue of their bloodlines, arrogate unto themselves, exclusively, the power to define the “nature and extent’ of their legal rights vis-à-vis the remaining 85 per cent of the population. There is a name for this form of government; it is called Aristocracy: – rule according to genealogical or ethnic descent.

If that is the sort of society New Zealanders wish to live in, all they need to do is keep their heads down and their mouths shut. As an egalitarian democrat, however, I’m hoping that every Kiwi decides to spend this summer at the beach.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post of 22 August 2003.

Checking The Left: The Dreadful Logic Of Fascism.

The Beginning: Anti-Co-Governance agitator, Julian Batchelor, addresses the Dargaville stop of his travelling roadshow across New Zealand . Fascism almost always starts small. Sadly, it doesn’t always stay that way. Especially when the Left helps it to grow.

THERE IS A DREADFUL LOGIC to the growth of fascism. To begin with, it seldom emerges in circumstances of left-wing weakness. Indeed, fascism is almost always a response to what the Right regards as the dangerous strength – or even the imminent triumph – of the Left. Fascism seeks to check the Left, and establishes its typically dictatorial political regimes to prevent the Left from rebuilding and reasserting the power that made fascism “necessary” in the first place.

I couldn’t help musing upon the genesis of fascist movements as I watched a recording of the Dargaville meeting organised by the Christian evangelist Julian Batchelor. The third of many such meetings planned by Batchelor under the banner: “Preserve Democracy, STOP Co-Governance”.

The explicit purpose of Batchelor’s roadshow is to build a mass political movement of Pakeha New Zealanders, not only to stop co-governance, but also to halt what he sees as the state-sanctioned elevation of Māori over European culture. Batchelor’s principal targets are the “tribal representatives or elite Māori” and “elite Māori treatyists” who, he alleges, are hell-bent on transforming New Zealand into “the Zimbabwe of the South Pacific”.

The planned culmination of Batchelor’s anti-Co-Governance crusade is a 100,000-strong gathering to be held at the Auckland Domain on the eve of the General Election – Friday, 13 October 2023.

This is a truly ambitious target. The largest political demonstration ever recorded in New Zealand took place on the eve of the 1938 General Election, when 70,000 supporters of the First Labour Government – most of them trade union members – rallied at the Auckland Domain in a non-violent show of working-class strength.

For Batchelor to succeed, he would need to awaken a huge, and so-far undetected, strata of angry Kiwi racists. And when I say “huge”, I’m talking in the order of a million citizens. A million! Yep. To get a crowd of 100,000 supporters in the Domain, he would have to generate at least that many followers. In any organisation, the ratio of passive to active members is generally around 10:1. Batchelor is, therefore, hoping that at least 20 percent of New Zealanders are mad as hell about co-governance, everything it stands for, and that they’re not going to take it anymore.

About now, the readers of this post will be saying to themselves: “Not. Going. To. Happen.” What they may not be factoring-in to this political equation, however, is the dangerous dynamic at work in what appears to be Batchelor’s method of building his mass movement.

The crowd that gathered in the Kaipara Community Hall in Dargaville on 9 March 2023 was not composed solely of angry and/or curious Pakeha. As any astute observer of current events in the Far North could have predicted (especially following the “Karakia Incident” at the Kaipara District Council meeting back in October 2022) roughly half of the people turning up to hear Batchelor were angry and/or curious Māori. Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for the meeting to dissolve into rancour. Local Māori were shocked by Batchelor’s uncompromising rhetoric. Accusations of “blatant racism” elicited angry responses from those supporting the speaker’s argument. The Police were called. Things turned nasty.

And it was all recorded. Cleverly edited, the confrontation at Dargaville, may yet serve as a powerful recruitment tool for Batchelor’s cause. Posted on social media it may persuade a larger number of angry/curious Pakeha to turn up to the next meeting. Which may turn even nastier, because, predictably, Māori and their anti-racist Pakeha allies are threatening to turn up to shout down Batchelor’s “hate speech”. Undoubtedly, the Police will, once again, be present to keep the antagonists apart. All the elements will be there for another riveting social media post.

Thinking ahead – and apparently unaware of the many legal and political fish-hooks embedded in their intentions – Batchelor’s opponents are planning to contact local councils around the country and urge them not to allow the “blatant racist” to hire their facilities for his public meetings. If some local councils, perhaps worried that Batchelor’s meetings might become unruly, or, even worse, attract threats of serious violence, decide to deny him access to their facilities, then as sure as eggs-are-eggs, the Free Speech Union will become involved. Instantly, Batchelor’s cause will expand to embrace not just the “dangers” of co-governance, but the threat its promoters pose to New Zealanders’ freedom of expression.

It is at this point that Batchelor, providing he possesses both the political smarts and the rhetorical skills to take full advantage of the unfolding situation, may be able to break his movement out of its narrow psychographic confines to engage with a much broader ideological community. People who may not be as hostile to co-governance as Batchelor, but who are extremely hostile to the angry crowds who turn up to shut his meetings down, may feel obliged to, at least, defend his freedom of speech. There may even be an element who feel strongly enough to offer themselves as “security” for Batchelor’s meetings. Naturally, they will wear uniforms – to assist both the Police and the public in distinguishing them from the “extremists”.

With unnerving speed, Batchelor’s movement will begin to acquire all the historical hallmarks of fascism. This will only increase if the Police and the mainstream news media are widely perceived to be – and are criticised for – taking the side of the protesters. Batchelor’s essentially conspiratorial argument that “the elites” are determined to destroy New Zealanders’ rights and freedoms on behalf of anti-democratic “treatyists” will, in the eyes of more and more citizens, be vindicated. The claim that the Left has become too powerful will find a growing number of adherents.

Observing the rapid growth of Batchelor’s far-right pressure group, the National and Act parties will find it very difficult to resist the temptation to range themselves alongside it. Neither of these “official” representatives of the Right will want to be caught opposing Batchelor, for fear that their rivals will immediately come out in support. It is equally hard to see NZ First and the other, even smaller, right-wing parties turning down the chance to piggy-back on what Batchelor’s opponents are angrily calling New Zealand’s shameful “white supremacist” movement.

An awful lot would have to go completely right for Julian Batchelor before his currently tiny travelling roadshow burgeoned into a movement capable of mustering 100,000 New Zealanders into the Auckland Domain. The best reason he has for optimism, however, is the current febrile state of the New Zealand Left. More than any other single factor, the Left’s reaction to Batchelor’s campaign will determine whether it remains a passing curiosity, or develops into something really nasty.

It is, sadly, entirely possible for the worst to happen. If Batchelor becomes the voice of aggrieved Pakeha. If National, Act, NZ First, and all the others rally to his cause – for fear of being lumped in with “treatyists”, “cultural Marxists”, and all the other manifestations of the “Woke Left” – then a great, 100,000-strong, gathering of the right-wing clans in the Auckland Domain on Election Eve suddenly becomes a “live” proposition.

Fascism almost always starts small. Sadly, it doesn’t always stay that way. Especially when the Left helps it to grow.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 17 March 2023.

Understanding Colonisation.

Relentless Advance: The Anglo-Saxon colonisation of North America and Australasia was a very different proposition from the colonisation of India and Africa. In a relatively short period of time the indigenous peoples of Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand were reduced to insignificant minorities by an unceasing flood of settlers from Europe.

SO, HOW DOES IT WORK? At every level, on every subject, the same explanation is offered for Māori disadvantage – colonisation. What’s more, the word itself has acquired such a talismanic quality that its mere utterance is sufficient to close down any further discussion. After all, the only people likely to challenge the colonisation explanation for Māori disadvantage would be the colonisers’ descendants themselves. And they would say that – wouldn’t they?

The colonisers’ descendants might also raise the question as to whether Māori were, in fact, colonised at all. Not a question that anyone would have thought to raise fifty years ago. In the 1970s the argument that Māori had not been colonised would have been laughed out of court. Back then it was generally accepted that, under the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori had ceded sovereignty to the British Crown. What’s more, the British, very soon after the signing of the Treaty, had exercised their sovereignty by annexing New Zealand, declaring it a British colony, and appointing a Governor to rule it. Oh yes, the Māori had been colonised alright – they’d been colonised good and proper.

But, fifty years later, the story has changed. Today we are enjoined to believe that the Māori chiefs gathered at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 did not cede sovereignty to Queen Victoria. Indeed, no less a body than the Waitangi Tribunal has declared that the sovereignty of Māori iwi and hapu remains intact to this day.

It is a curious sort of coloniser who, 180 years after the event, proclaims the untrammelled sovereignty of the indigenous inhabitants of the islands his ancestors had claimed as their own. If the indigenous people of New Zealand were not subjugated by military force, relieved of their lands, forests and fisheries, and pushed to the margins of colonial society, then what was going on between the 1850s and the 1970s?

In the most brutal and unvarnished terms, what was going on between the signing of the Treaty and the military suppression of all Māori resistance in the 1860s and 70s, was a deliberate policy of overwhelming the indigenous people by settling tens-of-thousands of immigrants across the country, to the point where their numerical superiority rendered the construction of a second Britain in the South Pacific a feasible proposition. What made “New Zealand” possible was the reduction of the Māori to a militarily and politically powerless minority in their own land.

A particular kind of colonisation, then? Not at all the same as the colonisation visited upon India and Africa. Not even the same as the colonisation visited upon England and Ireland by the Normans. That sort of colonisation featured a relatively small number of conquerors and a very much larger number of conquered. Hundreds-of-millions of Indians were ruled over by around 100,000 British soldiers and administrators. This was the sort of colonisation which colonised peoples could dismantle – which is pretty much what they spent most of the twentieth century doing.

But, the Anglo-Saxon colonies of North America and Australasia were a very different proposition. In a relatively short period of time the indigenous peoples of those lands were reduced to insignificant minorities by an unceasing flood of settlers from Europe.

This huge discrepancy in numbers rendered military resistance futile. Always there were more, and more, and more Europeans to replace the settlers and soldiers killed by the indigenous tribes. North America and Australasia thus became “Neo-Europes”, ruled over and overwhelmingly populated by Europeans. Even where they escaped becoming the victims of outright genocide, indigenous cultures: their languages, customs, modes of political and economic organisation; found themselves smothered by the sheer pressure of European numbers.

This is the process which Māori, along with the many other indigenous peoples forcibly assimilated into the Neo-Europes created by Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, call “colonisation”. The cultural suffocation that inevitably attended the submerging of indigenous peoples beneath a relentlessly rising tide of nineteenth century immigrants. Settlers who came to stay – and who, more than a century later, are still here.

Within the institutions of the state, and even in a number of private organisations, the answer to colonisation is being presented as “decolonisation” and “indigenisation”. As if the cultural and demographic facts of New Zealand life can be re-configured to the point of somehow undoing the facts of New Zealand history. Regrettably, this strategy carries within it distressing intimations of coercion. The threat is there, all the more daunting for being unstated, that those who refuse to decolonise and indigenise will pay a price.

Given the degree of coercion involved in colonisation itself, this hard-line approach is entirely understandable. Unfortunately, it is also likely to provoke the colonisers’ descendants into adopting an aggressively oppositional stance, which, given the balance of demographic forces, is almost certain to be counterproductive. Attempting to undercut “the tyranny of the majority” by unilaterally redefining the meaning of democracy will only make matters worse.

The decolonising concept of “co-governance” cannot succeed if it is understood by Pākehā to mean that Māori will be empowered to exercise a right of veto over the ownership and delivery of essential state services mostly paid for by Pākehā taxes. European cultural traditions and political norms are simply too deeply embedded in the Neo-Europe called New Zealand for this crude approach to righting the wrongs of the past, and overcoming the inequities of the present, to succeed.

Much more likely to secure Pākehā support is the argument that, in the making of New Zealand far too little concern was shown for the impact the colonists’ nation-building was having on the lives and treasures of Māori iwi and hapu. In their eagerness to create a second Britain in the South Pacific, the colonisers simply crowded-out the indigenous people whose rights they were pledged to respect. Presenting co-governance as a way of encouraging Māori to reclaim their lost space has a high chance of success. That the colonial state smothered and suffocated Māori culture and Māori rights is historically undeniable, and morally indefensible.

Ceding Māori the space they need to both rediscover and redefine their tino rangatiratanga is unquestionably the right thing for Pākehā to do. Encouraging Pākehā to join them in that expanded space is unquestionably the best way for Māori to make Aotearoa less European and more indigenous.

Decolonisation is not a programme to be imposed, it is a skill that Māori and Pākehā can only acquire together.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 7 October 2022.

Two Kings, One Country.

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

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

That was the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Bridge Of Insufficient Strength.

Not Strong Enough: There is no short-cut from our colonial past to a bi-cultural future. Surely, following this flood-ravaged fortnight, the Prime Minister realises that, when the waters rise in fury, bridges get swept away.

A GREAT DEAL can be learned from the metaphors politicians choose to illustrate the challenges they are required to overcome. At the recent gathering of Māori and Pakeha leaders at the Māori King’s Turangawaewae marae, the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, gave us the metaphor of te Tiriti o Waitangi as a bridge. Somehow, she suggested, New Zealanders must be brought safely across this fragile structure. Her job is to lead them.

Listening to the Prime Minister, I was reminded of the compelling final scene of the movie The Man Who Would Be King, in which Sean Connery strides bravely towards safety across a swaying rope bridge. Behind him, enraged tribesmen hack away furiously at the anchoring cables. Beneath him, a yawning chasm waits to swallow-up the foolhardy Scottish soldier.

Certainly, it is difficult to escape the notion that the Prime Minister perceives this present moment to be one of considerable historical danger.

Behind us lies the old society of colonial New Zealand. A society based upon assumptions of racial superiority. A society founded upon the dispossession of the Māori. A society riven by multiple inequities and injustices. Ahead of us lies Aotearoa – the new bi-cultural nation in which a “partnership of the races” will expunge the inequities and injustices of our racist past.

Across this perilous gap between yesterday and tomorrow, the Prime Minister has suspended the Treaty. She offers us her hand – and bids us cross.

The problem with Prime Minister Ardern’s metaphor is that far too few New Zealanders believe the Treaty is strong enough to carry them across the chasm. They fear the chaos into which their country will be plunged if the bridge proves unequal to the burden imposed upon it. They simply do not share the Māori people’s unwavering confidence in a document once referred to by a Chief Justice of New Zealand as “a simple nullity”.

Even those enthusiastic about a bi-cultural future for Aotearoa-New Zealand are beginning to express their doubts about the “official” interpretation of the Treaty as a “partnership between races”. Dame Anne Salmond, for example, writing for the Newsroom website, reminds us that race is “a colonial idea with an ugly history, associated with slavery, genocide and the dehumanisation of others, and utterly inimical to respecting [New Zealanders’] ‘tapu and mana’.”

Pakeha conservatives, on the other hand, listen to what they judge to be the exaggerated and essentially self-serving claims of Māori historians and lawyers who would have us believe that te Tiriti o Waitangi is Magna Carta and the United States Constitution all rolled into one unchallengeable fragment of Holy Writ. Their reading of New Zealand history and New Zealand law simply cannot be squared with what is fast becoming the “official” explanation of the Treaty.

For far too many New Zealanders the Prime Minister’s invitation to step onto her bridge to the future is an invitation to catastrophe.

Perhaps there would be a higher level of confidence in the Treaty’s strength if the Prime Minister was better able to explain its corollary – “co-governance”. So eloquent on other subjects, Jacinda Ardern becomes uncharacteristically tongue-tied when invited to “sell” the concept behind what her critics characterise as Labour’s racially-charged and electorally unmandated policies – most particularly Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s “Three Waters” project.

This inability to explain co-governance is not restricted to the Prime Minister. The attempt by her Māori Development Minister, Willie Jackson, to reassure New Zealanders that they have nothing to fear from this “new” variant of democracy has succeeded only in frightening the bejesus out of them. If this is what lies on the other side of the chasm bridged by the Treaty, then the Sixth Labour Government should not be surprised at the number of Kiwis declining to make the journey.

In the wise words of Dame Anne: “Rather than seeing the Treaty as a ‘bridge’ across a chasm of misunderstanding, in the spirit of ‘pernicious polarisation’, perhaps Te Tiriti can be visualised as a meeting place where different groups of New Zealanders come together in a spirit of tika/justice, pono/truth, and aroha to share ideas, resolve injustices and seek peace with one another.”

There is no short-cut from our colonial past to a bi-cultural future. Surely, following this flood-ravaged fortnight, the Prime Minister realises that, when the waters rise in fury, bridges get swept away.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 26 August 2022.

Controlling The Past.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” - William Faulkner

IT WAS NEARLY SIX YEARS AGO that I defended New Zealanders’ historical ignorance as a not altogether bad thing. In a column entitled “Let Sleeping Ghosts Lie”, I wrote:

There is a reason why so many of the signposts to old battle sites are weathered and overgrown; why lichen has been allowed to obliterate the names of those who fell. Sleeping ghosts, like sleeping dogs, should never be needlessly awakened.

Unsurprisingly, New Zealand history teachers were outraged. How can New Zealand’s peoples be reconciled, and past injustices put right, if its young people are kept in ignorance of their country’s past?

It was a battle-cry that carried the reformers to victory. Under the Labour-led government of Jacinda Ardern, the positive noises made by Bill English’s National-led government were translated into hard-and-fast policy. From 2023, New Zealand history will be a compulsory feature of the school curriculum for Years 1-10.

A cause for celebration? Well, that depends upon your point of view. History is as much about the present as it is about the past. What we choose to remember, to bring forward into the consciousness of people living today, is a profoundly political act, with frequently explosive political consequences.

Just how fraught with danger the emerging new curriculum promises to be was brought home to the viewers of an item broadcast on Monday night’s edition of One News.

A Māori mother was distressed because her son’s class had been asked to give a Yes or No answer to the question: ‘Should land be returned to Māori?’ She expressed her displeasure at what she described as the closed nature of the question and its lack of context.

There will be many New Zealanders, however, in whose judgement the question posed is entirely fair and reasonable. Any accurate account of the history of Māori-Pakeha relations since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi cannot fail to conclude that, as one history teacher interviewed for the news item declared:

“Their [Māori] ancestors were evicted, essentially, from their lands, which [were] taken from them”.

If justice and reconciliation is the goal of the new compulsory curriculum, then the question of who owns New Zealand can hardly be avoided.

The problem, of course, is that if the correct answer to the offending teacher’s question is: “Yes, the lands that were unjustly (illegally) taken from Māori should be restored to them”; then, immediately, a whole host of subsidiary questions arise. Supplying honest answers to these questions will likely prove beyond the resources of New Zealand’s teachers.

Herein lies the danger. Once the scale of injustice is exposed, how should students – Māori and Pakeha – respond? Being young, their answers are likely to echo the words of the New Zealand poet, James K. Baxter:

Anger is bread/To the poor, their guns more accurate than justice

Knowing New Zealand bureaucracy’s horror of passion and plain speaking, it seems a given that teachers will not only be expected to make sure that such sentiments are discouraged, but that they are also suppressed.

We are thus presented with a policy paradox. Our government is insisting that young New Zealanders be taught their country’s history: but not in a way that allows them to both perceive the truths of the past, and act upon them in the present. If you think this contradiction is bound to tie our history teachers up in all manner of pedagogical and cultural knots, then I think you’re right!

One more thing arises out of Monday’s One News item – and it bothers me.

How is the Ministry of Education proposing to deal with the cultural reality that most of the teachers, and most of the students, involved in the new history curriculum will be non-Māori? If Te Ao Māori drives the responses of tangata whenua, then is it not equally true that the cultural life-worlds of non-Māori will determine their responses? How, then, are we to avoid the new history curriculum generating in the here-and-now exactly the same conflicts that beset the past?

If the answer to that question involves a huge amount of prescriptive effort, centred around what teachers and students can think and say, then serious politico-cultural conflict is inevitable.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell wrote: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

Fasten your seat-belts.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 April 2022.

Thoughts On Waitangi Day, 2022.

Disputed Sovereignty: Politics as usual is no longer capable of delivering an Aotearoa worth living in. It is time for a new net to go fishing.

PERHAPS IT WAS just as well Omicron’s Red Light put paid to this year’s Waitangi celebrations. Too much is moving at speed on the front we used to call “race relations”. An embittered series of polemical exchanges on the Treaty Grounds would not have facilitated the clear and calm thinking so urgently needed on the nature and ultimate purpose of the “Treaty partnership”.

Such decisions as have been made: the new history curriculum, Māori representation in local government, the Māori Health Authority, Three Waters; have only whetted the appetite of an increasingly impatient younger generation of Māori nationalists. Those older activists who see the bi-centenary of the Treaty’s signing in 2040 as the best finishing post for a te Tiriti-based constitutional transformation will likely be disappointed.

Driven by the 15-strong Labour Māori Caucus, which must, itself, keep an eye on the even more unabashed radicalism of the Māori Party. Aided by a mainstream news media determined to make good the historical harms inflicted upon Māori by its deeply prejudicial coverage of New Zealand race relations. The drive towards constitutional transformation has acquired an momentum that cannot now be easily, or painlessly, slowed.

Interviewed by leading Māori journalist Julian Wilcox for the first broadcast of RNZ-National’s new programme, Māpuna, on Saturday (5/2/22) newly appointed Māori Land Court judge, Aidan Warren, warned of the growing impatience evident among rangatahi. It is becoming increasingly difficult for older Māori, Warren observed, to counsel patience successfully. Simply pointing to the rapidly increasing numbers of strategically located Māori professionals is no longer enough. Māori society is experiencing that most frightening of social phenomena, a “revolution of rising expectations”.

Armed with the well-honed arguments of Māori lawyers, historians and political activists, and marching to the beat of their own musicians, young Māori activists are unlikely to wait another 18 years for the construction of a new, te Tiriti-based, Aotearoa to be completed. After 182 years of Pakeha domination, the emerging consensus among young Māori activists seems to be that the time for waiting is over.

What, then, are they likely to make of David Seymour’s “State of the Nation” address of last Friday? (4/2/22) In what some commentators have already described as an updated version of Don Brash’s in/famous “Nationhood” speech to the Orewa Rotary Club, Seymour offers those New Zealanders yet to be persuaded of the need for a te Tiriti-based constitution the following, potentially inflammatory, propositions:

The next Government will not be able to simply stop doing new things that divide New Zealand. We will have to actively push back against the divisive idea that there are two kinds of New Zealanders.

We will need to remove the constant references to the Treaty from the law and replace it with a commitment to liberal democracy. One person, one vote, and equality for all in a multi-ethnic nation state.

It means removing co-governance structures from healthcare, from resource management, infrastructure, and education. It means going through the statute books and removing the distinctions in law that hold my Māori ancestors as legally different from my European ones.

The election of a National-Act government in which the balance of right-wing parliamentary forces made the implementation of these highly contentious policies a non-negotiable element of any coalition agreement would be potentially calamitous. The immovable object of right-wing Pakeha resistance to te Tiriti-based constitutional change would meet the irresistible force of youthful Māori nationalism (with plenty of Pakeha allies in tow). Something, or someone, would have to give up – or in.

It probably wouldn’t be Māori. As AUT’s Ella Henry told Moana Maniapoto in the course of Māori Television’s excellent Waitangi Day programming: when set against an historical backdrop extending back 3,000 years across the Pacific, the 200 years of Aotearoa’s European colonisation is just “one bad day”.

There was a time when those same European colonists spoke piteously about “smoothing the pillow” of the dying Māori race. And yet, the tangata whenua are still here.

Would voters really be willing to test the practicality of Act’s programme to effectively roll back the judicial, institutional, political and (most importantly) the economic and social progress made by Māori over the last 50 years? More to the point, would National? How many New Zealanders, when push came to shove, would be willing to embrace the repressive measures necessary to nullify the inevitable Māori resistance? Is it not more likely that a majority would opt to avert such a potentially tragic course by voting for a less combustible coalition?

But, even if they did, the challenge of te Tiriti-based constitutional transformation remains. Would it not be better for Labour, the Greens, and even National, to grasp the nettle and simply hand over the whole question to a constitutional convention?

Using the recent Chilean constitutional convention as a model, the first stage of the process would be the nationwide election of delegates. Not only would this require the four-fifths of the population who are non-Māori to decide what sort of future they favoured, but it would also require the Māori promoters of a te Tiriti-based constitutional transformation to come out from behind the closed doors where, to date, so much of the detailed discussion of what their new Aotearoa might look like has taken place.

Māori have, quite understandably, been reluctant to state too openly, or with too much detail, exactly what their preferred future would look like. Their preference has been to let their revolution unfold from the top down in a series of fait accomplis impervious to popular challenge from below. To spend the next 18 years very slowly boiling the Pakeha frog.

The consequences of this strategy are already ominously clear in Act’s reactionary propositions. If “co-governance” is perceived in terms of 15 percent of the electorate imposing its will on the other 85 percent, then it’s a non-starter. Which is why, as many of the participants in Moana Maniapoto’s Waitangi Day discussion were at considerable pains to explain, co-governance should be viewed not simply as a means of restoring Māori mana, but also of radically expanding the horizons of all the human-beings who have made Aotearoa their home.

Do Labour and the Greens have the courage to demand that all New Zealanders either put up, or shut up, by voting for or against the constitution eventually presented to the electorate by the Convention? Does National?

The colonial state of our fathers is slowly but surely breaking up. If we are to avoid Antonio Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” – the product of an old system that is dying while its successor struggles to be born – then all of us will have to find the courage to dream dreams and see visions of an Aotearoa in which both tangata whenua and tauiwi can grow and flourish.

Politics as usual is no longer capable of delivering an Aotearoa worth living in. It is time for a new net to go fishing.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 7 February 2022.

Not On The List.

A Moral Authority? The Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt, is supposed to uphold the secular character of the New Zealand state. As a public servant, he is not entitled to talk like an Archbishop. He may tell us what is lawful and unlawful. He may even reiterate the purposes of the Act of Parliament which created his office. But he has no mandate whatsoever to instruct New Zealanders on what is “Right” and what is “Wrong”.

PAUL HUNT, our British-born Chief Human Rights Commissioner, missed his calling. He would have made a much better Archbishop of Canterbury.

Archbishops are expected to use terms like Good and Evil, Right and Wrong. They subscribe to a faith in which the moral conduct of its adherents determines where they spend eternity: in Heaven, or in Hell.

Chief Human Rights Commissioners, however, are supposed to uphold the secular character of the New Zealand state. As public servants, they are not entitled to talk like Archbishops. They may tell us what is lawful and unlawful. They may even reiterate the purposes of the Act of Parliament which created their office. But they have no mandate whatsoever to instruct New Zealanders on what is “Right” and what is “Wrong”.

It is the arrogation of precisely this sort of moral authority, and the determination to instruct New Zealanders in right conduct, that makes the recent opinion piece by Mr Hunt, published in the NZ Herald of 31 August 2021, so objectionable. That, and the answers he gives to the questions he asks himself about “hate speech”.

“What’s the most effective way of stopping – or at least moderating – hate speech?” Mr Hunt self-inquires. The answer? “A fair, equitable, inclusive, diverse, plural, open, multicultural society which, in Aotearoa New Zealand, is grounded on Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

It is difficult to imagine a sentence more loaded with concepts more likely to spark lively, not to say bitter controversy. The nature of fairness, and its first cousin, equity, has taxed humanity’s best minds of more than two millennia. What are the boundaries of inclusiveness? How much diversity is a society obliged to tolerate? Does multiculturalism tend towards unity or division? Does pluralism? How far does a society open itself before it simply collapses? Is the Treaty of Waitangi New Zealand’s “founding document”, or an historical artifact now dangerously overloaded with obligations nowhere iterated in the document itself?

Mr Hunt’s solution for hate speech – a New Zealand Utopia in which all of these controversial concepts have been debated and resolved to the satisfaction of all its citizens – is self-evidently unsatisfactory. Clearly, such an utopian state-of-affairs could only have arisen in circumstances of untrammeled freedom of expression. Only in an intellectual climate peculiarly favourable to the discussion of contentious and even painful propositions could such an astonishing level of consensus have possibly been achieved. And yet, reading the rest of Mr Hunt’s essay, it becomes increasingly clear that any form of speech which alarms, excludes, distresses, and/or “denies dignity”, is “vile” and must be prohibited by law.

Mr Hunt is very keen on establishing the “boundaries” at which the robust discussion of ideas must cease. “If you are powerful and privileged,” he writes, “it is easy to dismiss the idea of boundaries indicating what is acceptable. But if you are a member of a disadvantaged group […] boundaries matter.”

It is here, of course, that Mr Hunt, for all his fine talk of “a respectful model for relations between individuals and communities” comes unstuck. By his own admission, the proposed hate speech legislation will have, as one of its principal aims, the limitation of the ability of the “powerful and privileged” to defend their interests.

But, who are the powerful and the privileged? Mr Hunt is extremely careful not to identify those upon whom these tendentious labels should be pinned. We can, however, answer the question by a simple process of elimination. Mr Hunt identifies the “disadvantaged groups” – i.e. those without power and privilege – as: tangata whenua, ethnic minorities, faith communities, sexual minorities, women, and disabled people.

Who is missing from this list? Well, men, obviously. That is to say, men who are not brown, gay, transgendered and/or disabled. Which just leaves white men. This is the group Mr Hunt is enjoining to be “respectful, self-aware, and empathetic” as the hate speech debate heats up.

Also missing from Mr Hunt’s list of disadvantaged groups are the poor and the exploited. Which is strange, because down through the ages it is the poor and the exploited who have felt the lash of power and privilege most keenly. What’s more, the key which unlocked the shackles fastened upon them by the powerful was always and everywhere – Free Speech.

Then again, as all Archbishops know: “The poor are always with us.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 September 2021.

The He Puapua Revolution.

Bastion Point, 25 May 1978: Even when it became obvious that New Zealand’s indigenous population was not going to disappear quietly into history, the sort of political and cultural concessions so clearly required to construct a bi-cultural nation failed to eventuate. If this country is to have a peaceful and prosperous future, however, these long-delayed concessions must be made. Pakeha New Zealanders simply have no choice: the colonial state no longer possesses the power to deny Maori the co-governance they seek – except by ripping New Zealand apart.

WE ARE IN the early stages of a revolution - much like the one New Zealand went through in the 1980s. Traditional leftists will, of course, object that “Rogernomics” was not a revolution. Others will insist that what New Zealanders actually experienced in 1984 was a “bureaucratic coup d’état”. Some will even claim that between 1984 and 1993 this country underwent a “counter-revolution” against the radical economic and social changes that characterised the thirty extraordinary years between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s.

Whatever.

Revolution, at least for me, isn’t about ideology, it’s about how decisively the revolutionaries are willing to break with the doctrines and institutions of the existing order, and how successful they are at replacing them.

By this definition, Rogernomics definitely qualifies as a revolution – albeit a revolution undertaken from the top down. Before the revolution New Zealand was an unabashedly social-democratic country. The state owned a substantial chunk of the economy and the workforce was heavily unionised. Economic regulation was heavy-handed and the domestic market heavily protected. New Zealand’s welfare state guaranteed the overwhelming majority of its citizens a job, a home, healthcare, education and generous financial support in times of adversity.

After the Rogernomics Revolution, New Zealand’s economy was proudly market-driven. State-owned enterprises were privatised and the unions reduced to a shadow of their former strength. Regulation became so light-handed that many businesses simply ignored it altogether. The domestic market welcomed the merchandise of the whole world. New Zealand’s welfare state had been (to use the language of the new regime) “downsized”.

What’s more, these changes stuck. Regardless of whether National or Labour occupied the Treasury Benches, the doctrines and institutions of the Rogernomics Revolution remained firmly in place.

In many respects, Rogernomics resembled that other great “top-down revolution” – the English Reformation. It was King Henry VIII who ploughed under the old feudal order and replaced it with a new, recognisably modern, approach to governance. His separation of the English church from Rome raises thoughts of Brexit; and his ruthless dissolution of the monasteries may count as History’s first great privatisation programme. What’s more, the King’s changes “stuck”. In spite of her best efforts, Henry’s daughter, “Bloody Mary”, could not reverse her father’s transformation of English society.

If Rogernomics represented a revolution in the way New Zealand’s economy and society was run, what may end up being called the “He Puapua Revolution” will thoroughly reshape New Zealand’s constitutional and political institutions and decisively reconfigure its culture. Like Rogernomics, He Puapua’s will be a top-down revolution: conceived and implemented by political and bureaucratic elites – with encouragement from the country’s most innovative and dynamic economic actors.

The He Puapua Revolution, like most revolutions, will be made possible by the glaring failures of the system it promises to replace. The New Zealand state, born of this nation’s colonial past, has consistently failed to serve the interests of Maori. Even when it became obvious that the country’s indigenous population was not going to disappear quietly into history, the sort of political and cultural concessions so clearly required to construct a bi-cultural nation failed to eventuate. If New Zealand is to have a peaceful and prosperous future, however, these long-delayed concessions must be made. Pakeha New Zealanders simply have no choice: the colonial state no longer possesses the power to deny Maori the co-governance they seek – except by ripping New Zealand apart.

Unsurprisingly, it was among the people charged with running the New Zealand state that this impasse first became apparent. Among its senior judges; its more perspicacious bureaucrats; its shrewdest politicians. All of them informed, it must be acknowledged, by its most radical academics. These latter, naturally, passed their insights down to their best and brightest students.

Thus was the doctrine of “Treaty Partnership” born. Thus was the “Treaty Settlement Process” launched. Thus emerged the successful iwi corporates and their dynamic business and political protégés. Thus began the necessary process of building up an ideological cadre capable of making the revolution a reality. Assembling patiently the sort of talent responsible for conceiving the revolutionary constitutional transformations set forth with such disarming candour in the He Puapua Report.

Are people marching in the street for He Puapua’s revolutionary changes? Of course not. The street demonstrations will only assemble, with ever-increasing determination, if the He Puapua Revolution fails.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 May 2021.

Falling Between Two Treaties: A Reply To Dr Emily Beausoleil.

Bringing The Past Into The Present: For the proposed solutions of those promoting a Tiriti-based constitution of Aotearoa to work, the whole history of New Zealand subsequent to the signing of the Treaty must be set to one side, and New Zealanders living in 2021 must proceed as if they are living in 1840. This is necessary because in no other way can the terms employed to translate the English of the Treaty into the Maori of te Tiriti be infused with real constitutional significance. 

THE “CONVERSATION” demanded on the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi is likely to be short. Not because there is no need for a national debate on how Maori and Pakeha should live together in the twenty-first century, but because the current defenders of te Tiriti (as it is now advisable to call the Maori translation of Captain Hobson’s document) will be unable to present a convincing defence of their ahistorical interpretation of its undertakings.

The reason for this incapacity is a simple one. To make their proposed solutions work, the whole history of New Zealand subsequent to the signing of the Treaty must be set to one side, and New Zealanders living in 2021 must proceed as if they are living in 1840. This is necessary because in no other way can the terms employed to translate the English of the Treaty into the Maori of te Tiriti be infused with real constitutional significance. What the promoters of a Tiriti-based constitution of Aotearoa are saying, in effect, is that everything which New Zealanders came to understand about their state must be cast aside, and that we must all begin again.

Is it reasonable to ask the five million human-beings inhabiting these islands in 2021 to agree to such a proposition? Dr Emily Beausoleil, senior lecturer in Political Science at Victoria University, writing for Newsroom, insists that it is.

Working from the strongly contested conclusion of the Waitangi Tribunal that “the rangatira who signed te Tiriti o Waitangi in February 1840 did not cede sovereignty to the British Crown”, Dr Beausoleil dismisses dissenters’ objections as “misconceptions” born out of “conflicting translations” and “the greater airtime the English version has had in our schools, media and government.” She does, however, acknowledge that the Tribunal’s 2014 rangatiratanga bombshell “also raises serious questions without any easy answers about what fulfilling these Articles [of te Tiriti] would require of us as a society today.”

Well, yes, it most certainly does.

Serious questions about the Treaty’s meaning have been raised before in New Zealand history. The most serious were arguably those raised by the leaders of the new settler state established by the New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852, whose first Parliament met in Auckland in 1854. A strong argument can be mounted that the Foreign and Colonial Office, in persuading the British parliament to grant its New Zealand colony a large measure of self-government, was effectively affirming the cynical view of the Treaty enunciated by one of the Governors of the land-grabbing New Zealand Company:

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

There is a logic to the Treaty, however, which is present in both the English and the Maori versions. A logic which asserted itself more and more forcefully as the settler government of New Zealand became ever more firmly established, and the number of Pakeha arriving in the country grew by leaps and bounds. The guarantees contained in Article 2 of the Treaty: that only the Crown could purchase Maori land; and that any decision to sell land had to conform with the tikanga (customs and practices) of chieftainship; were simply incompatible with the settler government’s vision of New Zealand’s future. The Maori King Movement, by refusing to sell any more land to the Crown, exposed the logic of the Treaty in a way that made a decisive settler response inevitable.

It came in 1863, when the settler government, aided by 12,000 imperial British troops, militarily overwhelmed the Maori Kingdom of the Waikato. Article 1, which, in the only version of the Treaty the settler government recognised, granted the Crown full and undivided sovereignty, was deemed to trump Article 2. This amounted to what the distinguished New Zealand legal scholar, Professor Jock Brookfield, described as a “revolutionary seizure of power”.

It was a revolution which resulted in the Treaty of Waitangi being dismissed as “a simple nullity”, and which led to the ruthless suppression of all Maori resistance to Pakeha rule. Built upon the expropriated resources of the autonomous Maori communities which preceded it, the New Zealand State has, with the passing of time, won both the de facto and the de jure right to dispose of these islands as it sees fit.

Dr Beausoleil’s arguments in favour of implementing the “Tiriti-led” recommendations of the controversial He Puapua Report would be a lot more convincing if she simply acknowledged that, for the logic of the Treaty to be successfully reasserted, then a similar “revolutionary seizure of power” will be necessary.

Significantly, the word “revolution” does not appear in Dr Beausoleil’s Newsroom post. The transition to a Tiriti-based constitution is, instead, to be accomplished by education and persuasion. In her words:

“When we understand these commitments, objections that He Puapua is divisive and undemocratic […] begin to ring hollow. Changing our institutions to more fully realise the unceded authority of tangata whenua would not only fulfil our Tiriti and United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples obligations and thereby make our power arrangements more legitimate – it would also mean greater self-determination, equality and meaningful voice among Tiriti partners.”

That’s a nice vision of the future, but, as someone who lectures in Political Science ought to know, the efficacy of education and persuasion in the state’s application of political, economic, social and cultural power is – to put it mildly – limited. Such a host of interests; such an array of prejudices; such a collection of legal and constitutional objections stand in the way of securing majority consent for even a tenth of He Puapua’s recommendations that the chances of bringing any of them into force by democratic means are vanishingly small.

More to the point, if a majority of New Zealanders come to believe that their government is attempting to bring about a revolutionary change in New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements by stealth, then the opportunity for any of us – Maori or Pakeha – to participate in the creation of Dr Beausoleil’s “more just, more honourable, more inclusive Aotearoa” will disappear entirely.

When Britain’s soldiers, having executed the “revolutionary seizure of power” demanded of them by the settler government, departed, did they leave behind them a more just, more honourable and more inclusive New Zealand? Or, did they bid farewell to a state which, having secured these islands by force of arms, would surrender them to nothing else?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 11 May 2021.

A Break In The Wave: Giving Effect To The UN Declaration On The Rights Of Indigenous Peoples In Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Stormy Seas: Will Jacinda Ardern's Labour Government stand behind the revolutionary proposals contained in He Puapua – the 20-year plan devised by a government appointed working group to realise the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand?

“GETTING AHEAD of the story” is one of the most important aspects of crisis management. As the PR mavens are fond of reminding their clients: “Explaining is losing.” If Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government is not very careful, however, it will soon find itself having to explain why it has failed to reject out-of-hand an official document which calmly anticipates the end of democracy as most New Zealanders understand it.

The Report of the Working Group on a Plan to Realise the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Aotearoa/New Zealand is one of the most remarkable documents ever submitted to a Minister of the Crown. Set forth on its pages is a twenty-year plan to transform New Zealand from one of the world’s oldest and most respected continuous democracies into what would effectively be a political condominium, presided over by co-equal Maori and Non-Maori rulers. A state in which the economic and cultural power of non-indigenous New Zealanders would be much diminished, and the authority, wealth and influence of its indigenous people greatly expanded.

Entitled He Puapua, the report’s authors: Claire Charters, Kayla Kingdon-Bebb, Tamati Olsen, Waimirirangi Ormsby, Emily Owen, Judith Pryor, Jacinta Ruru, Naomi Solomon and Gary Williams; are refreshingly upfront about the scope of their endeavours. In an explanatory note on the report’s title they sate:

‘He puapua’ means ‘a break’, which usually refers to a break in the waves. Here, it refers to the breaking of the usual political and societal norms and approaches. We hope that the breaking of a wave will represent a breakthrough where Aotearoa’s constitution is rooted in te Tiriti o Waitangi and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

For most people “the breaking of the usual political and societal norms and approaches” is another way of describing revolutionary change. Certainly, it is difficult to interpret the Declaration Working Group’s (DWG) blueprint for change as anything less. It is highly unlikely, however, that when the Prime Minister spoke of “transformation”, she was referring to He Puapua’s proposed revolutionary reconstruction of the New Zealand state.

Even so, when the Minister of Maori Development, Nanaia Mahuta, presented her paper entitled DEVELOPING A PLAN ON NEW ZEALAND’s PROGRESS ON THE UNITED NATIONS DECLARATION ON THE RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES to the 18 March 2019 meeting of the Cabinet Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti Committee, it is rather surprising that her colleagues were not temporarily deafened by political alarm bells going off in their heads.

Did none of those present think to parse out the potentially disastrous political consequences of commissioning a “Declaration plan” which, according to Mahuta, “could be a national plan of action, a strategy, or some other tool that provides a map that demonstrates and guides progress across government. I expect the Declaration plan to include time-bound, measurable actions that show how we are making a concerted effort towards achieving the objectives of the Declaration.”

Clearly not, because that is precisely what the DWG presented to the Minister seven months later. Te Puni Kokiri’s response to the document was certainly not discouraging: “The DWG provided the Minister with their final report, He Puapua, on 1 November 2019. The DWG’s report was highly insightful and provided a positive starting point to guide our thinking and will be used as part of the work programme to develop a Declaration plan.”

Somewhere, however, someone decided that, on reflection, it might be better to keep the content of He Puapua under wraps. It was not until October of 2020 that Mahuta consented to the release of a highly truncated version of the report.

Unsurprisingly, given the content of He Puapua, opponents of the now decades old “Maori Separatist” agenda were not slow to recognise its radical implications for the future of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements. Former Act MP, and founder/director of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research, Muriel Newman, even managed to secure of copy of the whole 123-page document. 

Newman’s judgement of the report’s contents was savage:

In essence, once a Treaty-based constitution is in place and tikanga is embedded in the common law, under Vision 2040 Maori separatists will control the country.

This is not pie in the sky. It is already underway.

There has been no public debate about the Declaration, nor was it mentioned in the Labour Party’s election manifesto.

The only information freely available about this UN plan to replace New Zealand democracy with tribal rule – and enact the biggest overhaul of public affairs this country has ever seen – was a general announcement by Minister Mahuta in 2019, and now, a year and a half later, the partial publication of a document revealing Jacinda Ardern’s dangerous intentions.

Are the National Party and Act aware of the existence of He Puapua, its contents and recommendations? Maybe not. In October of 2020 both of the right-wing parties were in the midst of an election campaign and its aftermath. It is just possible that they missed the importance – and even the fact – of its release altogether.

Besides, as Newman points out, it was under the Prime Ministership of National’s John Key that New Zealand signed-on to the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Or, more precisely, it was Key who authorised the Maori Party co-leader, Pita Sharples to fly off secretly to New York in April 2010 to surprise the world with his country’s acceptance at the United Nations.

At the time this was considered something of a coup for both Sharples and Key. After all, the Labour leader, Helen Clark, had consistently refused to support the Declaration while she was prime minister. Clark, like Winston Peters, was convinced that its provisions would have dire consequences for the country’s democratic institutions. Peters’ summation was typically trenchant: “The United Nations Indigenous Peoples Declaration… is the final step on the road to separatism. This is the road to Zimbabwe.”

But if Newman is right, and National is steering clear of the whole issue out of embarrassment, that still leaves unexplained Act’s failure to respond to what can only be considered the most extraordinary political gift.

For a classical liberal party like Act, the idea that a fundamental transformation in the nation’s constitutional, legal, political, economic and cultural arrangements could be contemplated in secret, and enacted piecemeal, without the prior passage of an authorising referendum, piles anathema upon abomination.

Act’s leader, David Seymour, should be demanding from the present Minister of Maori Development a categorical rejection of He Puapua’s “roadmap”. At the very least he should be seeking a rock-solid commitment from Willie Jackson – and the Prime Minister – that the creation of a bi-cultural state, founded squarely upon the prevailing reading of te Tiriti o Waitangi and the provisions of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, will only proceed on the basis of a two-thirds referendum majority.

Will he, though? The possibility has to be conceded that Act – along with National – will dismiss He Puapua as just one more example of Te Puni Kokiri’s magical thinking. If this is, indeed, their response, then they will be vindicating the prediction made nearly 40 years ago by Donna Awarere, author of the ground-breaking series of articles published in Broadsheet under the title “Maori Sovereignty”:

The strength of white opposition will be allayed by the fact that Maori sovereignty will not be taken seriously. Absolute conviction in the superiority of white culture will not allow most white people to even consider the possibility.

The likely consequences for Labour, however, if “white people” are persuaded to take the ideas and plans contained in the DWG’s report seriously, are potentially so dire that the only realistic way to get ahead of this story is to kill it – and He Puapua – stone dead.


This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 12 April 2021.

Safeguarding Maori Wards: A Significant Treaty Victory.

Nothing New Here: At the level of national affairs, ethnicity has been recognised as a significant aspect of political representation since 1867. That was the year New Zealand’s 13-year-old parliament deemed it expedient to create four “Maori Seats”, for the purposes of giving a voice to, and representing the interests of, New Zealand’s “native” population. Extending the principle to local government does not seem unreasonable.

MAORI HAVE A SIGNIFICANT victory to celebrate this Waitangi Day. Monday’s announcement by Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta heralds a significant shift in the representative breadth of local government in New Zealand. Maori wards are about to become a common feature of this country’s democratic architecture. Mahuta’s reforms will be remembered as an important historical step towards realising fully the bi-cultural constitutional assumptions implicit in the treaty signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840.

Not all New Zealanders will celebrate Mahuta’s legal changes. Many will decry the Government’s decision to retrospectively eliminate the legal rights of New Zealand citizens. They will further lament the damage Mahuta’s reforms will inflict upon the unitary character of the New Zealand state.

The world does not look kindly upon states that openly proclaim the existence of two (or more) categories of citizenship. It condemned the United States of America’s “Jim Crow” South (1878-1954). Likewise South Africa’s apartheid regime (1948-1994). The Israeli state’s legal elevation of Jewish over non-Jewish citizens raises similar misgivings. The liberal-democratic tradition – out of which the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was born - proclaims the equality of all human-beings, and looks askance at any state which bestows legal rights upon one group of its citizens while statutorily withholding them from another.

In the case of Maori wards, the arguments in opposition are generally represented by the phrase “single standard of citizenship”. Local government representation is based upon the number of New Zealanders living within the democratically determined geographical boundaries of regions, districts and cities. Constitutionally, the ethnicity of those New Zealand citizens (or permanent residents) is not supposed to signify.

Except that, at the level of national affairs, ethnicity has been recognised as a significant aspect of political representation since 1867. That was the year New Zealand’s 13-year-old parliament deemed it expedient to create four “Maori Seats”, for the purposes of giving a voice to, and representing the interests of, New Zealand’s “native” population.

Conceptually, it is but a short step from “Maori seats” to “Maori wards”.

If New Zealand’s constitution has survived its deviation from strict liberal-democratic theory at the national level for 154 years, without serious mishap, then what possible objection can their be to replicating that deviation at the local level? Anomalous though New Zealand’s special “indigenous” provisions may be in terms of liberal-democratic theory, they have proved remarkably successful in practice. Proof to many New Zealanders of their country’s improvisational genius.

Ours may be a No. 8 Wire constitution – but it works.

Why, then, was legal provision made for citizens to challenge councils’ decisions to create single, or multiple, Maori wards? After all, no such provision exists allowing citizens-initiated referenda to overturn the creation/composition of general council wards. What was it that made it acceptable for plans to provide effective local representation for New Zealand’s indigenous minority to be vetoed by its local ethnic majority?

It is very difficult to escape the conclusion that the referenda provision vis-à-vis Maori wards was nothing more than a sop to a deeply racist colonial Cerberus. The well-meaning framers of the legislation understood that it would be impossible for them to deliver Maori wards with their progressive left hand, without at the same time giving Pakeha electors an opportunity to snatch them back again with their reactionary right.

The framers’ understanding of Pakeha prejudice was validated repeatedly when nearly all attempts to establish Maori wards were voted down by huge majorities. The descendants of the Pakeha settlers who made the country called “New Zealand” clearly possessed a strong intuition that the colonial state erected on the tribal lands of its conquered “natives” would not long survive any concerted effort to take the bi-cultural implications of the Treaty of Waitangi seriously.

The results of those referenda make it clear that, were the democratic anomaly of New Zealand’s Maori seats put to the vote, their retention would, almost certainly, be rejected decisively. The Pakeha majority’s disdain for the principle of local Maori representation is likely exceeded only by its antipathy for special Maori representation in the New Zealand parliament.

This is the obverse side to the constitutional coin Mahuta and her Labour, Green and Maori Party colleagues have just tossed.

To the Pakeha majority, the principles of liberal-democracy are morally and constitutionally unassailable. To the Maori minority, they’re simply unbeatable.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 February 2021.