By The Time We Got To Turangawaewae ...

... We Were Ten Thousand Strong: The activists know that for the next few weeks, at least, the advantage lies with te iwi Māori and their Pakeha allies. Their most effective tactic – at Ratana, the Waitangi Tribunal, and at Waitangi, itself, on 6 February – will be to up the pressure on the Coalition Government and the Prime Minister. After Saturday, 20 January, they’ll be confident that Christopher Luxon will blink first.

KING TUHEITIA’S HUI was an impressive demonstration of the power of te iwi Māori. The Kingitanga had planned for 3,000 attendees – 10,000 showed up. Since those present on the Turangawaewae Marae at Ngaruawahia on Saturday, 20 January 2024 were likely to be the most powerfully motivated defenders of te Ao Māori, it is reasonable to regard that number – 10,000 – as the core of Māori resistance to the Coalition Government’s policies.

Significantly, that number, 10,000, is greater than the active strength of the New Zealand Defence Force (currently around 9,000) and only slightly fewer than the current muster of sworn Police officers (10,549). Small wonder that veteran Māori nationalists Hone Harawira and Tame Iti, both present at Turangawaewae, invited the Coalition Government, via the news media, to “bring it on”.

The activists know that for the next few weeks, at least, the advantage lies with te iwi Māori and their Pakeha allies. Their most effective tactic – at Ratana, the Waitangi Tribunal, and at Waitangi, itself, on 6 February – will be to up the pressure on the Coalition Government and the Prime Minister. After Saturday, they’ll be confident that Christopher Luxon will blink first.

In the National Party, blinking may already be the preferred option. It is, after all, the party that kicked-off the Treaty settlement process more than 30 years ago. It was National’s John Key who brought the Māori Party into his coalition government (alongside Act!) in 2008. And it was Key who sent Pita Sharples to New York to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. National’s record, vis-à-vis Māori Sovereignty and te Tiriti o Waitangi, is more than competitive with Labour’s.

If Christopher Luxon, like Jacinda Ardern, had led his party to an absolute majority in the House of Representatives, then Kingi Tuheitia would never have had to hold his hui.

But, that is not what happened.

With its final Party Vote stalling at 38 percent, it was clear that those on the right of the political spectrum harboured significant doubts about National. The share of the vote secured by National’s rivals, Act (8 percent) and NZ First (6 percent) indicated that National’s MPs would not be permitted to simply shrug off all responsibility for giving voice to the political rage holding so many voters in its grip. The smaller right-wing parties were there to ride alongside National and make sure it didn’t veer-off to the left like John “Labour-Lite” Key. At the slightest sign that National was about welch on the Coalition Agreement, Act and NZ First were expected to shoot the Coalition Government in the head.

What’s more, if Act and NZ First succumb to the same political pressures currently spooking National’s MPs, and simply abandon the commitments made to their followers on Te Reo Māori, co-governance, and te Tiriti, then the rage that propelled them into the House of Representatives will be forced to construct a new vehicle in which to carry the defenders of “New Zealand – as opposed to “Aotearoa” – into battle.

This will not be pretty.

Far too few New Zealanders fully appreciate what it took for 10,000 Māori to answer King Tuheitia’s summons. Inculcating the confidence needed to openly defy the policies of an elected government has been the work of decades. Tireless advocates of Māori sovereignty like the late Moana Jackson understood that the ultimate reclamation of their people’s patrimony would only become possible when Māori developed a political narrative that a significant percentage of educated Pakeha could be persuaded to endorse.

At the heart of that process was a wholesale revision of the meaning of te Tiriti. So long as the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders looked upon the document signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 as a simple treaty of cession, te iwi Māori could not hope to treat with the Crown as “partners”. That could only happen if the entire notion of an historical cession of sovereignty was overturned. Only when the claim that Māori never ceded sovereignty to the British Crown was accepted by the New Zealand state and its key institutions could “indigenisation”, “decolonisation” and co-governance become realistic political propositions.

Among a great many young, tertiary-educated Māori and Pakeha, the claim that Māori never ceded sovereignty has become an article of cultural and political faith. If one believes that the indigenous people of New Zealand never ceded sovereignty to their colonisers, then a constitutional revolution becomes not only morally desirable but politically necessary. Moreover, if right-wing political parties convinced that sovereignty was ceded back in 1840 are elected on a platform hostile to Māori claims, then forces unsympathetic to the “cession myth” will feel justified in opposing that right-wing platform by any means necessary.

And, you get 10,000 people answering King Tuheitia’s summons.

But, if Act is prevailed upon by National to back away from its promise to let the voters revise the Māori revision of the Treaty of Waitangi; and if it then refuses to step away from the coalition and move to the cross-benches; then somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the electorate – and possibly a lot more – will find themselves in the market for a political champion who rejects entirely the niceties of traditional Māori-Pakeha relations, in favour of a new and unabashed ethno-nationalist vocabulary and manifesto.

In exactly the same way as Māori intellectuals undermined the “cession myth”, this new political movement would aim to undermine the “sovereignty myth”, and, in a distressingly short period of time, the leader of this aggressive ethno-nationalist populist movement could well be in a position to successfully summon 10,000 followers to his own … rally.

Exactly how Christopher Luxon chooses to navigate his government’s passage through these treacherous waters remains to be seen. He may be tempted to tear up the Coalition Agreement, call a new election, and seek an unequivocal mandate in support of decency, racial peace, and economic common-sense. But that would only work in circumstances where the rage of “traditional” Kiwis, the very same anger that propelled him into the prime-ministership, was subsiding. An unlikely turn of events, it must be said, with Ratana, with the Waitangi Tribunal looming and, beyond them, Waitangi Day.

Then again, Luxon might decide to do what Slobodan Milosevic did as Yugoslavia started coming apart at its ethnic seams: make himself the leader of the biggest and meanest sonofabitch in the ethnic valley.

As the person calling himself “Ricardo” commented on the author’s “Bowalley Road” political blog recently:

Massey’s Cossacks could reappear in any number of forms. There are approximately 100,000 to 200,000 ex-territorial soldiers (of all ages going back to the 1970s) who can still field strip an M16, make a bivouac, put up with rain and place the correct side of a claymore towards the enemy. Last reports say up to a million firearms are still to be registered. A direct threat to home and hearth could release basic impulses among their owners.

When the drift of politics encourages this kind of speculation, it is difficult to feel optimistic about New Zealand’s – or Aotearoa’s – future.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz on Monday, 22 January 2024.

When Push Comes To Shove.

Emerging From The Shadow Kingdom: So devastating was the British victory over the Kingitanga that the movement tacitly foreswore any further assertions of political will. Henceforth, the Kingitanga would represent a shadow kingdom. What also remained unspoken, however, was the Kingitanga’s understanding that if the settler state’s ability to enforce its dominance ever faltered, then the substance of Māori power would return, and the shadow kingdom would turn into something much more solid.

ONCE AGAIN, the New Zealand state must decide if it should answer a Māori push with a Pakeha shove. The Māori King, Tuheitia, has summoned the leaders of Maoridom to the Kingitanga marae at Turangawaewae to formulate a response to the Coalition Government’s “de-Maorification” agenda. It is doubtful whether most New Zealanders, back at work now and already missing the sunshine and surf, are at all aware of the potential for disaster inherent in the King’s hui of Saturday, 20 January 2024. Not since the early 1860s have Māori and Pakeha risked so much over the meaning and status of te Tiriti o Waitangi.

The big difference this time is that the New Zealand state cannot count on brute military force to enforce its will. In the original stand-off between Māori and the Crown, the settlers were supremely confident that if push came to shove, then they would have access to massive military force. Rather than see their new colony compromised by an indigenous rebellion, the British Government was willing to deploy considerable military resources. Indeed, it was the arrival of approximately 12,000 imperial troops under Lieutenant-General Duncan Cameron that kicked-off the Pakeha invasion of the Waikato in 1863.

So devastating was the British victory over the Kingitanga that the movement tacitly foreswore any further assertions of political will. Henceforth the Kingitanga would represent a shadow kingdom. The kingdom of what might have been if the Pakeha settler government had been willing to keep faith with the letter and spirit of Te Tiriti. What also remained unspoken, however, was the Kingitanga’s understanding that if the settler state’s ability to enforce its dominance ever faltered, then the substance of Māori power would return, and the shadow kingdom would turn into something much more solid.

Small wonder, then, that the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, is said to be seeking an urgent private audience with King Tuheitia. [It took place on Monday, 15 January 2024. - C.T.] The Coalition Government needs to know just how pushy the Kingitanga and its allies are prepared to get if the National-Act-NZ First de-Maorification agenda is not abandoned. If, as seems likely, the King replies “wait and see” , then Luxon’s and his cabinet’s next step will be to assess the New Zealand state’s current capacity to enforce its will. One thing’s for certain: In 2024 the British will not be sending the New Zealand Government 12,000 troops!

If Luxon hasn’t convened a meeting of the Officials Committee for Domestic and External Security (ODESC) in response to the Kingitanga’s ominous re-entry into New Zealand politics, then he’s not doing his job. Like the rest of the country, Māori leaders would have observed the enormous difficulties experienced by the New Zealand Police in assembling sufficient non-lethal force to clear Parliament Grounds of anti-government protesters in March 2022. Were such occupations and disruptions to be replicated all over the country, the ability of the Police to both keep the peace and enforce the law – without recourse to deadly force – would be seriously compromised.

According to Wikipedia, ODESC “comprises the chief executives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Defence Force, the Ministry of Defence, the Security Intelligence Service, the Government Communications Security Bureau, Police, the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, the Treasury and others. The group is headed by the head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, [Rebecca Kitteridge].”

On paper, at least, this group looks formidable. The presence of the security services and the Police should guarantee a continuous and accurate feed of political intelligence to the politicians. In reality, however, it is most unlikely that the SIS, the GCSB and Police Intelligence personnel have been monitoring the communications of the Māori king, other iwi leaders, Te Pāti Māori and/or Māori activists generally. The political fallout, should such interceptions be exposed, would be politically catastrophic.

Ever since the Christchurch Mosque Massacres of 2019, the eyes of the spies have been firmly fixed upon New Zealand’s tiny community of Far Right extremists. Spying on Muslims and/or Māori would be construed by a large number of New Zealanders as evidence of state-sponsored white supremacism. ODESC’s ability to predict with any confidence the tactics and strategies of the rapidly coalescing Māori resistance movement is, therefore, negligible.

It is also probable that New Zealand’s defence chiefs would urge caution when assessing the capacity of the Military to come to the aid the Civil Power. Morale in the NZDF is said to be at an all-time low. Intense dissatisfaction with successive government’s underfunding of the armed forces is reportedly running very high. Called onto the streets to reimpose civil order through the application of deadly force, the willingness of servicemen and women to open fire on their fellow citizens must be rated as exceedingly doubtful. The great danger would be the soldiers going over to the people – thereby transforming nationwide protests into a full-blown revolution.

The New Zealand state has been here before, of course, back in the 1980s and early-90s, when Māori nationalist activists were tootling off to Libya and Cuba to pick up the rudiments of “freedom-fighting”. Back then, however, there were still plenty of concessions in the state’s briefcase: action on Te Reo, forests and fisheries, Māori health and education, cultural production of all kinds and – most important of all – the Treaty Settlement Process.

Taken together, these concessions bought the state three more decades of peace between Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti. When “indigenisation” and “decolonisation” became the order of the day, however, all bets were off. Should those two projects become entrenched Crown priorities, then the economic, institutional and cultural dividends flowing from the Pakeha victories of the 1860s will be threatened, and the ability of the state to concede its way out of trouble will diminish towards zero.

So, what will Messrs Luxon, Seymour and Peters do to placate the Kingitanga and settle down the angry rangatahi that are Te Pāti Māori’s nation? If they are wise, they will either defer, or scrap altogether, their de-Maorification agenda. Erect those bi-lingual road signs. Keep calling Hamilton “Kirikiriroa”. If necessary, retain the Māori Health Authority. Then, having secured the peace, spend the next five years pouring resources into the Police and the armed forces.

As the bicentenary of the signing of Te Tiriti looms ever nearer, the Pakeha settler state faces two, equally unpalatable choices. It will either have to accede to a Māori-led constitutional revolution, or find its own, twenty-first century equivalent of General Cameron. A Pakeha military leader prepared to shove back harder than the movement for tino rangatiratanga can push.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project of Monday, 15 January 2024.