Privilege & principles: Aaron Smale on what the Treaty Bill is really about
Focus on the mokopuna: Parehounuku Ruihi Makowharemahihi (Ngāti Toa) at te Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti in Wellington. Photo / Aaron Smale
During a hearing before the Waitangi Tribunal about the Treaty Principles Bill, member Derek Fox asked a kaumātua in te reo Māori what he would say to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon if he was present. The kaumātua paused for thought and then replied in Māori: “I’d tell him to tie his dog up. Otherwise it will bite him soon.”
Luxon hasn’t tied his dog up yet, and the dog is yet to bite him. But in the interim, the Prime Minister is having to clean up the doings the dog is leaving scattered all over the place. The images of as many as 50,000 protesters descending on Wellington have rippled around the world and created a PR mess that Luxon is being forced to contend with.
You’d think by now the crown would have learnt not to pick a fight with Māori. For 184 years, the crown has repeatedly ignored, overridden and trashed Te Tiriti o Waitangi and thought Māori would just lie down and die. But Māori have always put up a fight and the current government has now picked an almighty scrap.
Those attending the hīkoi probably had 50,000 different views on what they were there for. But if you had to distill it into one statement it might be, “We’re still here, so is te tiriti, we’re not going away.”
Bill architect and Act Party leader David Seymour’s response was to label the protesters as not representing New Zealand. Well, neither does he. Luxon’s response was to label it all a Te Pāti Māori thing. His proxy press secretary, talkback host Heather du Plessis-Allan, dutifully repeated the talking point (or did she give it to him?).
What they were all trying to do was delegitimise the voice of Māori who aren’t toeing their political line. If anything, the protest was defying this constant political rhetoric that wants to try to put Māori in their place. Māori know this and know the history of this kind of response because they’ve been on the receiving end of this implicit racism for generations. Your voice doesn’t really matter, they’ve been told repeatedly, and we’re going to ignore it anyway.
This government is willing to undo court decisions that recognise Māori rights but create an obstacle for overseas corporations.
Seymour’s bill is a piece of political theatre that distracts from the actual script of what not only the Act Party is doing, but also what the coalition government is carrying out in other ways. Through its fast-track consenting legislation and the unravelling of court decisions, the government is trying to limit the Māori voice in environmental decisions and overriding Māori property rights that would hamper the crown selling the country off to overseas interests.
According to Seymour, the treaty is being misused to grant Māori special rights that other New Zealanders don’t enjoy. Whether it’s Seymour or Don Brash or Winston Peters saying it, this simply isn’t true.
Te tiriti promised Māori they could retain their taonga and maintain their tino rangatiratanga, or self-governance. This self-governance was assumed to be collective. The so-called special rights are not special at all. They simply pre-existed before 1840 and were supposed to be protected in perpetuity. But they never were.
Since 1840, the crown has constantly violated those promises. It has taken land by violence and destroyed social structures through the Native Land Court, because it didn’t accept that Māori owned their land collectively. The crown set up native schools where children were physically assaulted for speaking their mother tongue and prepared for low-wage manual occupations.