During my time in Parliament between 2002 and 2007, I gave four speeches at the Orewa Rotary Club, on each occasion on the last Tuesday of January. The first was delivered before I became Leader of the National Party and generated some headlines at the time. The third was delivered in January 2005 and the fourth in January 2006. I’m probably the only person who can remember anything about those three speeches. But I have no doubt that a great number of New Zealanders can recall the substance of my second speech, delivered in January 2004. For most people, that remains “Don Brash’s Orewa speech”.
Reaction to that speech was extraordinary. The media were almost unanimous that I was a racist. One Sunday paper devoted its entire front cover to a photograph of me and Pauline Hanson, the Australian politician widely regarded as racist. There may have been some favourable media comment, but I certainly don’t recall it.
On the other hand, and despite the highly negative media reaction, a great many ordinary New Zealanders expressed strong support for what I had said in that speech. Support for the National Party leapt so sharply that Colmar Brunton re-did its subsequent poll, assuming there must have been some error. For a time, “Orewa” became a date, not a place, and people talked about “before Orewa” and “since Orewa”.
I was among those astonished by the reaction. I had made it clear three months earlier, on first becoming the Leader of the National Party, that one of my five priorities was to ensure that all New Zealanders would be treated equally without regard to when they or their ancestors arrived in New Zealand. That produced no particular surge in support for the National Party.
There were no new policy announcements in the speech. Bill English had announced that it was National Party policy to abolish separate Maori electorates six months before I became Leader and that had passed almost without comment.
But for whatever reason, the speech caused a political earthquake. For a time, I out-ranked Helen Clark in the preferred Prime Minister stakes and support for the National Party rose to a level in the high forties. No doubt in response, the Clark Government stopped talking about “closing the gaps”, a programme which was avowedly aimed not at reducing income disparities across society but specifically at closing the economic gap between those with a Maori ancestor and those without one, as if ethnicity was the sole determinant of economic and social status.
Perhaps another positive outcome of the public reaction was that the National Party went into the 2005 election committed to accelerating the resolution of historical grievances. I felt strongly that resolving those grievances had dragged on far too long, and was poisoning race relations in New Zealand: too many Maori New Zealanders wrongly assumed that compensation for historical grievances would automatically lift their economic status enormously, while other New Zealanders felt that they were being ripped off by having to fork out “billions” to right wrongs for which they felt no responsibility whatsoever. The National Party said that, if we won the election, there would be just one more year in which to lodge claims for compensation, and we promised to resolve all outstanding grievances in not more than a further five years.
The Key Government retained that promise and, just over seven years on from its election in 2008, most historical grievances have been resolved. That’s positive.
But much else has gone seriously awry. There has been constant pressure to accord those with a Maori ancestor some kind of privileged constitutional status, despite there not being any suggestion of that in the Treaty of Waitangi. When Greater Auckland was formed from the merger of the seven smaller cities, it was initially suggested that there should be separate Maori wards, similar to the separate Maori electorates in Parliament. When that idea was vetoed, Auckland was instead saddled with the Independent Maori Statutory Board, made up of unelected Maori who have nevertheless been given full voting powers on Auckland Council committees.
We now have the Auckland Council requiring Cultural Impact Assessments for thousands of sites in Auckland lest some long forgotten site might potentially have significance for one or Maori groups.
In New Plymouth, we saw the mayor pushing for equal representation of Maori and other New Zealanders on the city council, even though Maori make up only a small minority of the citizens of that city. When the idea was rejected by the New Plymouth citizenry in a referendum, the mayor said he would appeal to the United Nations against the law which permitted such a referendum on the issue.
In 2010, Judge Joanna Maze fined a helicopter pilot $3,750 for hovering over the peak of Mount Cook, thus causing “cultural offence” to Ngai Tahu.
More recently, the Waitangi Tribunal, in its conclusions on the so-called Wai262 claim, made a series of recommendations which, if accepted by the Government, would lead to a massive increase in Maori authority over almost every aspect of New Zealand life. Among other things, the Tribunal recommended a new Maori Advisory Commission to control patents and plant variety rights, with the power of veto over applications; a new Maori Conservation Authority for dealing with all conservation matters; all decisions made by Maori under the Maori consultation processes of the Resource Management Act to be binding; all public sector agencies being required to prepare Maori language plans; and an expansion of the role of Maori in the negotiation of international treaties.
In that regard, it was perhaps not surprising to hear Maori activists complaining loudly last month that Maori had not been involved in the negotiations leading to the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, as if somehow one ethnic group in New Zealand should, as of right, be entitled to representation in the negotiations.
And we now have the Iwi Leaders Group, backed by the Waitangi Tribunal, arguing that Maori have special rights over water, and should be involved, along with local governments, in how water is allocated.
It is clear that, as a country, we have moved a very long way from the promise of Article III of the Treaty, which promised that all Maori would, on signing the Treaty, be granted the “rights and privileges of British subjects” – no more and no less.
Gareth Morgan chose to give a speech in Orewa last year effectively arguing that we should move beyond a literal interpretation of the Treaty, and include within the Treaty all the modern mumbo-jumbo which has arisen over its misinterpretation over the last four decades. And he chose the Orewa Rotary Club in which to give that speech – only the speech was not to the Orewa Rotary Club, as I assumed when asked if I would like to attend and “reply” to Gareth, but only in their premises, which he had hired because of the huge significance of the Club in this whole debate.
Move on to the last Tuesday of last January. And there we saw a speech which in many respects was much more important than my own speech in 2004. The speech was given by Winston Peters. Mr Peters said a number of things in that speech that I don’t agree with – about foreign investment, about immigration, and about the TPPA – but he also laid down a challenge to the Key Government which could well go down as a turning point in New Zealand history.
For years, the National Party has argued for a far-reaching reform of the Resource Management Act as a way of encouraging investment, economic growth and employment, and of making it easier to fix the outrageous price of housing in Auckland. Late last year, the Government tabled a Bill to reform the RMA but, by common consent, it is a rather pathetic attempt at reform and goes nowhere close to what the Government had hoped to achieve. And even that Bill was assured of sufficient votes to get to Select Committee only because the Government had agreed to incorporate yet more special rights and privileges for Maori in the law. Not only does the RMA already require local governments to consult specifically with Maori – as if Maori require some special rights of consultation – the Bill now before the Select Committee would require all local governments, within 30 days of election, to invite iwi to join councils in “iwi participation arrangements”. This formalisation of a constitutional preference for those who happen to have a Maori ancestor is outrageous, and is totally inconsistent with any reasonable interpretation of the Treaty.
What Mr Peters said at the Orewa Rotary Club in January was that New Zealand First is willing to work with the National Party to produce a meaningful reform of the RMA, but only on condition that all references to preferential treatment of Maori are eliminated from the legislation.
The Prime Minister has said publicly in reaction to Mr Peters’ speech that he is willing to negotiate with any party which can help the Government get the 61 votes in Parliament it needs to get the RMA Bill passed.
Nobody yet knows whether either man is serious, but if they are serious, January 2016 may turn out to be a turning point in New Zealand history. Everybody who has looked at the RMA knows that it has been a major brake on New Zealand development, and a major cause of unaffordable housing in our major cities. Everybody who has looked dispassionately at the steady drift to racial separatism arising from the misinterpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi over the last four decades knows that this racial separatism is a disaster for our future. Mr Peters, as a Maori himself, may be the only politician able to solve both problems simultaneously.
Copyright © 2024 Don Brash.