A few weeks ago, at the height of the general back-slapping which accompanied Waitangi Day celebrations, a University of Waikato researcher Dr Arama Rata, urged that “acknowledgement of the Treaty of Waitangi be made part of the rite of passage for every new New Zealand citizen”.[1]
She was in Waitangi with a coalition of advocacy groups launching a petition to have reference to the Treaty formally written into the Oath of Citizenship.
She argued that the current oath “only acknowledges one Treaty partner – the Crown” and lamented that Maori New Zealanders have been left out of conversations about immigration. Honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi in this way would be one small part of addressing that omission, she argued.
When a reporter for Newshub asked me to comment on the idea of referring to the Treaty of Waitangi in the Oath of Citizenship, I thought it wasn’t a bad idea. As most older readers will know, the Treaty was an extremely simple, one page, document, which involved Maori chiefs surrendering sovereignty to the British Crown, being guaranteed the rights to their property in return, and having the rights and privileges of British subjects conferred on them. For 1840, it was an extraordinarily enlightened document: nothing like it happened anywhere else where British colonists settled.
But it rapidly became clear that what Dr Arama Rata had in mind was something quite different. She sees the Treaty as some kind of partnership between Maori and the Crown, even though the word “partnership”, or its Maori equivalent, appears nowhere in the document.
And this notion of the Treaty being a partnership has become widespread, with our new Prime Minister using the word in her Waitangi speeches and most younger New Zealanders being indoctrinated with this understanding of the Treaty from the time they enter pre-school.
In a November 2000 speech in memory of Bruce Jesson, David Lange commented that even “the court of appeal once, absurdly, described [the Treaty] as a partnership between races, but it obviously is not… As our increasingly dismal national day continues to show, the Treaty is no basis for nationhood. It doesn’t express the fundamental rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and it doesn’t have any unifying concept… Many on the left of politics who sympathise with Maori aspiration have identified with the cause of the Treaty, either not knowing or not caring that its implications are profoundly undemocratic.”[2]
Much more recently, in April last year, Winston Peters asked in a speech whether it was plausible to think that, while on 5 February 1840 Queen Victoria was in partnership with nobody, the following day she entered into a partnership with hundreds of largely illiterate Maori chiefs.
Dr Rata is clearly of the view that Maori entered into a partnership with the Crown – in today’s parlance, with the New Zealand Government – as if Maori New Zealanders are somehow not part and parcel of the New Zealand state.
She suggests that Maori have not been consulted about immigration policy. And that is complete nonsense: Maori New Zealanders, like all other New Zealanders, are eligible to vote for Members of Parliament, and thereby have a direct say in immigration policy, in taxation policy, and indeed in all other policies.
She no doubt understands – as I certainly do not – what the Maori “king” meant a year or so ago when he expressed the hope that Maori would “share sovereignty” in New Zealand by 2025. Share sovereignty? All of us who can vote “share sovereignty”, and Maori New Zealanders have the same right to vote as all other New Zealanders do.
And the result? In the current Parliament, 29 of the 120 Members would be entitled to be on the Maori electoral roll because they have a Maori ancestor. The Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of New Zealand First is Maori; the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, of the National Party, and of the New Zealand First Party are also all Maori. And of those 29 Maori MPs, only seven were elected in Maori electorates: the rest were elected in general electorates or entered Parliament on the list.
To quote David Lange’s 2000 speech again:
Democratic government can accommodate Maori political aspiration in many ways. It can allocate resources in ways which reflect the particular interests of Maori people. It can delegate authority, and allow the exercise of degrees of Maori autonomy. What it cannot do is acknowledge the existence of a separate sovereignty. As soon as it does that, it isn’t a democracy. We can have a democratic form of government or we can have indigenous sovereignty. They can’t coexist and we can’t have them both.
Copyright © 2024 Don Brash.