The ACT Party’s election promise of a referendum for Aotearoa New Zealand to redefine and enshrine the “principles” of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Treaty of Waitangi) is likely to dominate debate at this year’s Rātana and Waitangi Day events.

ACT’s coalition agreement with the National Party commits the government to supporting a Treaty Principles Bill for select committee consideration. The bill may not make it into law, but the idea is raising considerable alarm.

Leaked draft advice to Cabinet from the Ministry of Justice says the principles should be defined in legislation because “their importance requires there be certainty and clarity about their meaning”. The advice also says ACT’s proposal will:

change the nature of the principles from reflecting a relationship akin to a partnership between the Crown and Māori to reflecting the relationship the Crown has with all citizens of New Zealand. This is not supported by either the spirit of the Treaty or the text of the Treaty.

Setting aside arguments that the notion of “partnership” diminishes self-determination, the 10,000 people attending a hui at Tūrangawaewae marae near Hamilton last weekend called by King Tūheitia were motivated by the prospect of the Treaty being diminished.

Do we need Treaty principles?
The Treaty principles were developed and elaborated by parliaments, courts and the Waitangi Tribunal over more than 50 years to guide policy implementation and mediate tensions between the Māori and English texts of the document.

The Māori text, which more than 500 rangatira (chiefs) signed, conferred the right to establish government on the British Crown. The English text conferred absolute sovereignty; 39 rangatira signed this text after having it explained in Māori, a language that has no concept of sovereignty as a political and legal authority to be given away.

Because the English text wasn’t widely signed, there is a view that it holds no influential standing, and that perhaps there isn’t a tension to mediate. Former chief justice Sian Elias has said: “It can’t be disputed that the Treaty is actually the Māori text”.

On Saturday, Tūheitia said: “There’s no principles, the Treaty is written, that’s it.”

This view is supported by arguments that the principles are reductionist and take attention away from the substance of Te Tiriti’s articles: the Crown may establish government; Māori may retain authority over their own affairs and enjoy citizenship of the state in ways that reflect equal tikanga (cultural values).

Author and Professor of Māori Studies at the University of Auckland, Margaret Mutu, who was in attendance at the recent hui-ā-iwi at Tūrangawaewae marae, says the government is required to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi.https://t.co/zSusoi5RER pic.twitter.com/dMrxjtMRan

— 95bFM News (@95bFMNews) January 26, 2024

Democratic or undemocratic?
The ACT Party says this is undemocratic because it gives Māori a privileged voice in public decision making. Of the previous government, ACT has said:

Labour is trying to make New Zealand an unequal society on purpose. It believes there are two types of New Zealanders. Tangata Whenua, who are here by right, and Tangata Tiriti who are lucky to be here.

Liberal democracy was not the form of government Britain established in 1840. There’s even an argument that state government doesn’t concern Māori. The Crown exercises government only over “its people” – settlers and their descendants. Māori political authority is found in tino rangatiratanga and through shared decision making on matters of common interest.

Tino rangatiratanga has been defined as “the exercise of ultimate and paramount power and authority”. In practice, like all power, this is relative and relational to the power of others, and constrained by circumstances beyond human control.

But the power of others has to be fair and reasonable, and rangatiratanga requires freedom from arbitrary interference by the state. That way, authority and responsibility may be exercised, and independence upheld, in relation to Māori people’s own affairs and resources.

Assertions of rangatiratanga
Social integration — especially through intermarriage, economic interdependence and economies of scale — makes a rigid “them and us” binary an unlikely path to a better life for anybody.

However, rangatiratanga might be found in Tūheitia’s advice about the best form of protest against rewriting the Treaty principles to diminish the Treaty itself:

Be who we are, live our values, speak our reo (language), care for our mokopuna (children), our awa (rivers), our maunga (mountains), just be Māori. Māori all day, every day.

As the government introduces measures to reduce the use of te reo Māori in public life, repeal child care and protection legislation that promotes Māori leadership and responsibility, and repeal water management legislation that ensures Māori participation, Tūheitia’s words are all assertions of rangatiratanga.

Those government policies sit alongside the proposed Treaty Principles Bill to diminish Māori opportunities to be Māori in public life. For the ACT Party, this is necessary to protect democratic equality.

In effect, the proposed bill says that to be equal, Māori people can’t contribute to public decisions with reference to their own culture. As anthropologist Dr Anne Salmond has written, this means the state cannot admit there are “reasonable people who reason differently”.

Today thousands answered the Māori Kings call for unity by descending on Tūrangawaewae marae for a national hui to discuss Act’s proposal to redefine the principles of the treaty. Here’s David Seymour being grilled by @moanatribe on his questionable use of the word apartheid. pic.twitter.com/1E9pItTqLm

— Kelvin Morgan 🇳🇿 (@kelvin_morganNZ) January 20, 2024

Liberal democracy and freedom
Equality through sameness is a false equality that liberal democracy is well-equipped to contest. Liberal democracy did not emerge to suppress difference.

It is concerned with much more than counting votes to see who wins on election day.

Liberal democracy is a political system intended to manage fair and reasonable differences in an orderly way. This means it doesn’t concentrate power in one place. It’s not a select few exercising sovereignty as the absolute and indivisible power to tell everybody else what to do.

This is because one of its ultimate purposes is to protect people’s freedom — the freedom to be Māori as much as the freedom to be Pakeha. If we want it to, democracy may help all and not just some of us to protect our freedom through our different ways of reasoning.

Freedom is protected by checks and balances on power. Parliament checks the powers of government. Citizens, including Māori citizens with equality of tikanga, check the powers of Parliament.

One of the ways this happens is through the distribution of power from the centre — to local governments, school boards and non-governmental providers of public services. This includes Māori health providers whose work was intended to be supported by the Māori Health Authority, which the government also intends to disestablish.

The rights of hapū (kinship groups), as the political communities whose representatives signed Te Tiriti, mean that rangatiratanga, too, checks and balances the concentration of power in the hands of a few.

Checking and balancing the powers of government requires the contribution of all and not just some citizens. When they do so in their own ways, and according to their own modes of reasoning, citizens contribute to democratic contest — not as a divisive activity, but to protect the common good from the accumulation of power for some people’s use in the domination of others.

Te Tiriti supports this democratic process.

Dr Dominic O’Sullivan is adjunct professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, and professor of political science, Charles Sturt University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

At this year’s local government elections, average voter turnout was 36 percent. This is comparable to the 2019 figure. It compares with voter turnout of 81.5 percent at the last general election.

Local Government New Zealand says that a review into why people don’t vote should be carried out before the next elections in 2025.

We need to know how many people didn’t vote because they didn’t receive their ballot papers and what practical obstacles to voting might have occurred.

We also need to know how many people just couldn’t be bothered, and if some people made a conscious choice not to vote. A conscious choice is a legitimate democratic decision.

Wayne Brown’s campaign for the Auckland mayoralty may have succeeded partly because it targeted people who traditionally vote — property owners and people over 50. People who are less likely to be Māori.

However, positioning Māori as Treaty partners to the Crown may also be a factor, because it overshadows The Māori citizenship as a share in the Crown’s authority to govern.

Participating in the affairs of government is a greater political authority than partnership. The state is a large and powerful institution and always the senior partner in the relationships it forms. Its partners may have a voice, but they don’t have the right to help make decisions. Decision-making is the task of the participant.

Democracy requires complementary participation
While there are examples of council/Māori partnerships that work well, democracy requires that they complement participation, rather than take its place.

Te Tiriti wasn’t a partnership between races. It was an agreement over the distribution of political authority. Rangatiratanga, as an independent Māori authority over Māori affairs, on the one hand, and the right of the British Crown to establish government on the other.

Te Tiriti didn’t intend that the rights of government should override the rights of rangatiratanga. Indeed, it provided a check against this outcome by granting Māori the rights and privileges of British subjects.

In 1840 those rights and privileges were not extensive. But, in 2022 they have developed into the rights, privileges and political capacities of New Zealand citizenship.

Most importantly, citizenship means that everybody has the right and obligation to participate in public decision-making. They should expect that their contributions have the same likelihood of influence as anybody else’s.

Nobody should have reason to feel so alienated from the system that they can’t see the point of voting. Māori wards are supposed to guard against this possibility by supporting active participation and influence.

Influence means being able to participate with reference to culture and colonial context.

Yet, in 2019, the Iwi Chairs’ Forum commissioned a report on constitutional transformation, Matike Mai Aotearoa.

Ethnically exclusive Pakeha body
It comments on what rangatiratanga looks like, but it sees citizenship as the domain of its partner, the Crown. It sees the Crown as an ethnically exclusive Pakeha body governing only for “its people”.

In other words, government is for other people. It’s not for us because rangatiratanga is where our exclusive political authority lies. Our relationship with government is as Treaty partner.

Another view is that rangatiratanga and citizenship are different but complementary. While voting doesn’t matter if one is a partner, it’s essential if one is a participant. Participation means, as Justice Joe Williams, argued, that, there is a need for a mindset shift away from the pervasive assumption that the Crown is Pākehā [non-Māori], English-speaking, and distinct from Māori rather than representative of them.

“Increasingly, in the 21st century, the Crown is also Māori. If the nation is to move forward, this reality must be grasped.”

In 2022, I was commissioned by the Ministerial Review into the Future for Local Government to write a discussion paper on Māori and local government.

The review is required to consider Treaty partnership. But it has also decided to be “bold” in its thinking.

Boldness could mean strengthening Te Tiriti and democracy by thinking beyond partnership as a treaty principle, established by the Court of Appeal in 1987, to thinking about the real substance of rangatiratanga and citizenship.

Local government functions by iwi
Rangatiratanga could mean that not all local government functions need to be carried out by councils. There may be some that are more logically and justly carried out by iwi, hapu, marae, or other Māori political communities.

The ideal that decisions are best made at the point closest to where their effects are experienced is a well-established democratic principle.

Citizenship is different from rangatiratanga but especially important because if Māori are, like everybody else, shareholders in the Crown’s authority to govern, then they are entitled to make culturally distinctive contributions to council decisions.

They are also entitled to expect that councils’ powers and decision-making processes will work for them as well as they work for anybody else.

Increasing voter turnout depends on people believing that councils make a positive contribution to their lives.

Professor Dominic O’Sullivan (Te Rarawa, Ngāti Kahu) is adjunct professor at Auckland University of Technology’s (AUT) Taupua Waiora Centre for Māori Health Research, and professor of political science at Charles Sturt University in Australia. He is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report. This article was first published by Stuff and is republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

If there’s one thing Matthew Tukaki thought he and the protesters at Parliament might agree on, it’s the right to free speech. But after starting a campaign to end the occupation, he discovered that wasn’t quite the case.

“I started a campaign on Sunday, which kind of went viral, called #endtheprotest, via social media,” the Wellington-based chair of the National Māori Authority said.

The hashtag is now one of the top trending topics for New Zealand Twitter users and has been shared by close to 60,0000 people on Facebook, hitting a reach of 2.3 million accounts.

Tutaki said the backlash, which had included physical threats and racial abuse, was initially just online but it quickly escalated once protesters realised he was behind the campaign.

“I came out of a hotel on Sunday and someone recognised me, they grabbed me by the arm, and the force was so great, they ripped the sleeve off my anorak and left a bruise,” he said.

Never one to let a single incident perturb him, Tukaki passed the protests on his way to lunch a few days later.

“I was down there on my way to get some sushi and a group of about eight of them piled in, shouting verbal abuse and trying to physically intimidate me. One of them was about to lunge and if it wasn’t for the police, it could have turned into something much more brutal.”

No self-respect
He said the protesters seemed to have no self-respect, either for their own space or the environment they were occupying, given the amount of human waste that was swirling around Parliament grounds.

“It’s like someone has turned up at your house, put a tent in your lounge, and then shat in your sink. It’s another level of disrespect out there and these people have no respect for the whenua.”

Having attended many protests over his life as well as having many friends and family involved in different types of activism, he said the difference in how a Māori-led campaign operated was stark.

“Ihumātao was totally different, hīkoi to parliament are different,” he said. “With Māori, when we have a protest, our people will go down to Wellington, we prosecute our kaupapa, present our petition and members of parliament will often come out to greet you.

“It’s always well-organised, and it’s safe and then we clean up after ourselves and we continue to prosecute the kaupapa back home from our marae.

“This is completely different. It’s violent, it’s aggressive and they have no respect for the whenua.”

He noted that even after protesters sent out a press release welcoming visitors, “a reporter from Wellington Live went down there, and was beaten up”.

Māori culture appropriated
He said it was particularly concerning to see both Māori culture and New Zealand’s wartime history being appropriated.

“Unfortunately our Māori whānau are being used as clickbait by those in the alternative right, who are pushing messages from the United States,” he said.

“We’re being used, our symbols are being appropriated. Our tino rangatiraranga flag is flying next to the Trump flag, next to where a Nazi swastika symbol was painted on a war memorial.”

He said the prime minister had made the right call not engaging and he felt some blame could be laid at the feet of politicians who had helped stoke racist conspiracies.

“Many politicians have used Māori issues as a political football over the last 12 months,” he said.

“What they have done is they have set free the sorts of racist attitudes that have been hiding in dark corners, and look at what those same politicians have done now — blame the government for it all.”

Peddling of racist ideas ‘normalised’
This wasn’t the first time Tukaki had received abuse, given his role with the National Māori Authority, which advocated for iwi and Māori business and community service organisations around New Zealand, but he was concerned by how normalised the peddling of racist ideas was becoming.

“I was getting racist and threatening messages before the protest, but what this has taught me is the issue of racism is out there more, because people are now emboldened to show their names and faces.

“And to be frank, people like [David] Seymour and [Judith] Collins, [Winston] Peters and Matt King all need to take responsibility for the beast in the cave they have conveniently let loose.”

Justin Latif is a Local Democracy Reporting project journalist. Read more of his stories here. Asia Pacific Report is a community partner.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz