RACIST POLICIES FROM THE 'WE ARE ALL ONE PEOPLE WITH EQUAL RIGHTS' COALITION: WHEN EASY WHITE RACIST RHETORIC BECOMES LAW

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‘We are one people’ is always a call to arms to those who experience superiority and privilege over others. Any real engagement with the idea of racism and work toward anti-racism leads to the understanding that white people and communities are often allowed and encouraged to be blind to race, in order to remain blind to their racism and privilege. Any real engagement with the real world reveals that most white people are not blind to race, but instead live in a freeze of not understanding how ethnicities exist and interact, and how privilege informs their views of the world.

Within this freeze exists fear, malcontent, jealousy, and anger – all easily triggered by voices focused on portraying the world and themselves as fair, while actively positioning to hold white supremacy in place. Holding white supremacy in place is exactly the same act as being racist and denying the rights of others.

At least three of the coalition government’s immediate moves on gaining power target Māori.

Those policies target rights given to Māori constitutionally through our majority rule liberal democracy over the last four decades.

New Zealanders fought and committed their lives and careers to bringing te Tiriti to life in our public domain, and to see it entered into law and practice in Aotearoa – to see it honoured.

Those policies target te reo Māori as a constitutionally recognised public language being used in practical and public ways, and this targeting is based solely on the very racist, and supremacist, and very weak policy premise that white people can’t understand, and it is of primary importance that white people should be able to understand. To be clear, this is not weak because white people understanding public language usage is a weak or bad idea. It is weak because it is very easy to understand the public use of te Reo in public sector settings. It is almost always accompanied by translations, and in other cases the meaning can be easily found. The policy idea here is not that te Reo is bad, it is that life should be made easier for people who refuse or want to refuse to engage with te Reo at all in their lives. In fact this policy may be racism at its worst - a meaningless policy which will have no impact on the growth of te Reo or on non-Māori understandings of the public sector, but which simply operates to unify non-Māori against Māori. (Evidence: we now hear politicians behind the policy saying the policy will have no impact on te Reo).

New Zealanders fought and committed their lives and careers to securing the future of te Reo Māori and to see it protected in law and practice in Aotearoa – to see it honoured. To diminish a legal language of our country, established as legally recognised through our own liberal democracy not through some other means, is likely to be unconstitutional and lead to unending legal challenges and damage to the Crown-Māori relationship that National will find near-impossible to mend.

These policies promise to ‘restore balance’ to the teaching of history in New Zealand. The intentional message is that teaching real history about te Tiriti and colonisation is ‘unbalanced’, and/or that before the move to introduce New Zealand history to New Zealand school curriculums, those curriculums were ‘balanced’, or more balanced.

What’s unbalanced is a curriculum within which teachers struggle to tell true stories about our history, or to teach history at all, and within which the Indigenous people of Aotearoa can neither find themselves nor be found, except, perhaps, as the first nation on earth ever to cede sovereignty through peaceful means with no real reason to do so or any exchange of real value. This prior approach which excludes Māori and Māori histories has always been racist, and it will be again. It is not undermining the history, truth or veracity of Pākehā narratives and ideas, it is undermining those of Māori and Māori alone.

New Zealanders fought and committed their lives and careers to securing the future of Aotearoa through introducing New Zealand history to our curricula, and to see it protected in pedagogy, law and practice in Aotearoa – to see it honoured.

These policies target Māori and the rights of Maori alone

Within an erudite and smartly maintained narrative of fairness and eqaul rights, these policies, and the politicians, are targeting Māori and only Māori. They are not targeting themselves for being part of the liberal democracy that established and sustained those rights, or their parties for being part of the political millieu in which those rights have been openly discussed, debated, responded to, and continuously breached in lieu of ignorance or ‘progressive realisation’.

Like Julian Bachelor, they are targeting Māori. Not a policy about Māori, but an existence. Not a system, but a people. Not a curriculum, but the people who have fought to bring balance the curriculum for more than a century.

Be careful; someone has claimed that to teach real history means teachers will be forced to tell a story only about Māori and covering only Māori perspectives. It has been suggested that, like the Pākehā curriculum taught to date, it will idolise Māori just as Pākehā have been idolised – Cook, the Great Discoverer, for example. This reveals a deep racism based on fear of the truth, and the knowledge that hiding history keeps us in the dark. Don’t incidentally follow their lead – only follow if you share their racist fears, and their mutually reinforced blindness.?

What do these policies mean to you?

To support or think good of these policy moves it is a pre-requisite that you don’t respect our history in this country. It is a pre-requisite that you don’t value the contribution Māori make to our society and our country, and a pre-requisite that you agree that Māori should have no rights that flow from te Tiriti and New Zealand’s history of colonisation, or our future of fair and appropriate race relations. It is a pre-requisite that you consider that rights afforded to ‘others’ should be able to be debated and discarded by primarily white New Zealanders in our majority rules system in a zero-sum equation, and that those rights should be enitrely vulnerbale to destruction by political leadership.

You must believe that any sense of our rights being of a constitutional nature should be itself discarded, and that they should not be protected constitutionally.

It is likely that if you agree with these race targeting policies, you have some kernel of deep fear that any rights whatsoever afforded to Maori will take something away from you personally.

What may have been presented through softer (or at least less certain) rhetoric during the campaign, has now sharpened in the operationalisation.

Over and above these plainly race targeting policy moves, the coalition has clearly positioned itself as anti-te Tiriti – the one thing that has the power to set New Zealand apart from other nations in the way we recognise our indiginous community, following more than a century of destructive colonisation.

In this breath, a racist coalition is simultaneously associated with fiscal austerity, while throwing down the drain billions of dollars worth of jurisprudence developed over 50 years, along with the immense gains in the productivity of the so-called Māori economy and associated gains in race connections.

Back to the future, or onward to the past

These policies take us back. Back to 1973, with white hegemony well and truly in place, Māori voices excluded, protests on bridges, and a New Zealand in which Pākehā and Māori called for te Tiriti to be recognised.

Let’s not be sentimental about this: all our governments since have bought into the need for New Zealand to recognise Māori rights in te Tiriti and both Māori and non-Māori have benefitted from this decision, not least in the securing of civil peace in a grand public agreement to help settle underlying anger un uncertainty about our constitutional foundations. Today’s government attempts to wipe the slate clean.

I was talking with a colleague recently. A Pacific Island man who stood alongside Māori in the 1970s – back when the slogan was ‘the treaty is a fraud’. Māori and other New Zealanders made this stand. For Māori it referred really to the Crown’s authority based on the treaty being a fraud. Of course by that time the Crown was not relying on the treaty, and never really had. By that time the Crown was invoking the legal falasey that its sovereignty may have begun as de-facto (a position that can only be argued rhetorically through lenses of te Tiriti and international law interpretation), but it had become a de jure sovereignty over time. This argument depends on te Tiriti not really existing, or the Crown’s full willingness to deny entirely the agreement it entered into. It also requires us to accept obviously self-serving, nonsensical western legal interpretations of itself.

And this is where our new racist policies are taking us again. They are claiming the rights that have been established under the banner of te Tiriti are false or fraudulent (somehow contrary to the ‘liberal democracy’ that created them, which is constitutionally not possible), while at the same time having no other real idea of where our government authority comes from, if not te Tiriti.

My colleague reminded me that during the 1970s the protest cry changed from ‘the treaty is a fraud’ to ‘honour te Tiriti’. He said many of the people he stood with, subsequently moved from protest into the political system in various places, and the call has become an entrenched baseline in the Crown-Māori ether. These figures represent in human terms the transition of te Tiriti from historic obscurity into legal expression. These policies are not just winding back, but proposing an absolute obliteration of all that has been gained since 1975.

In 1877 the treaty was declared by our highest court ‘a simple nullity’; an irrelevant nothing. Looking through the eyes of the Chief Justice, whose judicial role is to interpret law and apply it to facts before him, it is possible to see where this declaration comes from. The Crown had never entered the treaty into any law at that time, which was itself vastly inconsistent with the treaty. And so, from the Chief Justice’s perspective, he felt he was unable to consider it. So our law goes. In fact, this perspective reveals the idea that the court and judiciary are the one institution who could legitimately hold that view – it is not their job to write law; this role sat with the UK Parliament which failed to reflect te Tiriti in founding laws for Aotearoa, a lead followed by the new domestic legislature.?(Except and putting aside for a second the reasonably easy case that can be made that if there was common law at all in New Zealand, te Tiriti was surely part of it).?

Today, our coalition government is aiming to reach the same status for the treaty: a simple nullity obscured from law. The proposition that the key principle flowing from the treaty is that all New Zealanders are equal resonates strongly with white blindness (presumably constructive in nature) and white superiority (constructive in nature), especially in the assertion that there is at this time no inequality in Aotearoa and there is no real difference experience by non-Māori in Aotearoa.

While claiming idly to represent a fair view of the treaty, this position directly and intentionally nullifies 5 of the 8 plain articles of the treaty and te Tiriti. It ignores the Crown’s express wish to protect Māori, which promises a right to protection. But to the new coalition, this would unfairly privilege Māori again – just has they have been since 1840 by that provision.

The position upholds the Crown’s claim of sovereignty, presumably, from article 1 of the english text. But of course it renders null and void article 2 of the treaty, because the right to retain land and possessions undisturbed would be a right afforded to Māori, but not afforded to everyone and therefore unpalettable.

But one of the things non-Māori like the coalition really truly want is their property rights to remain undisturbed. That’s precisely why the Waitangi Tribunal’s ?powers were always limited in scope to exclude findings or recommendations over privately held property. Quite a white carve-out for white rights, while since the inception of law Māori land has been a target of Crown takings legitimised in law.

In the real world, non-Māori property have been and remain protected in precisely this way, whereas the same rights for Māori have been breached in well-known grave and gratuitous ways. In our real history we find Māori land has been targeted and Māori property rights consistently discarded while the property rights of others have in fact been protected and upheld. Now the project of transferring land and wealth to Pākehā is seen as complete we are told ‘let’s all have equal rights’.

This posiiton suggests a desire to uphold the article 3 provision of various equalities.

This position discards article one of te Tiriti, that being the right of kāwanatanga for the Crown, which in plain and simple reading cannot be sovereignty and is most clearly understood as the right to govern within the constraints of tino rangatiratanga – the sovereignty of Māori. The coalition’s position also discards artcile 2 of te Tiriti, which promises tino rangatiratanga, which means sovereignty, to Māori.

These policies offer a history lesson

Ironically, the racist and anti-history policies of this coalition seems be teaching us a history lesson in treaty justice, and treaty jurisprudence.

I guess we can be taken back there. But as we are dragged back to New Zealand’s own little middle ages, from whence our faux western law constitution originates, let’s be clear about something. We have Māori alone to thank for holding Te Tiriti and its constitutional promise in their hearts for over a century up until the 1970s. In that time non-Māori people largely forgot about it, and the UK government and the Crown in right of New Zealand entirely discarded it.

My guess is that as we endure those middle ages again, Māori and many others will hold te Tiriti in our hearts so that it can always be found, and will always flourish again.