This is what democracy looks like

This year, like many other people, I went to Waitangi. I went because I had to. I felt it in my bones. There wasn’t really any choice. Even though, when my lovely friend Sarah suggested it, I didn’t think it would be possible to wrangle my children and find accommodation and work it all out, but something pulled me. And thanks to my family I did wrangle it and the logistics and made it for three days from 3-6 February.

My overwhelming feeling from Waitangi, that was so palpable and evident, was that this is what democracy actually looks like. True democracy is already here, if we would only open our eyes and see. We saw it at Tūrangawaewae in January, and then at Waitangi in February (and at marae everyday before, between and since).

At Waitangi I saw people engaging with politics in depth. Not the politics of who said what to whom, or the surface level “analysis” of what politicians are proposing, but politics at the deep constitutional level of how do we want to live together, how ought we treat each other, and what are the values we should live by.

And everyone was part of the discussion. Not only the politicians and the academics and the lawyers and the experts and the activists, but everyone—the mums and the dads and the kuia and the kaumātua, and the rangatahi and the tamariki. The hau kainga and the manuhiri. The tangata whenua and tāngata Tiriti. People were sitting on the grass having constitutional conversations, and their voices were being heard, and their questions were being asked, and their ideas were being offered, and their disagreements were being surfaced. And mana was upheld, even in disagreement. And people were not being disowned, even when their actions were harming their own people. They were still whanaunga.

This, for me, is the clear difference between Te Ao Māori and Te Ao Pākehā (and by extension the spaces of tino rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga). It is the difference between: still caring for your people even when they piss you off; and refusing care and cutting them off. It is feeling responsibility and love towards the entirety of your community, rather than blaming those who do not achieve what you have and being contemptuous of them. It is the understanding that we all have to live together and it is in our interest to look after our living habitat (which also consists of people). This is why kāwanatanga as it is currently formulated has never lived up to its promise to look after its unruly people—because it disowns the “unruly” and cuts them off from care. It is built on superiority, dominance, and separation. But what is dominant is not always what is best.

At Waitangi, I saw democracy in action—right there on the Treaty Grounds. Actual democracy, not some rarified and removed, we-won-you-lost-eat-that, it’s all too complicated for the masses type of democracy. But democracy that values everyone’s views and can handle talking about those views openly without dehumanising and denigrating each other. And all I could think was why the f*** don’t we see what is right here in front of our eyes. We don’t need more research and more experts coming up with new unproven models for how to be together. It is already here and it already works. Tikanga can hold space for difference without falling apart.

And then I got back and I watched Parliamentary Question Time, and I read the media stories, and I saw the social media sniping. And all I could think was how unsophisticated it was, how narrow it was, how unable to work with the complexity in which we dwell, how its entire set-up is about division and binary thinking. Two-sided debate is not what we need. We need something much more expansive, much more capacious, much more multidimensional. But instead we have right or left, for or against, good or evil, right or wrong, affirmative or negative. As though the world is divided into black and white. And as though defeating and denigrating each other is the way to create a world we want to live in. We complain about the polarisation we are facing in the world, and yet we cannot see that the very systems in which we are trying to address polarisation are what is producing it in the first place.

This is not a criticism of the individuals in our parliamentary system (as tempting as that is!); it is a criticism of the system that is designed to produce those behaviours. It is a criticism of the worldview on which that system is designed. We need a much more sophisticated way of doing politics that is not built on the binary operating system that Westminster has given us and through which polarisation emerges. How we are trying to solve the problem is itself the problem. As Bayo Akomolafe says, “what if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?”

So, let’s take a look at a way of orienting discussion that can bring many voices in, and that does not seek such binary ways of exploring issues. We have it right here, with much expertise and guidance, and with a track record of success. What if we shed our cultural blinders and were prepared to let go the less sophisticated ways of doing things that we have inherited, and come into the rich inheritance of this whenua and its tikanga?