Why Maori are protesting against equal rights in New Zealand

David Cohen I 21 November 2024 I Spectator World

Around 35,000 thousand demonstrators descended on the capital of New Zealand this week, many of them adorned in traditional native dress amid a fluttering sea of red, white and black ‘Maori sovereignty’ flags. They were there to decry a bill looking to redefine New Zealand’s founding treaty.

The Treaty Principles Bill, introduced earlier this month by one of the National party-led government’s junior coalition partners,?has virtually no chance of becoming law. But the bill’s sponsor, the libertarian ACT party leader David Seymour, insists it offers a ‘certainty and clarity’ long missing in New Zealand. He also wants the country’s constitutional arrangement to have an explicitly democratic basis in law. His bill has three articles:

• The New Zealand government has the right to govern all New Zealanders.
• The New Zealand government will honour all New Zealanders in the chieftainship of their land and all their property.
• All New Zealanders are equal under the law with the same rights and duties.

On the face of it, the third point probably appears puzzling to many outsiders: why the objection to equal rights for all? Precisely because – the argument more or less runs – this undermines the special ‘first nation’ status that some Maori would argue is theirs as an ethnic right.

Thus, the introduction of the legislation has led to much grandstanding around questions of history and race in New Zealand. Not least from the small and tightly coiled Maori party, which sponsored this week’s march in the capital.

At issue is the Treaty of Waitangi, which was signed in 1840 between local Maori chiefs and the British Crown. New Zealand’s founding document is usually invoked in claims made against the government by Maori tribes looking for financial recompence or the return of lands they argue were stolen from their forebears by English overlords in the 19th?century.

Clocking in at just 226 words in the English version (slightly fewer in the Maori one), the Treaty offers broad guarantees of governance, sovereignty and citizen rights for the local Polynesian inhabitants who first settled on the Land of the Long White Cloud many centuries before the arrival of the earliest British traders.

What are this treaty’s finer implications for the modern New Zealand polity? The answer often seems to rather be in the eye of the cultural beholder.

Nearly 50 years ago, the newly drafted Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 stipulated that ‘the practical application of the principles of the Treaty’ had to be weighed in resolving any historical cases relating to it. As Seymour pointed out again on the day when his doomed bill was first tabled in Parliament, ‘at no time since has this Parliament said what those principles actually are’.

This has not been for lack of trying. On the watch of the previous Labour-led government, for example, the principles were taken to mean that ‘the nature of democracy has changed’ and Maori – who constitute around 12 per cent of the adult population – deserved a 50 per cent casting vote on matters having to do with national water infrastructure.

The current conservative National party prime minister, Christopher Luxon, isn’t keen on that interpretation, although he says his party will not be supporting what he calls Seymour’s?‘simplistic’ stab at sorting things out merely ‘through the stroke of a pen’.

Instead, Luxon is having his cake and eating it. In order to form his coalition with Seymour, he said he would support the bill’s introduction but nothing more.?With all of Parliament’s five other parties now vowing to vote a second reading down, the initiative appears dead on arrival.

This week’s protests, however, have been decidedly alive.??Even before the crowds surged into Wellington, things got off to a rollicking start when a 22-year-old Maori party MP, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, rose to her feet in the chamber, ripped Seymour’s bill in half, and launched into a haka war dance.

Maipi-Clarke’s ‘spontaneous’ stagecraft may have got her booted out of the debating chamber for the rest of the day, but her performance itself has since garnered?hundreds of millions of online views ?– a flattering tally for her, but a bit of a cringe for other Kiwis.

In a post on X, the country’s longest-serving Maori MP, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters described the Maori party’s parliamentary haka as a ‘disgraceful pre-planned and coordinated stunt that served only to intimidate and undermine the running of the House and grab as many headlines as they could.’

Eru Kapa-Kingi, the main organiser of the protests, struck a more upbeat note. He told RNZ news that a New Zealand in which the treaty is honoured as it stands is ‘a world where everyone thrives’.

At some point though the principles of the?Treaty of Waitangi will actually have to be defined. At which point what the Maori call the?tutū te puehu, or great disturbance where all hell breaks loose, will inevitably arrive.

Author: David Cohen