Te Tiriti has taken on the features of what the Americans call a ‘third rail issue’ – you touch it, you die
How much longer can Labour and the Greens maintain the fiction that Te Pāti Māori is an acceptable coalition partner?
The answer would appear to be “for the foreseeable future”. Both parties have positioned themselves in such a way that a repudiation of Te Pāti Māori is extremely unlikely. Neither Labour’s caucus, nor the Greens’, nor their respective memberships would sanction such a move.
Both of New Zealand’s “progressive” parties are constitutionally committed to fulfilling the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
That being the case, any backing away from Te Pāti Māori would be interpreted by both Labour and Green MPs, and their parties’ activists, as a backing away from Te Tiriti itself.
Were the leaders of either party rash enough to attempt such a disengagement by issuing a captain’s call, they would instantly find themselves in treacherous political waters.
For both Labour and the Greens, Te Tiriti has taken on the features of what the Americans call a “third rail issue” – ie, you touch it, you die.
Examining how that happened, how serious debate on the subject of race relations and the Treaty of Waitangi came to an end in both parties, offers insights into how it came to an end throughout much of New Zealand society.
In Labour’s case, the transformation boils down to most of the party’s MPs and activists not being given any reason to take Te Tiriti seriously until, quite suddenly, it became a sure-fire career-killer not to.
Ever since Matt Rata inserted “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” into his legislation setting up the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975, the words had been included without serious discussion – and almost without thinking – into all manner of “left-wing” documents.
Though few, if any, were brave enough to say so, these endless references to “the treaty” amounted to little more than proforma progressivism.
Even more cynically, some dismissed them as a sop to Labour’s Māori MPs and members – the rhetorical equivalent of blankets and beads.
Then came the state-owned enterprises legislation, the Māori Council’s litigation and Geoffrey Palmer’s decision to leave the politically fraught business of defining “the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi” to the courts.
Lord Cooke’s lofty elaboration of what the Crown and Māori owed to one another set the pace.
The judiciary, having been handed the job of defining the treaty relationship by a fainthearted legislature, proceeded to do just that.
As the 1990s unfolded, the ‘sop’ of the 1980s began to sound increasingly like an injunction. What Labour had failed to take seriously, it was now expected to enforce.
‘Haters and wreckers’
For Helen Clark, that appeared to involve handing over New Zealand’s foreshore and seabed to Māori – an act which, in 2004, would have amounted to her party legislating itself out of office.
That was a sacrifice Clark was disinclined to make. And so entrenched was she as Labour’s leader that her refusal to be guided by the Court of Appeal was accepted by just about everyone who mattered within her party, except Tariana Turia.
Clark’s arguments were reinforced by her familiarity with the dramatic political developments within Māoridom that the judiciary’s definition (re-definition?) of the treaty had unleashed.
Unlike so many in her caucus and party organisation, Clark had experienced, up-close and personal, what radical Māori nationalism expected of the representatives of the Pakeha state.
With considerable venom, she would describe the separatist organisers of the impressive foreshore and seabed hikoi to Parliament as “haters and wreckers”.
No Labour leader since Clark, however, has possessed the political steel to legislatively negate the judiciary’s treaty judgments.
When her successor, Phil Goff, in a speech bearing the same title as Don Brash’s (in)famous Orewa speech, went offmessage on Labour’s bi-cultural project, he was torn to pieces by his caucus colleagues, with Clark’s young protégé, Grant Robertson, leading the charge. Te Tiriti’s third-rail status was now a given of Labour Party politics.
Treaty focus
The evolution of the Greens’ relationship with Te Tiriti’s expanding legal and moral force was quite different from Labour’s.
From the moment the party shrugged off its more environmentally focused blue-green faction in the early 1990s, the Greens’ more radical elements made certain that, where it mattered, an uncompromising stance in favour of locating Te Tiriti at the heart of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements would become the lode-star of the Green Party of Aotearoa’s policy formation.
Where it mattered, in a party committed to consensus-based decision-making, was inside the tight circle of formal and informal party big-wigs without whose agreement and cooperation nothing of significance could be achieved.
These were the people who vetted prospective candidates long before any formal processes of selection got underway.
Evidence that a potential Green MP might not be completely sold on the idea of the Treaty of Waitangi being accepted as New Zealand’s founding document would instantly disqualify them from representing the party.
Any candidate foolhardy enough to challenge the tight circle’s judgment would soon find their name and the word “racist” indissolubly linked. That was usually enough.
Thanks to the generalised fear of these third rails and thoughtcrimes, both of New Zealand’s “progressive” political parties have made any serious reconsideration of their stance on Te Tiriti, and its imputed obligations to decolonise and indigenise Aotearoa, politically inconceivable.
The idea that debating these issues would constitute a white supremacist abomination is now so deeply embedded that it will be dislodged only by some quite extraordinary series of terrible events.
Dangerous hyperbole
Some commentators have argued that Jack Tame’s recent Q&A interview with Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader of Te Pāti Māori, fits the description of an extraordinary event.
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer
To hear Ngarewa-Packer tell Te Pāti Māori’s story, if the world wishes to discover what exterminationist white supremacy and state-sanctioned genocide looks like, then it has only to visit New Zealand.
Not even Tame – a journalist sympathetic to the twin causes of decolonisation and indigenisation – was willing to allow such dangerously hyperbolic language to pass unchallenged.
All to no avail, because Ngarewa-Packer simply doubleddown. If Pakeha recoiled from words like “white supremacy”, “exterminate”, and “genocide”, then that was their problem.
Ngarewa-Packer’s use of such inflammatory rhetoric owes much to the fact that a crucial contributor to Te Pāti Māori’s majorities in the Māori seats was the support of rangatahi – Māori youth.
Angry, alienated from the Pakeha world and excluded from the rewards of neo-tribal capitalism, young urban Māori are perilously susceptible to Ngarewa-Packer’s language.
No longer at school, out of work, hassled by the cops: it is no real stretch for them to absorb the idea that their troubles are the result of European colonisation.
Te Pāti Māori’s claims that “this white supremacist government” is out to roll back everything Māori have succeeded in building since the 1970s, “exterminate” te reo and, in an act of cultural “genocide”, extinguish Te Tiriti, will resonate with these kids.
From an electoral perspective, that resonance is surely dangerous enough.
Much more dangerous, however, is the effect such inflammatory language may have on a young Māori person unable to grasp that Ngarewa-Packer is speaking metaphorically.
Convinced that white supremacists really are out to destroy his people, what might that frightened and furious rangatahi feel obliged to do?
In Butler, Pennsylvania, on 13 July 2024, a disturbed 20-year old youth climbed up onto a roof and came within an inch of killing a former President of the United States of America. Describe a politician, over and over again, as an existential threat to democracy and, sooner or later, someone will take a shot at him.
That’s why Debbie Ngarewa-Packer should undertake, immediately, to tone down her own and her party’s rhetoric because using terms like “white supremacy”, “exterminate” and “genocide” are incendiary.
What’s more, they cast those against whom they are directed as existential threats. And what is it about an existential threat that separates it from all the other kinds? It is the one threat a person is lawfully entitled to use deadly force to counter.
Recalling New Zealand’s response to the Christchurch mosque massacres, try imagining its reaction to a similar instance of stochastic terrorism – this one involving a Māori shooter and multiple Pakeha victims.
Such a frightening thought experiment is not for the fainthearted. Nevertheless, the leaders of Labour and the Greens would be wise to attempt it. And, if they would not be blamed for an extraordinary series of terrible events, so would the leaders of Te Pāti Māori.
Chris Trotter is a political commentator with more than 30 years’ experience and the author of the Bowalley Road blog.
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