Reclaiming Aotearoa: Is New Zealand ready for Te Pāti Māori’s plan for top-down indigenous revolution?

Chris Trotter

Imagine you’re one of a conquered people. The islands that once were yours have fallen under the sway of strangers from the far side of the world. Through a combination of voluntary sale, violent seizure and legal sleight-of-hand, your ancestral lands have passed into these strangers’ hands. Everything that matters to you has been pushed aside, shrunken down, or made to disappear altogether.

Nothing about this reduction is accidental. The strangers had always intended to replace the world that you and your people had made with the world they and those to whom they owed their allegiance were determined to make. They had come for your land and they would not stop until they got it.

This tragic tale of dispossession and loss was made all the more heartbreaking by the cruel act of betrayal at its heart. The strangers who had arrived as the emissaries of a foreign monarch had negotiated a treaty promising to respect and protect the lands, resources, custom, and treasures of the islands’ original inhabitants. Without this promise your people would never have ceded the sovereignty of their respective territories to these stern servants of a distant Queen.

At first the Queen’s servants had kept their promise, but within 20 years of the treaty’s signing, so many strangers had been allowed to settle in the ceded islands that the faraway Queen’s ministers were prevailed upon to permit these increasingly numerous settlers to govern themselves.

The moment this settler government was formed, it made it clear that the promises of the treaty would no longer be honoured. Within 10 years a massive army, acting in the name of the Queen, had crushed and dispossessed all those who dared challenge the settlers’ power. A mere 60 years from the date of the treaty’s signing, almost all of your people’s lands, forests, fisheries and other treasures had passed into the strangers’ hands.

What would you do? How would you set about recovering the lands, resources and treasures you and your people had lost? What strategies and tactics would you employ to ensure that, even at the remove of 180 years, the abrogated treaty was restored and honoured? And if these were your goals, would you share them openly with your conquerors? After all, they had come to take your land and they took it. What on earth would possess them to let you take it back?

Unmaking the omelette

This is the story Māori tell themselves about what happened when the peoples of Europe began incorporating the islands of New Zealand into their maps. It is not the story most Pakeha New Zealanders tell themselves.

In the Pakeha version, the same events occur, but the interpretation of those events is very different. In the minds of the settlers, the 30 years between the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the final suppression of Māori military resistance in the 1870s occupy a special and separate historical space.

The history of the nation that arose out of the settlers’ victory – the nation of Richard Seddon, Kate Shephard, the Red Feds, Anzac Day, the Great Depression, Mickey Savage, World War II and the golden postwar years – that’s the real history of New Zealand. The wholesome omelette Pakeha made out of all those broken Māori eggs.

How to unmake that omelette? That is the question Māori have been asking themselves ever since they found themselves in the settlers’ frying pan.

Their first answer, the answer they have never let go, was the Treaty of Waitangi.

This was the original covenant, the solemn deed of settlement, the document which had once been honoured by the Crown and could – should – must – be honoured again. In 1877 the Chief Justice of New Zealand had dismissed the treaty contemptuously as “a simple nullity”.

But history cannot be voided so easily. Māori clung to the treaty and the treaty survived.

The best of the good guys 

For the best part of the 20^th century, the settler state –Pakeha New Zealand – looked at the treaty and saw only proof of its own magnanimity. The genocide basic to the birth of Canada, the United States and Australia formed no part of New Zealand’s colonial experience.

Far from dwindling to an impoverished fraction of their former selves – as happened to the native Americans and the Aboriginal peoples of Australia – the Māori population, faltering only briefly, expanded dramatically. New Zealand had nobly disdained to follow colonialism’s genocidal logic. Its race relations were “the best in the world”. History would surely include Pakeha New Zealanders among the best of the good guys.

But history’s course is seldom straight and her judgments are far from sure.

United States historians, caught up in the great cultural shifts of the 1960s and 70s, turned away from America’s triumphant colonial narratives to confront the ugly ghosts of their nation’s past.

Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee coincided with a similar surge of critical historical inquiry in New Zealand. Between them, Michael King and James Belich forced open a door that had been wedged shut for the best part of a century.

To undo a conquest it is first necessary to undo the conquerors. Māori who had despaired of ever finding a way into the Pakeha conscience read the new histories and took heart. Perhaps there was a way to catch the conscience of the conquerors’ great, great grandchildren?

The catalyst

Rob Muldoon’s invitation to apartheid South Africa’s Springbok rugby team provided Māori with a formidable hook. In 1981, Pakeha racism, reared up on its hind legs, was impossible to miss. Challenged to live up to its self-congratulatory myths, the settler state reached instinctively for batons and barbed wire.

“This is who you are. This is who you have always been,” the Māori anti-tour protesters told their shocked Pakeha comrades. “You have only just discovered what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the settler state’s fury. We have been fending it off for 140 years.”

Now, at last, Māori could count on friends and allies inside the Pakeha Pā. They may have been young and idealistic in the early 1980s, but by the time they had acquired age, experience and institutional power, they had reordered the settler state in ways that transformed the restoration of tino rangatiratanga – Māori sovereignty – from a hopeful indigenous dream into a real constitutional possibility.

Constitutional transformation

This then, is the political architecture of the present moment: the structures in which New Zealand is enmeshed barely two months from a general election.

One of the parties contesting that election, Te Pāti Māori, has made explicit in its manifesto the reforms required to effect a constitutional transformation of Aotearoa-New Zealand.

Were this radical Māori force to achieve its objectives, then the political, economic and cultural power last wielded by Māori in the 1860s would, in large measure, be restored.

So dramatic have been the changes of the past four decades that if Te Pāti Māori’s policies were to be adopted and implemented by its political allies, Labour and the Greens, then its reforms would find staunch defenders in the judiciary, academia, the public service, the artistic community and most of the mainstream news media – instruments and repositories of judicial, administrative and cultural power which, 40 years ago, would have run a mile from such a revolutionary agenda.

New force

The prime architect of the constitutional changes being championed by Te Pāti Māori was the late Moana Jackson.

For more than 40 years, Jackson dissected the musculature of the settler state, identifying those points of sensitivity and weakness where the assertion of indigenous rights would stimulate the most movement. His purpose was always to establish a constitutional Māori authority that was equal to, if not greater than, the authority of the Crown.

As Jackson worked away behind the scenes, the Crown’s response to the growing numbers and the growing needs of Māori – especially urban Māori – were making his mission considerably easier.

To prevent South Auckland from going the way of Norther Ireland, the National government under Jim Bolger skilfully grafted the traditions of rural iwi onto modern capitalist economics. The result – dynamic Māori corporations capitalised by treaty settlements –announced a new force in New Zealand society.

This “neo-tribal capitalism” (the phrase belongs to Professor Elizabeth Rata) was itself made possible by Labour Attorney-General Geoffrey Palmer’s shrewd decision to enshrine the concept of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in legislation but, by leaving those principles gloriously undefined, ensure that treaty’s evolution became the responsibility of the judiciary, rather than the legislature.

Matike Mai 

This notion that democracy was much too important to be left to “racist” voters – one of the most potent legacies of the 1981 Springbok tour – also served Jackson’s purpose.

It primed the political and administrative elites for the dangerous business of changing the constitution, legislative step by legislative step, rather than by having a democratically-elected constituent assembly draft a constitution in public, and then submit the final product to a binding referendum.

Jackson did not believe a constitution that gave effect to the promises of the treaty would ever be accepted by the Pakeha majority.

His preferred method was to work away in secret with the Māori elites – men and women who were in ever-increasing numbers finding influential berths in the judicial, administrative and academic infrastructure of the state.

It was this behind-the-scenes discussion and debate that evolved into his greatest work – Matike Mai.

A document dedicated to the constitutional transformation of Aotearoa, Matike Mai became the inspiration for the He Puapua report, a step-by-step implementation plan commissioned by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government in 2019 to give effect to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (a document with which Jackson was closely associated).

Tellingly, He Puapua was also compiled behind closed doors and its existence kept secret from Labour’s 2017-2020 coalition partner, NZ First.

Top-down revolution 

It is doubtful that Moana Jackson would have approved of Te Pāti Māori’s candour on the constitutional transformation front.

It is much more likely he would have counselled patience and discretion, anxious that the Pakeha frog floating lazily in the constitutional pot was not alerted prematurely to the steadily rising temperature of the water.

Te Pāti Māori’s grand proclamations are, therefore, likely to prove unhelpful. Top-down revolutions on behalf of a minority can succeed, but not when the majority discover ahead of time what the revolutionaries have planned for them.

Reclaiming Aotearoa from the settler state is an idea with many more supporters in 2026 than it ever possessed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In two months’ time, New Zealanders will discover whether or not it has enough.

Chris Trotter has been a political commentator and analyst for more than 30 years. He is the author of the Bowalley Road blog