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men an election campaign that so far has largely been a tendering contest over who can fund the most ‘out of the box’ projects, create the most jobs, and support the most post-Covid apprentices, many Commentators have lamented the absence of a visionary debate about the kind of New Zealand we want to become.
It was therefore comforting to see the Maori party announce its Mana Motuhake policy this week. When it comes to timing, the policy hasn’t garnered much media attention. The news has been dominated by the Serious Fraud Office charges against two people in connection with the First New Zealand Foundation, a new poll and the second debate by leaders. Many also think that the Maori party is inconsequential in 2020, as it has a 1% to 1.5% vote in support of the party in public opinion polls and it does not appear that they will regain any seats in the electorate.
However, this new policy is not something to be ignored.
The Maori party policy is a 25-year advance to improve the results of the Maori whānau that the major major parties have failed to achieve. It is based on the Maori asserting their right to self-management, self-determination and self-government in all their domains. Among its main recommendations are the end of the widespread management of Maori affairs, the total and final abolition of the Waitangi Settlement Treaty, the buy-back of land for the Whānau, Hapū and Iwi, the return of all lands of conservation to the Hapū and Iwi, and all Maori who join the Maori electorate. spend the next three years.
Neither of these ideas is new, but combined with a demand for a separate Maori parliament, politics is the most potentially transformative platform we have seen from any party this election season.
A separate parliament was one of the recommendations of Matike Mai, the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation in 2016. This was the culmination of a long discussion that the Maori had been having about what a treaty-based constitution should look like, and five years de hui held in New Zealand that emphasized the need for a new conception of values-based politics.
While pitching the idea of a separate Maori parliament, with 15 to 17 seats and control of more than $ 20 billion of “self-managed” annual spending, Maori party co-leader John Tamihere said that overall control of Maori things had been an “abject failure” after the country was colonized by consent, not conquest, through the Treaty of Waitangi.
Fixing things would require “transferring the money from control and non-Maori hands, and directly into Maori hands.” The Maori parliament would be based on the Irish, Scottish and Welsh parliaments. “Westminster didn’t work for the Scots or the Irish; Wellington definitely doesn’t work for Maori, ”Tamihere noted.
With a treaty signed between the Maori and the colonizing Crown in 1840, New Zealand is in a unique position. Even being able to have a serious discussion about political self-determination is a luxury that supporters of Black Lives Matter movements around the world can only dream of.
And yet it remains the kind of politics that sends shivers down the spine of New Zealand’s dominant political parties, which have always interpreted any claim for the right to determine the future of the Maori, by the Maori, for the Maori, in mainstream terms New Zealand could lose, not what the Maori could gain.
Between 1938 and 1960, our main political parties were not so afraid to recognize that the Maori had separate political interests for Pākehā. In the 1960 election campaign, the National Party even claimed that Maori affairs were the most important issue in the 1960 party’s electoral politics, and promised to “Uphold the principle of equality between Maori and Paques in accordance with the spirit and the letter of the Treaty of Waitangi …[and] recognize that the Maori meet the Pākehā in all things. “
However, after 1960, the word equality largely disappeared from the main party campaign platforms. The more the New Zealand government was required to interact with international organizations and conduct trade negotiations after Britain joined the Common Market, the more major political parties competed for definitions of nationality and what made us exceptional on the level. world.
Both main parties unequivocally framed us as a single people; like New Zealanders. The term “kiwi” became a way to unite the country with a general collective identity to legitimize New Zealand as a national state. All notions of equality are expressed in terms of legal notions of citizenship and not in commitments to association.
If coming together as a nation state required all voters to register to be Kiwis, powerful political parties increasingly positioned Maori as non-Kiwis. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the idea that Maori and others could launch the treaty grievance process became a popular electoral platform, especially for minority parties. ACT claimed that it was the only party that could “fix” the treaty. New Zealand first denounced the Maori for acquiring undeserved legal privileges as citizens that Pākehā was not obtaining. Both sides argue to this day that Maori seats should be abolished on the grounds that there is no room for separatism.
While refraining from participating in the more overtly racist attacks by minor parties, the major parties have nonetheless determined that if they can co-opt and absorb Maori interests on their broader platforms and attract more Maori as mainstream MPs, they can neutralize Maori demands for separate forms of self-determination.
The idea of a Maori parliament may still be an idea on the periphery, biding its time. But after 180 years of waiting, the stubborn persistence of inequality and poverty still plaguing Maori suggests that the time has come for Maori to start exercising. absolute sovereignty and realizing their own social, cultural and political systems so that they can care for their people without total dependence on the state.
Whether the Maori party returns to parliament in 2020 or not, this call will only grow louder.
Claire Robinson is Professor of Communication Design at Massey University
