Terry Dunleavy: Vital to understand the Treaty from both sides

Terry Dunleavy

When National Party MP Bill English delivered the 2005 Robert Chapman Lecture at the University of Auckland recently, he challenged our tertiary institutions to engage in critical thinking and robust debate about the history and significance of the Treaty of Waitangi.

It's a challenge that could be directed at all New Zealanders, not least those short-changed by an education system that has in recent decades deprived them of the real facts of our nation's history, but also newer arrivals from other lands who have chosen New Zealand as their home and who seem mystified by what all the Treaty fuss is about.

It's also timely, given that the topic is featuring in episodes of the TV One series Frontier of Dreams, and that the Maori Party has emerged as a new and independent voice for tangata whenua.

The full text of Mr English's well-reasoned treatise on what he termed "treatyology" ought to be compulsory reading in our secondary schools and universities as an introduction to a topic with profound implications for future harmony in New Zealand.

It is refreshingly different to the Maori-bashing implicit in Dr Don Brash's Orewa speech last year. Where Dr Brash was appealing to preconceived prejudices of a section of Pakeha voters, Mr English makes a more reasoned and reasonable assertion.

"The terms of cultural diversity are open to debate," he said. "The status of the Treaty and the relationship with Maori and non-Maori citizens is open to debate - and should be welcomed by people of goodwill.

"It is neither racist nor narrow-minded to question conventional wisdom or to suggest that this is a legitimate subject for genuinely public debate as distinct from specialist debate."

But a note of caution. The debate Mr English calls for must take in all shades of opinion, allowing for expression and understanding of the Maori viewpoint as well as Pakeha. And it must focus as much on Article II as on Articles I and III.

For the majority non-Maori members of our population, it will be important to try to see the articles of the Treaty not just in terms of a European interpretation of the English version. They should try to put themselves into the minds of Maori and their understanding of the Maori version, because there are subtle but significant differences.

An excellent text to help Pakeha understand Treaty issues from a Maori perspective is contained in a small book, The Waitangi Tribunal - The Conscience of the Nation, published in 1990 by the late Paul Temm QC (later Hon Mr Justice Temm). Unfortunately the book is now out of print but should be in libraries.

Mr Temm was a member of the Waitangi Tribunal from 1982 to 1985, and in 129 compelling pages he helps Pakeha to understand why the Treaty is so meaningful to Maori.

"The Treaty of Waitangi has mana," he wrote. "It is an agreement made by the forebears of today's generation of Maori New Zealanders, who venerate it as the act and deed of their tupuna.

"Respect and reverence of ancestors is close to the heart of Maori culture. But it is not only the memory of the ancestors that is sacred; their deeds, their wisdom and their promises are likewise revered.

"For this reason, the Treaty is not just another contract as Europeans might look upon it. It is a solemn ancestral promise to be observed, and thus it has mana.

"The tensions in race relations in New Zealand have their origins partly in the differing value systems of the two cultures ...

"But they arise also from the way the Treaty has been regarded since the Land Wars. Europeans have treated it as a historical curiosity; Maori have respected it and called for it to be observed punctiliously."

There are at least two immediately important aspects to the foregoing words. The first is that they were written prior to the decision in 1990 by newly installed National Prime Minister Jim Bolger to commit his Government to the settlement of Treaty grievances.

The second is that the reference to Europeans treating it as a historical curiosity foretold the line uttered by Dr Brash at Orewa 14 years later: "None of us was around at the time of the New Zealand Wars. None of us had anything to do with the confiscations. There is a limit to how much any generation can apologise for the sins of its great-grandparents."

For Paul Temm it was (and for me, it is) a matter of honour. Mr Temm described it thus: "The Treaty is short and simply expressed. There are three articles: the first gives the Crown sovereignty over New Zealand; the third gives Maori New Zealanders the full rights of British citizenship.

"The second article is the most far-reaching. It assures Maori New Zealanders that the Crown will protect all their cultural and property rights - and this is not mere protection, it is an explicit guarantee of those rights."

Why it is a matter of honour for Pakeha is simple. We are here, as New Zealanders, because in 1840 the then tangata whenua as first settlers gave their consent to settlement by our forebears and later immigrants, subject to guarantees by those early settlers which were subsequently dishonoured in ways well recorded in our history.

Too seldom are today's Pakeha applauded for their fairness in creating the Waitangi Tribunal and its process for grievance settlement.

But, also, too seldom are Maori applauded for their patience over a century and a half, and for their generous pragmatism in settling for restitution of but a fraction of today's value of what was stolen from under them, and for not disturbing current private ownership of lands, however unfairly obtained in the first place.

So let Mr English's debate begin, but in a spirit of fairness, patience and pragmatism, and with a full understanding of the facts of recorded history. It must start from a wider and better understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi, as seen from both sides.

* Terry Dunleavy is a member of the National Party, and secretary of the group Pakeha for the Treaty.