Waitangi Day 2025: Reflecting on history and Māori sovereignty- Chloe Swarbrick

Greens co-leader Chloe Swarbrick and MP Teanau Tuiono will be among the MPs attending Waitangi.

• The Treaty of Waitangi is New Zealand’s founding document and is named after the Bay of Islands location where it was first signed, on February 6, 1840.
• In 1973 Prime Minister Norman Kirk announced that the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi would be a unifying national holiday and changed it to New Zealand Day.
• Māori signed the Treaty for many reasons, including: the mutual benefits British settlement would bring, protection of land and tribal position and the relationship with Britain and Queen Victoria.

Waitangi Day is a portal to our past and future.

190 years ago, chiefs from Northland through the Hawke’s Bay and Waikato signed He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni, or, the Declaration of Independence of the United Tribes of New Zealand.

Five years later, those same two sovereign nations signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi, as te iwi Māori sought to grapple with growing numbers of increasingly disorderly British settlers on their shores. Māori, then, still outnumbered Pākehā 40 to one.

In 2025, as with many, many other times in the last 186 years, politicians are trying to conveniently clean slate the past and tutū with our founding agreement.

Politicians from all parties will be given the opportunity to speak at Waitangi.

The official Tiriti, in the language of this land, contained three articles. The first required the British Crown to look after its own rapidly growing population. The second reaffirmed tino rangatiratanga, absolute sovereignty of Māori chiefs over their people, land and treasures. Article three promised a kind of dual citizenship for Māori, with equality promised should they engage with the British system.

That was the deal.

We all know it was broken. Badly.

Two hundred years ago, Māori owned all of the land in this country, when the idea of “ownership” was but a foreign, colonial idea, and resources were collectively managed for the wellbeing of all. The idea of privatisation and profit came on the colonial ships, and entrenched themselves here through trickery, violence and force.

Inequality built on dispossession and deceit

The inequality we see today didn’t come from nowhere. It was built on that dispossession and deceit.

There’s a reason politicians who today are trying to sow the seeds of fear about Māori getting special rights are the very same people pushing privatisation.

Te Tiriti guarantees all of us protection and provision, through sound governance and accountability. That means properly funded public services, which are necessary for a functional democracy.

It means our natural world is valued because it gives us life – obvious in the concept of legal personhood for rivers and mountains, innovations attempting to weave Te Ao Māori and tikanga into Western legal frameworks.

The idea of prioritising the wellbeing of people and planet quite clearly clashes with the dreams of some to extract profit at all costs. And that’s why certain politicians and their powerful donors want Te Tiriti done away with.

That’s why these politicians want regular people fighting amongst each other, divided and conquered, while multinational corporations fast-track their way to pillaging our environment.

Dame Tariana Turia crossed the floor in 2004 over Labour's Foreshore and Seabed legislation and formed the Māori Party.

I was 10 when the Foreshore and Seabed debate raged on the news and politicians were shouting about Māori getting ‘special rights’ to prevent public access to our beaches. Twenty years later, I’ve been at more than enough protests and occupations where te iwi Māori are the last thing standing between corporate privatisation and exploitation of that very same foreshore and seabed.

It wasn’t until I was in the privileged space of law school that I was confronted by the reality and weight of our history. It is hard to unpack everything you thought you knew, and realise today is an echo of yesterday. I’m still learning.

If the idea of Māori sovereignty terrifies you, I ask you to sit with that discomfort. Interrogate it. Question where it comes from.

You, like me, were probably raised on a diet of stories that justify the unfair and unequal world we currently live in. Those stories are so deeply held, but they are just that: stories.

Waitangi Day is a portal as much as it is a mirror.

Are we comfortable with what’s staring back at us? Are we being honest with ourselves?