Kaipara Mayor Craig Jepson and partner Jeannette Reid in their 1840s English settler costumes at Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Photo / Craig Jepson
KEY POINTS:
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, urban development and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
ANALYSIS
Craig Jepson and Jeannette Reid joined the Waitangi Day celebrations at the Treaty Grounds this year wearing colonial settler costumes. A roomy white blouse and top hat for him; bonnet, parasol and full-length dress for her.
Jepson explained to the Northern Advocate that this represented his own history: his family had originally arrived in New Zealand on one of the fabled “first four ships” of Canterbury.
He said he hoped that in future Waitangi celebrations, more people would dress in costumes representing the Treaty-signing era, including “seafaring sailors and whalers and Dalmatians with their bags of gum and gum-digging sticks”.
Jepson is the Kaipara District Mayor, from an area with a rich history of both gum digging and colonial-era warfare.
At Waitangi, he said, they were very well received. “A lot of the older Māori kuia were coming up to us and saying how much they loved what we were wearing, wanting photos with Jeannette in particular.”
The couple also handed out small scrolls with the inscription: “Honour the Treaty. He iwi tahi tatou.”
“That translates to: ‘We are now all one people,’” Jepson said.
The phrase comes to us from the missionary William Colenso, who was present when the Treaty was signed in 1840. “He iwi tahi tatou,” he wrote, is what Lieutenant Governor William Hobson, representing the Crown, said to each signatory when he went round and shook their hands.
Whether Hobson really said this is disputed. No other witness noted it and Colenso himself didn’t reveal it until 50 years later, in a book he wrote when he was 80.
Does that matter? The phrase has become, literally, Hobson’s Pledge. It’s the motto of the group of that name campaigning against laws it believes unfairly favour Māori.
Jepson was elected mayor in 2022, on a platform opposing Three Waters and other “co-governance” reforms, such as Māori wards, as proposed by the then Labour Government.
On November 30 that year, he prevented Pera Paniora (Te Roroa, Ngāti Whātua), who is a Māori ward councillor, from saying a karakia at the start of a council meeting. A week later he banned the use of karakia altogether, although the practice had been in place for two decades.
After another week and much public debate, the Kaipara council reached a compromise. Members would be rostered to allow each of them, one per meeting, to provide a short reflection, which might be a karakia.
When Jepson’s turn arrived two months later, he declared, “When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”
It’s a famous quote by Thomas Sowell, an American economist and public affairs commentator. Sowell, who is black, is celebrated in conservative circles for his opposition to the civil rights movement. He’s 94 now and has always been opposed. He disputes the existence of “systemic racism” and thinks Donald Trump was a better US President than Barack Obama.
Sowell made his “seems like discrimination” statement while supporting the removal of affirmative action programmes. His point: when people of colour are used to getting some kind of advantage – such as places reserved for them in college – they can feel picked on if it’s taken away. The statement is a favourite among Hobson’s Pledge followers.
But others use it to say the exact opposite. By their reading, the people who get preferential treatment in our society are Pākehā. This advantage is so normalised, they say, many Pākehā don’t even know it’s happening.
Which is why some targeted benefits for Māori – such as quotas for entry to medical school – seem like discrimination against Pākehā. And why the right to start a meeting in accordance with tikanga Māori seems, to some, designed to alienate.
And that, right there, represents the two poles of our race debate. Someone’s getting an unfair advantage, and some of the people on the other side have had enough.
But who is it getting that unfair advantage? Whatever your ethnicity, the question is: is it them, or is it us?
Craig Jepson and Jeannette Reid weren’t the only people to present themselves at Waitangi in a style inspired by the olden days. Every haka party, and there were many, did the same. And, although it may be slightly less obvious, so did the Royal New Zealand Navy.
“MERI KIRIHIMETE, Merry Christmas” declared the front page of the Herald at Christmas time last year.
Many readers told us they loved it. Others said:
“The Herald is a propaganda rag these days.”
“Try printing ALL your articles in Māori and see how well you do.”
“Rotten Xmas to you msm drongos.”
“Speak English!”
“This is the last straw. I subscribed to an English-language newspaper. You can expect to see my cancellation forthwith.”
And, “Look at the divide you are creating.”
There was also this: “You guys are disgusting. Merry Christmas is in a smaller font.” That one might or might not have been ironic. We couldn’t tell.
“MOST NEW Zealanders, whatever their cultural backgrounds, are good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant,” wrote historian Michael King in his book The Penguin History of New Zealand, first published in 2003.
“Those qualities,” he added, “are part of the national cultural capital that has in the past saved the country from the worst excesses of chauvinism and racism seen in other parts of the world. They are as sound a basis as any for optimism about the country’s future.”
King died the next year, but his book has sold over 300,000 copies and has never been out of print. It was republished last year, unchanged except for a new foreword by historian Jock Phillips and a new title: The Penguin History of Aotearoa New Zealand.
King’s optimism is being sorely tested now.
The trigger is a proposed referendum on the “principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”. The trigger is the haka performed this season by a professional women’s rugby team, the Hurricanes Poua. The trigger is almost every health statistic. It’s road signs, te reo on the news, Māori wards, water reform, the supply of social housing, gangs, the school history curriculum, the nature of science, the role of museums, the names we give our country.
The trigger is those people who make you angry. The trigger is the people whom you make angry. The trigger is the trigger.
The Herald’s Whenua series invites readers to dive into the history of the land we stand on. While we’re used to specific land disputes, it isn’t easy to debate land rights more widely. Instead, our race debates tend to be about language, or “preferential treatment” and “discrimination”. We dispute what’s equal and fair and equitable, and we also dispute what those words mean.
But land sits beneath it all. Almost 200 years ago, the Treaty of Waitangi was an attempt to define our relationship to the land and how our society might operate. Commitments were made.
What were those commitments, what happened to them and what should happen now?
There’s fundamental disagreement about this, and yet among all the people who differ, there is wide agreement on one thing. The Treaty has been breached.
“It is a curious thing,” wrote Audrey Young in the Herald in October last year, “that the further we get from the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi 183 years ago, the more convinced certain people have become about what was in the minds of those who signed it.”
She added that it was because of those differences in interpretation that the concept of Treaty principles was put into legislation.
The concept was established in law in 1975, when the Waitangi Tribunal was created. One of its jobs was to “provide for the observance, and confirmation, of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi”.
But these principles were not defined. Instead, as AUT professor Dominic O’Sullivan says: “They have evolved as new problems and possibilities arise, and as different ideas develop about what governments should and shouldn’t do. Te Tiriti, in other words, can’t be a rigid rule book.”
The Treaty of Waitangi was written in English and then translated into te reo Māori, to become Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The translation was done by the Reverend Henry Williams, who was fluent in te reo. It’s not exact, because many of the key words and phrases have different meanings in each culture, or don’t really translate at all.
For a long time it was assumed – at least among Pākehā – that the English version was authoritative. After all, it was written in the name of Great Britain and it came first.
But only 39 people signed that version, and only after it was explained to them in te reo. More than 500 signed Te Tiriti.
Following the work of historian Ruth Ross in 1972, it’s now widely accepted that Te Tiriti is the authoritative version. It’s the only one most Māori signatories were able to understand, which makes it the only possible record of what they agreed to.
The former chief justice, Dame Sian Elias, put this view bluntly in 2017, in an interview available through the National Library on You Tube. She said: “It can’t be disputed that the Treaty is actually the Māori text.”
In both languages, the document has a preamble and three articles.
In English, Article One says the chiefs “cede to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of sovereignty” which they had previously exercised themselves.
But “sovereignty” is not a concept in te ao Māori, the Māori world. It was translated as “kāwanatanga” – a word the missionaries made up, based on “kāwana”, a transliteration of governor.
Victoria University’s Emily Beausoleil, a political scientist, points out that kāwana was used at the time to refer to the British governor in Sydney, and also to Pontius Pilate in the te reo Bible. “Governorship or kāwanatanga provided the British in Aotearoa – a very small hapū in 1840 – the capacity to have a governor to oversee their own affairs and enforce British law over British subjects.”
O’Sullivan says the article means “governments should always be allowed to govern”. But what that in turn means is confused by Article Two.
In the English version of this article, the Queen “confirms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and to the respective families and individuals thereof the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession”.
In plain English, that says Māori would retain their property rights. But “property rights” doesn’t translate easily into te reo either.
The Māori text uses the word “rangatiratanga”, which means something very much larger. Rangatiratanga is the full mana and authority of chieftainship.
National’s former Minister of Treaty Negotiations Chris Finlayson says the reference to rangatiratanga in Article Two “recognises the special position of the indigenous people in our land”.
The late Moana Jackson, a pre-eminent scholar of te ao Māori, argued that Māori could not possibly have believed they were “ceding mana or sovereignty”.
The idea they did, he said, is based on “an illusion that on the 6th of February 1840 every Māori in the country woke up and said: ‘We don’t want to make our own decisions anymore, we’re going to give it to that lady in London we’ve never even met.’”
The numbers alone make a similar case. In 1840, there were about 80,000 Māori in this country and 2000 Pākehā. Why would the chiefs of that overwhelming majority have simply agreed to give up their mana?
In 2022, another legal scholar and historian, Ned Fletcher, published The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi. He argues the British understood this too.
It wasn’t until later, says Fletcher, that the British Empire sought to extinguish the mana and rights of the chiefs. It wanted more land for settlers, and the chiefs’ authority, upheld by the Treaty’s recognition of rangatiratanga, stood in its way.
Article Three gives Māori “all the rights and privileges of British subjects”.
This introduces another field of dispute. Article Three is used by Hobson’s Pledge and others to argue there should be no special programmes or agencies for Māori, like Te Aka Whai Ora, the now-disbanded Māori Health Authority.
For many years, however, Government agencies have understood the article to mean the opposite of that. If Māori are systematically discriminated against, they cannot enjoy all the same “rights and privileges”. Te Aka Whai Ora was one example of an attempt to rebalance that. The “by Māori, for Māori” community health programmes of Whānau Ora are another.
The statistics are plain. Māori lag behind everyone else in every statistic of achievement and deprivation. And it culminates in this: Māori die on average seven years earlier than other New Zealanders.
Do Māori enjoy “all the rights and privileges” if they are likely to die earlier? And if there’s something wrong about that, what should we do about it?
Here’s one answer. “We want to go back to delivering Māori in their great number with things they do want, which is first-world wages, a decent education for their children to take them as far as they can go, access to a health system which is affordable and immediate, and a decent, affordable home, which is what Māori want.”
That’s NZ First leader Winston Peters (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi), on the campaign trail in 2023.
A year earlier, the then deputy leader of the Labour Party Kelvin Davis (Ngāpuhi) suggested there was a “simple way to understand Te Tiriti”: it’s kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga working together to achieve equity. Articles One and Two, combining to make a reality of Article Three.
“That’s what Māori want,” Davis said. “We just want to be able to achieve as well as any other people in Aotearoa New Zealand. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation.”
“The new world order is creating mindless undemocratic racial inequality, in NZ, enticing maoris to demand and take control against all statutes and protocols ,fake treaty talk ,fake news ..you are already paying and giving power wrongly so to Maori in relative silence „exacuted without discussion,,,you are setting up chaos division violence here and world wide to facilitate the PLAN” - Email to the Herald
“We progress as a society when the centre holds, whilst slowly moving that centre to reflect the changing nature of our aspirations and beliefs. But if the centre collapses because the extremes are too unyielding, or either one of the main parties rapidly moves to embrace that extreme, we put the bonds that bind our society at great peril. But the political centre has to move as well.” - Former National Party leader Todd Muller, valedictory speech to Parliament, 2023.
“To see how a totally illiterate, stoneage, canabal bunch have been elevated to a god-like level is amazing. It’s great to see them being put back where they belong - On an equal footing.” - Email to the Herald
“Let’s talk, so that the sparks of understanding can be reignited.” – Rahui Papa, spokesman for the Kiingitanga movement
The concept of partnership is not mentioned at all in the Treaty, in either version. But it is used in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, which set up the Waitangi Tribunal. And it has been widely used in the 50 years since then, in the courts, in law, at the tribunal, in agencies of central and local government and in many parts of civil society.
Partnership is often recognised as a principle of the Treaty and has been called that by the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, and every one of his predecessors stretching back some decades.
The argument for partnership goes like this. The Treaty is a document designed for the greater good. But when the Māori and English versions are read together, its meaning is not clear. The concepts of sovereignty, kāwanatanga, rangatiratanga and property rights do not sit easily together.
Further, knowing how to apply a historical document to contemporary society is an ongoing task.
The Treaty invites us to address all this by working together. That’s part of the meaning of being “one people”. And it implies we should do this in ways that recognise the mana of all concerned. “Partnership” is a useful word to encapsulate this.
It doesn’t have a strict legal meaning and it’s not meant to. We make it fit for purpose in any given time and place, and we keep remaking it.
Dame Sian Elias suggests this is not a weakness but a strength, not an oversight but a necessary condition. “Constitutional documents are always indeterminate. They have to leave room for societies to grow. They’re all made with aspirations of their day, and they have to expand to fit the different society that evolves.”
Writing for e-Tangata, commentator Jamie Tahana (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Makino, Tapuika) described the Treaty as “a promise between Māori and the Crown to each other. It offers a shared sense of nationhood, and gives people from elsewhere a chance to make a home on this land”.
His argument: to honour the Treaty is to honour this intent.
The National-Act coalition agreement takes a different approach. At Act’s instigation, a bill will soon be introduced to define the “Treaty principles” and put them to a referendum. Act leader David Seymour has been made an Associate Minister of Justice so he can lead this process.
National will support the bill in its first reading, after which it will go to a select committee for public submissions. Luxon says National will oppose the bill progressing any further than that.
On its website, Act says the principles will be based on “the three articles in the Māori version of the Treaty originally signed in 1840″. The party translates them as:
These principles describe some fundamental components of our democracy. But do they describe the Treaty?
The third principle doesn’t address the dispute over how we should all be treated equally, so that we have the “same rights”. With unequal life expectancy at birth, should Māori tamariki (children) have no “special” treatment, or as much as is necessary to give them the same fighting chance as everyone else?
Seymour says the former. If this view prevails, an enormous range of initiatives, public and private, could be abandoned.
The second principle is not what the Treaty says in English or te reo Māori. The second article doesn’t talk about “all New Zealanders”. It’s a specific assurance to Māori that rangatiratanga – the full mana and authority of chieftainship – will be retained.
Rangatiratanga is not and never has been enjoyed by “all New Zealanders”.
Act’s second principle discards the Māori concepts expressly included in Article Two.
And something else is missing: Act’s principles have nothing to say about the evolving value of partnership.
Remember, Te Tiriti is the Treaty. But if the bill and its referendum are successful, with this wording, the Māori concepts will be discarded and the English concepts will be the only ones that matter in law.
Seymour denies this. “Actually, we’re pro-Treaty,” he told Moana Maniapoto on the TV show Te Ao with Moana. “We just don’t like the divisive way it’s been interpreted lately.”
Many Māori – and others – don’t like the “divisive” way he’s conducting the debate, either.
This is why the iwi of Aotearoa have come together this year in unprecedented displays of kotahitanga, or unity. At Tūrangawaewae, Rātana, Waitangi and at Ōmahu Marae in Hawke’s Bay, they said Seymour was the one being divisive.
It’s why Seymour has been met around the country with angry wero, or challenges – in schools, on the rugby field, on the marae at Waitangi itself – and why the anger is so strong, the challengers sometimes ignore the protocols of politeness.
The question raised by the bill and its referendum is this: if they succeed as currently proposed, will that make the Treaty of Waitangi itself redundant?
THREE DAYS after Waitangi Day this year, at the Waterfront Theatre in Auckland, a new play called Hyperspace opened. It was set in the early 1990s and told the story of a mismatched couple of dance enthusiasts who try to win an aerobics competition with a dance style they invent, called “kapa haka fusion”.
It was funny and heartbreaking and as is the way with all such stories, things go terribly wrong but also wonderfully right.
The show was a collaboration between the Auckland Theatre Company, whose subscriber base comes in large part from Remuera and the other wealthy, Pākehā-dominated eastern suburbs of the city, and Te Pou Theatre, a Māori company based in West Auckland.
The collaboration allowed them to share resources, merge their creative wellsprings and reach each other’s audiences. In a speech on opening night, Te Pou director Amber Curreen (Ngāpuhi) said there was a lot of talk about “partnership” these days and she wanted to contribute her own definition.
“Partnership is a mana-enhancing relationship,” she said. “It’s not hard. We’ve been doing it for a while.”
Whenua is a New Zealand Herald data-led project, supported by the Public Interest Journalism Fund, in association with Māori land legal expert Adrienne Paul (Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tuhoe) from the University of Canterbury law school.
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