Heather du Plessis-Allan: A referendum on co-governance would return a big, fat no

Labour set up a separate Māori Health Authority, rammed co-governance into the Three Waters legislation and wedged it into the new RMA. Apart from the Māori Health Authority, none of this was what voters asked for.

OPINION

On Friday last week, 240 people sat down in a room in Auckland’s Viaduct to eat food paid for by the Maxim Institute and listen to a chap speak. There were MPs, business owners, members of the media and academics.

The chap we were there to hear was Tom Simpson, an associate professor of philosophy and public policy at Oxford University.

He wanted to talk about why trust is breaking down in democracies across the Western World.

There are, he said, two classes of people. There is the laptop class. These are people who earn a crust working on computers. People like me, MPs, people who work in government departments and courts and universities. Then there is the tactile class. These are people who earn a crust building things and making things and growing things. Normal people basically.

Sometimes the laptop class does things without regard to whether that’s actually what the tactile class wants. The example he used was Brexit. There were many people in the tactile class who wanted the UK - rightly or wrongly - to leave the EU. The laptop class didn’t want to have that debate, so they didn’t let it happen. It happened accidentally and the result surprised them.

That same day - Friday last week - a group of Australian pollsters released a poll in the local Wellington newspaper showing that 48 per cent of respondents want “a referendum on Māori co-governance, to end the confusion and let every New Zealander have a say.” Only 17 per cent said no.

That result surprised me. It was many times higher than I would have expected. It was also exactly what Tom Simpson was talking about. Because clearly, people want to have this debate and decide what we do, but they’re not allowed.

Act is the only party backing a referendum on co-governance. Every other party either outright rejects it or says it isn’t important.

Worse, the Labour Government has gone out of its way to actually stop normal people (aka the tactile class) from having any kind of say on co-governance.

It used to be the case that when your local council proposed to establish Māori wards, ratepayers could object. They would need to collect signatures from 5 per cent of ratepayers to force a vote. The vote was binding. That was democracy.

In 2021, Nanaia Māhuta binned that right to object. Too many times democracy had said no. In other words, too many times the tactile class had said no to the thing the laptop class wanted to do. So the laptop class took that ability away from the tactile class.

Since then, laptop-led councils around the country have clamoured to set up Māori seats. The Western Bay of Plenty District Council did it last month. A community board member quit in protest. He was probably on the side of the public given that 78 per cent of ratepayers said no to these seats six years ago.

Labour tried to make half the seats on Rotorua’s council Māori seats. It set up a separate Māori Health Authority, rammed co-governance into the Three Waters legislation and wedged it into the new RMA.

Apart from the Māori Health Authority, none of this was what voters asked for. None of it was in the Labour Party manifesto last election.

If you ask members of the laptop class if we should have a referendum on co-governance the answer is always no: it’ll be divisive, it’s race-baiting, people don’t understand what they’re saying, this is good for Aotearoa. No one ever says out loud what the real reason is: a referendum will return a big, fat no.

Saying no to a referendum is the laptop class ignoring what the tactile class wants.

I don’t know for sure that a referendum is the right mechanism. I’m in the laptop class after all. I worry it will be extremely divisive.

But I know ignoring this simmering anger is a bad idea. We ignored it once before in 2005 after the Orewa speech. We shouted it down, called people racist and hoped the idea would die away with a generation. It didn’t. It’s come back nearly 20 years later. Because co-governance is really just Iwi/Kiwi by a different name.

We can ignore it again if we want, and we probably will because we’re cowards. But it will come back again. And in the meantime, every time we ignore it we’ll break down more trust in our democracy.

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive, Newstalk ZB, 4pm-7pm, weekdays.