Metiria Turei vanished from politics shortly before the 2017 election.
She has been lecturing in law at the University of Otago.
She has co-edited a book on Te Tiriti o Waitangi including essays featuring the principles and tikanga.
Audrey Young is the New Zealand Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was named Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018.
OPINION
Metiria Turei – who has laid relatively low since suddenly resigning as Green Party co-leader andleaving politics in 2017 – is re-emerging in different ways.
She has also been lecturing at the University of Otago law school, where she has co-edited a book on the Treaty of Waitangi with two fellow academics, professor in politics Janine Hayward and law professor Nicola Wheen.
Turei, who was a lawyer before becoming an MP in 2002, is a senior lecturer in Māori legal principles, Māori jurisprudence and indigenous legal theory.
She and co-editors Hayward and Wheen have selected a group of mainly academics and activists to delve into different aspects of the Treaty including the principles, tikanga, sovereignty, rangatiratanga, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Treaty settlements.
These are the sorts of people who have largely led Treaty debates for the past few decades and, even if they are not mainstream views, they are a valuable set of essays if they reflect where the direction of the Treaty debate is headed.
Turei has had a huge, if understated, role in New Zealand politics and is still very much a martyr on the left who ponders the “what-ifs”.
Were it not for the controversy over her revelation of historic benefit fraud and subsequent resignation, the polls may not have gone berserk and Labour may not have replaced Andrew Little with Jacinda Ardern just 54 days from the 2017 election.
The Greens surged after the public and media pile-on [me included] against Turei’s lack of contrition. Labour supporters shifted their support in solidarity with Turei to such an extent Little was forced to resign for Ardern.
Professor Janine Hayward is a co-editor of Te Tiriti o Waitangi Relationships, People, Politics and Law.
The controversy continued inside and outside the Greens. Ardern said Turei would not be a minister in any Government she led (although Winston Peters would undoubtedly have blocked her appointment in any case) and Turei resigned 45 days before the election and vanished from politics.
The Treaty has always been central to Turei’s life. It was the backbone of her maiden speech in 2002 when she said that as Māori had continued to fight for recognition as a Treaty partner, “the post-colonial state has co-opted Te Tiriti, and reduced the tikanga in that document to mere property rights.”
She returned to that theme in her own contribution to the book and how tikanga could apply in the relationship with the Crown. She sets out in detail the case involving the circumstances and consequences of the infamous 1916 Pouākani land deal, in which Wairarapa Moana were given land 400km away in South Waikato that had been confiscated by the Crown from Raukawa.
Turei explains how the concepts of hara (a harm), utu (a response), muru (a tool of redress) and ea (a state of resolution) were in play and how the Waitangi Tribunal was prevented from settling the matter with a creative but tikanga-consistent resolution.
In the final chapter summarising the various strands, Turei says, “Iwi Māori are looking for innovative tikanga-based pathways to engage with the Crown.”
Co-governance had less utility for Māori as a relationship tool than the editors expected.
“Rangatiratanga is the clear intent for iwi Māori, exercised to the greatest extent possible at many levels.”
One of the most revealing chapters is written by Hayward and Wheen – who have both previously published seminal books on the Waitangi Tribunal and Treaty Settlements. In it, they explain both the background to the so-called principles of the Treaty of Waitangi and an important development by the Supreme Court.
Professor of law at Otago University Nicola R. Wheen is a co-editor of the book.
They make the point that is often overlooked that references to Treaty principles have not only been criticised for being too vague in some quarters but have been criticised in other quarters as watering down the text of the Treaty and being a device to avoid addressing the Crown’s obligations to Māori as stated in the text.
In 1986 the Government of the day was advised that referring to Treaty principles was more flexible than specifying rights and principles in legislation “which could have the effect of setting them in concrete and not allowing for changing perspectives and circumstances over time”.
The famous Lands case of 1987 is reviewed; it produced the precedent-setting principles of partnership, active protection, redress, informed decision-making and Crown government.
What is clear is that successive Governments have moved away from broad statements about the principles in legislation, which have tended to give the courts an open invitation to define the principles, and instead elaborate on how that particular law meets the Crown’s Treaty obligations.
As the writers say: “By setting out the elements of the Treaty relationship in elaborated sections, Parliament limits that relationship to its own express terms.”
By 2024, half of the Treaty principle clauses were in the broad form and half were in the elaborated form designed to limit Treaty principles.
However, the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2021 Trans-Tasman Resources (TTR) case about the consent for seabed mining in South Taranaki challenged and even reversed assumptions.
While the authors say the legislation related to the case, the Exclusive Economic Zone Act, appears to curtail the Treaty principles to consultation, the Supreme Court’s judgment on the TTR case has nipped the curtailing effect of elaborated sections in the bud.
It said that unless the law explicitly stated it was not to give effect to the principles of the Treaty, the court assumed Parliament legislated in accordance with the principles, and that the proposed activity would be considered the light of existing interests. Those interests included tikanga-based customary rights and interests.
As the authors noted, if the Treaty principles are considered to exist unless the law explicitly says they must not be considered, then moves to remove Treaty principles from legislation may not change how the courts treat them.
“Such a move would have significant political and constitutional fallout.”
The full list of contributors is Grant Berghan, Heather Came, Claire Charters, Luke Fitzmaurice-Brown, Frances Hancock, Janine Hayward, Kerensa Johnston, Carwyn Jones, Merata Kawharu, Jacobi Kohu-Morris, Gerald Lanning, Jenny Lee-Morgan, Qiane Matata-Sipu, Tim McCreanor, Marama Muru-Lanning, Pania Newton, Mihiata Pirini, Nicola Short, Fleur Te Aho, Metiria Stanton Turei, Moana Waa, Tracey Whare, and Nicola Wheen.
The book's cover.
Te Tiriti o Waitangi Relationships: People, Politics and Law, edited by Metiria Stanton Turei, Nicola R. Wheen and Janine Hayward. Published by Bridget Williams Books, RRP $49.99
