Dame Tariana Turia at Ratana last week. Photo / Audrey Young
Chris Finlayson and Tariana Turia have a special friendship.
“It’s no exaggeration to say I love her,” says former Treaty Negotiations Minister Finlayson in an interview about partnership and the Treaty of Waitangi.
He says she was the most impressive person he ever met in politics.
They seemed a good place to start for a Treaty project on my to-do list for January and February.
I put in a request last year to talk to former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern about Government policy on the Treaty, partnership, co-governance and how New Zealand should be functioning in 2040.
But it also seemed a good idea to talk to a few people – without an immediate party political agenda - who might have some thoughts on partnership and power-sharing.
The subject has become more relevant since Ardern’s resignation, not less relevant.
In a frank admission, her successor Chris Hipkins acknowledged there was anxiety about co-governance, and admitted the Government had made a hash of explaining it and what its limits should be.
He intends to say more about the matter, possibly in his first visit to Waitangi as Prime Minister, although that could be delayed because of the Auckland floods emergency.
Dame Tariana Turia, the former Labour MP turned Māori Party founder, is not a great fan of co-governance.
Her focus is rangatiratanga for iwi.
“We need to find our way back to ourselves first and some of us are struggling,” she says in an interview at Ratana, near her home base of Whanganui.
They should be able to live by their own tikanga and take care of their own people.
“That’s what we were promised and it has never happened.”
Most of the time, iwi were entrapped in Government rules and regulations in the way they lived and that was not what rangatiratanga was about.
“For me, rangatiratanga is about us determining what’s in our own best interests and living by that.”
She rejected a suggestion that definition sounded like living separately.
“No, I’m not saying that because we are never going to be separate. The majority of our world that we live in is not tikanga-driven or it’s not Māori.
“What I am saying is that where we desire to practise particular things within our iwi, that’s our right and we don’t need to have the permission of the state or anyone else for that matter to do that.”
She believed the Crown should be resourcing iwi “to practise their own obligations to each other”.
Like many others, she did not have her head around how New Zealand should ideally be functioning by 2040 but she said she did not think about it in global or pan-iwi terms.
“When I think about iwi and the Crown I think right down to my own marae, my own families, the river and all those marae up and down the river.
“Our kids need the opportunity to experience what it means to be who they are, and they don’t. They don’t get that chance.”
She talks about her “blondinis” – two blonde mokopuna who live with her and their father four days a week, and three days with their mother.
She said they had been teased at kura and been called Pākehā - and they had said they were not.
Turia told them they were Pākehā and they should be proud of it, and they were also Māori.
“I said ‘you don’t need to be ashamed of that. Your mother is a Pākehā and we love her to bits. You just say to them ‘Yes I am and I’m really proud of it … You look at them you say to them ‘I’m really lucky, I’m both.’”
Turia retired from politics in 2014 and is now aged 78. She is under the watchful care of family and friends after a bout of ill health required her to get a pacemaker.
Finlayson’s respect for her is reciprocated.
“I love Chris,” she says. She loved his honesty and his respect for her people.
The way they talk, it’s almost a perfect political partnership.
The pair - as National Cabinet minister and radical Māori Party co-leader - strongly supported each other’s work in government and have deep personal respect.
He admired her opposition to the Foreshore and Seabed Act, and her work to set up Whanau Ora, a holistic approach to improving the lives of whānau. She supported his repeal of the foreshore and seabed law and his mammoth efforts to conclude Treaty settlements, which included the Whanganui River settlement.
Finlayson dedicated his 2021 book He Kupu Taurangi on his Treaty settlements work to her.
“I just remember her quiet determination when dealing with the repeal of the foreshore and seabed legislation,” he told the Herald.
“She was totally without hyperbole and without rancour but knew exactly what she wanted. She is a very, very impressive human being.”
Finlayson, who has returned to practising law since retiring from politics in 2018, said there needed to be a proper discussion about where co-governance came from, what its boundaries were, and what the intentions were for the future.
“Increasingly people are conflating the idea of co-governance and co-government and that’s not right,” he said in a Zoom interview.
Some Treaty settlements had allowed particular iwi at a local or regional level the opportunity to be involved in the management of a water resource, and that was a form of power-sharing.
“I don’t have any problem with that at all and every party in the Parliament during my time as minister, including the Act Party, used to vote for those measures.”
There were some areas at the national level, such as security and intelligence, and foreign affairs and defence, that were the Crown’s and the Crown’s alone.
“Of course there can be input but any idea of power-sharing is just not realistic. So it depends on the particular circumstances.”
The limits of partnership were dictated by the particular issues at stake.
He believed there was a strong claim in the resource and environmental areas – and in familial matters involving, for example, children in state care.
“It is sensible to involve the iwi or hapū in at least some of those questions.”
The principle of partnership between Maori and the Crown was set out in the 1987 Lands case by the Court of Appeal.
He said it was no bad thing to set some parameters and to define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.
“The trouble is you leave it to the courts and with the greatest of respect to the courts, they invent a lot of this stuff on the way through and I don’t think it is the right of the courts to do that – it is the role of the legislature.”
It was the role of Government to be very clear about what it meant by the principles of the Treaty.
Rather than having “lazy” laws that simply said it must give effect to the principles of the Treaty, Finlayson said that when he was minister, there was an attempt to be more precise about what giving effect to the principles meant in the context of that specific law.
That was evident in laws such as the Heritage NZ legislation.
“It does require thought, but if you have what I call the ‘lazy’ formulation, you have uncertainty and you can have judges making it up as they go along.”
When it comes to what New Zealand should look like in 2040, 200 years after the Treaty was signed, Finlayson said he was an optimist. Other countries had problems but New Zealand had a very worthy project in the Treaty.
It would not be helpful to spend too much time dwelling on the past.
“We won’t be looking back and we won’t be looking at breaches of agreements if the Crown … is mindful of the new obligations it takes on in Treaty settlements.”
But it was one of his worries that 10 or 20 years on, “the Crown forgets”.
“They forgot, for example, the 1992 Fisheries settlement which caused a bit of upset with the Kermadecs [ stalled marine reserve].
“We have to be mindful of the obligations that are created and honour them.”
Rebuilding Better
The New New Zealand: Rebuilding Better is a major series from the NZ Herald and NZME that examines how Aotearoa can rebuild economically and socially.
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The project focuses on a series of themes - we started last year with the economy before moving on to social division. The project continues this year with Audrey Young’s look at the Treaty and co-governance
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