Shane Te Pou: New Zealand Government recognises Māori rights; indigenous Australians have no voice

Locals outside a supermarket in Wadeye, a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory of Australia. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in July last year kick-started the process of holding a referendum to write the Voice into Australia’s constitution. Photo / Matthew Abbott/The New York Times

OPINION

It must be hard for people whose ancestors arrived in a country through colonisation to imagine that experience through the eyes of the indigenous people.

Imagine that your history is divided between the time that your people governed themselves according to their culture, on their land, and the time when they were governed by others, who suppressed and overwhelmed their culture and took that land, leaving only scraps.

The colonial attitude isn’t dead in Aotearoa. Just look at the immigrant from the UK, Rita, who recently complained at one of Chris Luxon’s meetings that “the Māori language is given priority”. Oh, yes, how shocking to occasionally see and hear some te reo Māori, here, in the homeland of the Māori!

Here I am, child of Ngāi Tūhoe, writing in te reo Pākehā in a land where the English Crown is sovereign over my people’s rohe – but let’s not offend the Ritas of the world with a little te reo Māori.

But, in Aotearoa, we have a government that is, in principle at least, seeking to no longer make new breaches of Te Tiriti and has made some small restitution for its past breaches. The Government’s adherence to Te Tiriti is by no means perfect, but there is a genuine effort to do things right and to give tangata whenua a voice.

Recognition of Māori rights and our voice is increasingly enshrined in law and at every level of government decision-making. As it should be – that’s the deal we made. And everyone in Aotearoa benefits from a voice in decision-making that is about the generations to come, not just next quarter’s profits.

Our indigenous cousins in Australia have not had the same recognition.

Their lands, their identities, even their children were systematically stripped from them by the colonial government. Until 1967, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were not included in Australian population counts. Our indigenous Australian cousins didn’t count. How horrible is that?

They literally didn’t exist in their own land, as far as the Australian Government was concerned.

There has been a slow, painful process in Australia to correct that. The claim that Australia was “terra nullius” (i.e. that there were no people living there worth consideration) has been legally overturned. Australian leaders commonly acknowledge the traditional owners of the land they are speaking on during events. It was only in 2017 that Ken Wyatt became the first indigenous Australian to be a minister in the Federal Government.

Wyatt began the process of creating the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. The Voice is to be a group of 24 representing the indigenous people of Australia, independent of government, that will be able to raise issues with the Government and which Parliament and government will have to consult with when developing laws and policies.

For a country without a Treaty, the Voice seems to be a good way to give the indigenous people input into the governance of their land. It means that the long-dispossessed and disconnected indigenous people of Australia will finally have a professional, resourced body to speak for them at the heart of government.

It was such a good idea, in fact, that the incoming Labor Government of Anthony Albanese adopted the work begun by Wyatt under the previous Liberal-Nationals Coalition Government. Albanese decided that the Voice should be written into Australia’s constitution, with a referendum that will need a “double majority” – “yes” nationally and “yes” in four out of six states.

Unfortunately, the allure of dog-whistle racism is strong for right-wing politicians in Australia, just as it is in New Zealand.

Although the Liberal-Nationals Coalition began work on the Voice, Liberal leader Peter Dutton now opposes it. Those attempting to scare white Australians have called the Voice “separatism”, a “veto” for indigenous Australians, and an unelected “third chamber of Parliament”.

Sounds awfully like the scaremongering we’ve heard about water reform and healthcare here in Aotearoa, doesn’t it?

And the sad thing is, blowing the dog whistle seems to be working. Since the Liberals started using the Voice as a weapon to whack the Labor Government, support for the popular idea has plummeted and the Liberals have started to close their polling gap with Labor. Just like how National beats on Labour whenever anything to do with Māori comes up here.

Wyatt resigned from the Liberals, saying “Aboriginal people are reaching out to be heard but the Liberals have rejected their invitation.”

The polls are now neck and neck, and the referendum will come down to the wire when it is held later this year.

I send my aroha to the Australians of all ethnicities fighting for the Voice. It needs to win for two reasons: so that indigenous people of Australia will, after two centuries of exclusion, finally have a voice in their government, and so that right-wing parties can learn that stoking racism is not a path to winning elections – a lesson that we need to learn on this side of the Tasman, as much as the other one.

I say to our indigenous sisters and brothers from across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. Kia Kaha, Ka whawhai tonu mātou. Your struggle is our struggle and our struggle is your struggle .

“Our spirituality is oneness and an interconnectedness with all that lives and breathes, even with all that does not live or breathe.”

– Mudrooroo

Shane Te Pou (Ngāi Tūhoe) is a commentator, blogger and former Labour Party activist.