OPINION:
We’ve lost a lot, these last few years. All over the country, homes and hillsides swept away, roads and bridges, hopes and dreams and lives.
It’s not just the weather. Each Waitangi Day politicians have proclaimed their aspirations and appealed to our best selves. But that’s taken a battering too. Bitterness now corrodes the debate.
Jacinda Ardern used to talk about the bridge between the worlds of Māori and Pākehā and about the way Māori cross that bridge far more often than Pākehā do. She borrowed the idea from her deputy, Kelvin Davis, who got it from his friend Charlie Shortland, who was an Anglican minister in Northland.
How’s that bridge holding up, on Waitangi weekend 2023, and who’s walking across it?
In 2018, at her first Waitangi as prime minister, Ardern led the Government delegation around the corner of the Treaty House, spotted Titewhai Harawira waiting in her wheelchair, and with a warm smile, broke ranks and went over to clasp the kuia’s white-laced hands.
There they were. The elderly protester, still fierce and yet shrunken, a lifetime of conflict behind her, hand in hand with the new young PM, still to discover what conflicts might lie ahead. Together, they made their way onto the paepae in front of the Whare Runanga.
Ardern made an historic speech that day, from the whare’s mahau, or porch. She said, “We did not come just for the beauty of the North. We came because there is work to do.”
She pointed across the lawn: to the Treaty House, which was once the home of the British Resident, James Busby. “That is the distance between us,” she said. And she listed some of the ways in which it can be measured: unemployment, mental health, housing, rates of incarceration.
She was pregnant. “You must hold us to account,” she said. “One day, I want to stand here with my child and only you can say when we have done enough.”
Five years have passed and there has been progress. Unemployment is low and workplace equity is on the rise. New housing construction is at record levels and there are fewer people in prison. A poverty index has been adopted and, on many of its markers, the news is good.
But few would say it’s enough.
Ardern is not at Waitangi this year but her successor Chris Hipkins is. On the marae and around the country, he has been hearing what she would have heard.
Anger, that in street crime, family violence, mental health, substance abuse, the signs of despair and social dysfunction are easy to see. That health services are in crisis. That by almost every measure, the people most harmed are Māori.
In the five years since 2018 we have also had pandemic and protest. Kindness became a powerful weapon for good, until frustration drove it away.
Everything has become harder. Bold plans for reform have stalled. Through Covid, the very mechanisms that kept businesses afloat, people in work and the economy in good working order also created a house-price boom that channelled wealth to the already wealthy.
The explosion in demand for emergency housing is a direct consequence of that. Again, Māori suffer the most.
The wealth gap between us has widened. It’s an indictment of our economic and social priorities.
And many, political leaders among them, now say we have become a people more divided than ever.
Bill English had something to say about all this. The then-PM celebrated Waitangi Day 2017 at the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei marae at Takaparawha (Bastion Point).
He spoke of the “great enterprise” of building a country based on “fairness, tolerance and respect”. Looking directly at Joe Hawke, the man who led a 506-day protest “occupation” on that land in 1976-78, he said, “We’ve all got better at it because of our struggles over the treaty.”
English explained that he had come to this marae because of the iwi’s achievements. Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei was awarded an $18 million treaty settlement in 2011 and today runs pioneering housing projects, health, education and social programmes, and a large plant nursery serving the city. It has also, through shrewd property investments, turned those few millions into a $1.65 billion asset. The iwi is an economic powerhouse in the city.
“Ngati Whatua’s future is New Zealand’s future,” said English. “In the regions, and I include Auckland in that, I would say that almost without exception the organisations that are most committed to development are the local iwi.”
Those sentiments are not echoed by National’s current leader, Christopher Luxon, although they are likely to be strongly backed by the party’s newest MP.
Hamilton West’s Tama Potaka is grounded in tikanga and experienced in business and treaty negotiations: he’s a respected iwi leader, in Parliament, on the centre right. Will he shake the place up?
In 2017, English also said, “Much as we have good intentions, the truth is we have not met our aspirations.” He cited domestic violence, educational underachievement and the high rate of imprisonment: “These things are the signs of failure.”
Which is why, he said, Whanau Ora “represents the best and truest chance of the next 20 to 30 years”. Whanau Ora empowers iwi and hapu to develop social services and direct them where they are needed most.
As a country, we’re struggling to agree on the best frameworks for progress. “Co-governance” raises fears among some that Māori will gain unwarranted advantage.
On the other hand, former Māori Party leader Dame Tariana Turia told the Herald this week she worries co-governance holds Māori back, because it keeps the Crown in the tent when, she believes, it shouldn’t be there. She prefers the Whanau Ora model, with Māori in charge.
The reality is, we have been evolving different ways in which Crown-Māori partnerships can work for many years: not just for Whanau Ora, but for kohanga reo, the Waikato River Authority, marae-based justice, charter schools and more.
Comfort levels with each of them rise and fall and that will always be the way. For tangata tiriti – all of us whose presence here was legitimised by the Treaty of Waitangi – walking across Charlie Shortland’s bridge might be difficult, but that’s no reason to stop trying.
Every year, more tangata tiriti are doing it. Te reo classes are busy and everyone in them is learning tikanga along with the language. Corporates have developed bicultural programmes, schools use some tikanga and te reo in classroom life, media are telling different stories and boosting our Māori vocab. The new history curriculum could have a profound effect.
Labour’s Minister for Treaty Negotiations, Andrew Little, made an impression in 2020 when he walked onto the bridge to talk about history, education and economic support. His speech took eight minutes and he delivered it entirely in Te Reo, without notes.
That morning on the paepae, the mana whenua sang, “Do not hold on to anger, there is another day.”
Since then, have we really become “more divided than ever”?
Luxon, for one, did not say that during the pōwhiri at Waitangi today. He suggested, instead, that Māori and the Crown had worked together and built a relationship of “trust and respect”.
But while Māori are still expected to cross the bridge far more than everyone else, quiet uncertainties remain and there are louder objections, sometimes accompanied by abuse.
It’s not that conflict is wrong and it’s not that Waitangi Day is the wrong time for conflict. On the contrary. It’s the right time.
In 2018, Ardern affirmed the value of mata ki te mata: speaking face to face. “We don’t seek perfection,” she said. “Frank and open disagreement is a sign of health.”
That has always been the Waitangi way. Titewhai Harawira and Joe Hawke both knew it and so did Bill English. In 2020, Pania Newton led a hikoi to Waitangi in protest at the lack of action at Ihumātao. Destiny Church’s Brian Tāmaki, later to become a leading dissenter to the Covid response, was there that year too. His protest then was that Māori were being oppressed.
Throughout last year, opposition political leaders became more “frank and open” with claims there has been too much change, too quickly. It’s their right to think this and it’s essential the framework of the Waitangi celebrations has room for them.
At the Iwi Leaders Forum and the panel sessions on the lower Te Tii Marae, though, Government ministers and officials have heard trenchant expressions of the opposite view: that progress is far too slow.
The conflict of heartfelt aspirations is the dynamic of progress. What matters is how we manage it: whether we commit to crossing the bridge and not just standing on one side shouting across at the other.
Harawira has gone from us now and so has Hawke. Jacinda Ardern’s time as prime minister is up. But the bridge that joins us remains.
Troy Kingi and Don McGlashan, among others, will sing on the Waitangi Treaty Grounds on Monday. That sounds like it might be a concert for the ages.
And remember Ruby Tui, seizing the mic at Eden Park to sing “Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi”?
Ruby Tui, who grew up near Charlie Shortland’s old stamping ground in Northland and had to navigate a life as tough as tough can be. But there she was, just three months ago, singing to us.
And the crowd sang with her. For a moment, it was like everyone had clambered onto the bridge.
The vehicle was damaged while later being towed and an $11k claim by the owner followed.