Waitangi 2025: What the kōhanga generation offers the country - Simon Wilson

Kuini for a day: The kohanga generation is on the move, from young adults all the way down to this little girl in the prow of a waka at Waitangi on Thursday. Photo / Simon Wilson

THREE KEY FACTS

• Waitangi celebrations this year have been both confrontational and festive.
• They were coloured by the recent death of Dame Iritana Te Rangi Tāwhiwhirangi, a co-founder of the kōhanga reo movement.
• The kōhanga generation was to the fore at Waitangi this year.

ANALYSIS

There was a lot of talk about Dame Iritana Te Rangi Tāwhiwhirangi at Waitangi this week. She died recently, aged 95, having been famous and enormously impactful in te ao Māori while remaining, I would guess, almost unknown among Pākehā. Call it a feature of our cultural life.

Tāwhiwhirangi, an early childhood teacher and welfare officer from the East Coast, was one of the founders of Kōhanga Reo, the first te reo immersion preschool. When it began in Wainuiomata in 1982, she was given the job of expanding the programme around the country. Turning the programme into a movement; turning the movement into a phenomenon.

Language immersion teaching spread to primary schools, as kura kaupapa, to secondary schools as wharekura and then to tertiary education, as wānanga. Today there are 4500 kōhanga reo and around 25,000 students enrolled in the various levels of language-immersion education. That figure doesn’t include the many more for whom te reo is integrated into their schooling without it being full immersion.

Tāwhiwhirangi – Auntie Iri to many – didn’t do all this on her own but she made a leader’s contribution to an extraordinary legacy: children in those language-immersion schools get better academic results than their peers in English-language education.

The studies are consistent. The longitudinal Growing Up in New Zealand study, along with NZ Council for Educational Research studies and others, have all found that full-immersion learning is likely to turn kids into better readers who get higher grades in NCEA exams and at university and move into better jobs.

This “outcome” – to borrow one of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s favourite words – has a name. It’s called the kōhanga generation.

Dame Iritana Te Rangi Tāwhiwhirangi was one of the founders of Kōhanga Reo. Photo / Te Tai

“Don’t be scared,” said Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, the 21-year-old Te Pāti Māori MP, when she was elected in 2023. “Because the kōhanga reo generation are here and we have a huge movement and a huge wave of us coming through.”

It’s true. Data from Growing Up in New Zealand, analysed by Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, a tertiary institute in Papatoetoe, suggests about 10% of all New Zealand 4-year-olds can speak or understand simple sentences in te reo. An astonishing 75% use at least some te reo at home.

The kōhanga generation was everywhere at Waitangi. Tamariki in the waka ama crews and the kapa haka groups. Rangatahi (children) the same, and leading the protests. And middle-aged adults, because kohanga is over 40 years old now, sprinkled among the judges, the officials, the civic leaders, the politicians. Maipi-Clarke was there, along with other kōhanga kids who are now in Parliament.

The kōhanga movement is an undisputed success story in New Zealand, in a field – education – in which it’s not always easy to point to many others.

So why isn’t it celebrated? Shane Jones and Winston Peters urged everyone on Wednesday to move on from “Treaty principles” debates: did they mean to issues like education? After four decades and counting, why hasn’t language-immersion schooling been funded, promoted and learned from much more widely?

Education Minister Erica Stanford and her associate minister, Act leader David Seymour, were at Waitangi: imagine if they’d gone with a promise to make that happen.

It’s not like there isn’t a desperate need. The gap between the highest achievers and the lowest in our schools is one of the largest in the developed world. In 2018, Unicef ranked New Zealand 33rd on this measure, out of 38 countries in the OECD.

And Māori students are disproportionately represented among the low achievers. This can’t be explained just by economic status. The evidence suggests Māori do worse because of the way they are treated in the education system, as Māori. This mirrors the way African-American students are treated in the American education system.

Pōwhiri for Arikinui Kuini Ngā Wai hono i te pō, at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Photo / Dean Purcell

Seymour knows these statistics and says he finds them as unacceptable as anyone. At Waitangi, he said: “Across all spending, I think we’re doing more for young Māori than any other party.” The reintroduction of charter schools is his showcase policy to back that claim.

But charter schools have an uneven track record and the rollout of the new tranche this year is underwhelming. One charter school in Seymour’s electorate may have just six students. Some others have under 30.

At Tipene, formerly St Stephens, which he launched as a new charter school on Waitangi Day, the intake is 40 and the student fees are $15,000 each.

I asked Seymour directly about this at Waitangi and he said they’re starting small and it will grow. But it does not look like a recipe for either growth or success. Especially as the kohanga movement offers so much more promise.

Again, why are kōhanga, kura kaupapa and wharekura not being supercharged?

Educationalist Alwyn Poole has an answer. He believes that, despite a lot of hand-wringing, too many of us don’t want the gap between Māori and non-Māori education to close.

“My conclusion is that we take the differentials between ethnicities as natural rather than a function of upbringing, previous education or deeply ingrained expectations,” he wrote a couple of weeks ago. “For many, Māori are still those tactile kids who can play rugby, love practical learning and are future ‘stop-go’ experts.”

According to that view, we don’t want Māori to become teachers, lawyers, health workers, business leaders, and especially politicians, because they’ll want to change things. And it’s true, they do. This was very clear from the protests at Waitangi these last two years, the hīkoi to Parliament last year and the hui-ā-motu that preceded it.

Potential lawyers, doctors, business leaders and politicians at a kohanga reo in the Bay of Plenty in 1988. Photo / Bay of Plenty Times

Seymour complained that, although he was at Waitangi to talk, no one wanted to talk to him. In my view, he misunderstood the eloquence of those turned backs, the full in-his-face challenge of the wero, the calculated insults, all framed by tikanga (customs).

Nobody was there to hurt him, physically. But they were telling him as profoundly as they could just how frustrated they are with his refusal to accept he is causing harm.

It’s supposed to be one of the biggest truisms of any society: for people to prosper and advance, “education is the key”. But what if that education produces young people with the knowledge that society needs changing and the skills to push for those changes?

This is not the first time there’s been a backlash against educated Māori.

Emma Wehipeihana, a doctor and writer, has said: “This is the education system that, threatened by the graduation of the first Māori doctor, Māui Pōmare, and others, around the turn of the 20th century, responded by focusing the curriculum for Māori away from ‘professional’ vocations and into labouring and domestic-work training. We were told that we were too stupid and unfit for higher education by the same people who ensured we wouldn’t have the chance to even try.”

Seymour’s slogan, used often at Waitangi, is that “it’s wrong to treat people differently on the basis of their ancestry”. The kōhanga generation would probably agree. But they would say the gaps in home ownership, health outcomes, employment, rates of imprisonment, educational achievement, you name it, speak to generations of Māori being treated differently. This generation says, “Enough.”

Wehipaihana asks: “What do they fear? They won’t articulate this in any official document, but they are driven by the fear that we will gain critical mass and actually start to achieve equity, maybe even rangatiratanga.”

If you’re wondering just why so many Māori are upset about Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill, that’s not a bad place to start.

Waitangi offers so much and on Thursday there were a lot of happy people walking about. Most of the politicking had finished, although not all of it.

During the dawn ceremony, Methodist president Te Aroha Rountree got stuck into Seymour’s bill. She quoted historian Alistair Reese that the Treaty is like a marriage, “but it seems our spouse, the Crown, has filed for divorce while we were blissfully unaware”. His claim the bill promised equality for all, she added, was “a masquerade”.

Dawn at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Photo / Dean Purcell

There were lots of panels and debates. So many choirs and bands and kapa haka groups performing on the many stages, it could get confusing what to go to next.

You’re walking around in the hot sun, through three fairgrounds full of stalls, one event here and then another way down over there, and you come across a group rehearsing their poi under the trees. So you just stop, watch and listen for a while. That works.

The Treaty House was open and lovely to explore. It’s like a Tardis: a colonial wooden cottage that’s larger and more elegant on the inside than seems possible by looking at it from the outside. Te Rau Aroha, the museum of the Māori Battalion, is one of the most moving and creatively presented museums I’ve ever been in.

The whare tupuna on Te Tii Marae has been brought back to life and reopened. There’s a big new photo exhibition at Te Kongahū, the Museum of Waitangi, commemorating 50 years of the Waitangi Tribunal, which will be up for months. So much history, all there to take in.

Shane Jones boasted about the money he’d provided for new public toilets and they’re open too. I’ll give him this: they’re really good toilets.

Speaking of toilets, Jones also gets the prize for most entertaining idea. After complaining mournfully that the youth of today were turning the pōwhiri (welcome ceremony) into a circus, he got his twinkle back by explaining that, back in the day, the warriors on both sides had to be good runners.

Put down the taki, the leaves, and beat it, or you’d get caught “and have your face rubbed in horseshit”.

“Sadly,” he said, “I did not bring a bucket of horseshit with me today.”

Best costumes: Ngāpuhi wahine toa turned up with heavy red woollen blankets, embroidered with Toitū Te Tiriti slogans. Homely and very handsome.

Protesters with blankets turn their backs on David Seymour as he speaks at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds. Photo / Dean Purcell

Best stories: Labour’s Chris Hipkins.

He refrained from the attacky soundbites of most of the others and talked about the three hours he’d spent paddling a waka on Tuesday. He said he’d been advised before he left to take all his troubles out with him and “send them to Tangaroa”. We hear unconfirmed reports of whirlpools and a boiling sea in the outer Bay of Islands.

But he believes it worked, and he had a “cultural, physical and spiritual experience” so good he wished all New Zealanders could have it too.

Then he got back on land and the politics started up again.

Hipkins also told the story of a boy collecting starfish on the beach and throwing them back, so they don’t drown. An old man comes along and tells him not to bother because there are so many, he won’t be able to make a difference. The boy throws back another starfish.

“Made a difference to that one,” he says.

Politician with the most to prove: Māori Development Minister Tama Potaka. His declaration that “We have come here in person, to feel the sweat on the forehead,” felt like a commitment to restore the mana of the party of Sir Bill English, Chris Finlayson, Sir Doug Graham and Dame Jenny Shipley. Engaged, with goodwill.

Oddest moment? It didn’t happen at Waitangi, but 1400km away in Akaroa, where Potaka’s boss said about Waitangi Day commemorations: “These events have been going on for 185 years.”

Not quite. In his enthusiasm for the moment, Luxon may have forgotten the Land Wars, the long period of confiscation and the declaration of Chief Justice Sir James Prendergast in 1877 that the Treaty was “worthless” and a “nullity” because it had been signed “between a civilised nation and a group of savages” who were not capable of signing a treaty.

With that legacy, Waitangi Day wasn’t officially marked until 1934.

Most welcome return: Greens co-leader Marama Davidson was back from her many months of cancer treatment, with best wishes from everybody, a little more quietly fiery than before, but fiery nonetheless.

Several times over the week, she referred to attacks on mana. That word was rejected when the original English version of the Treaty was translated into Māori, shortly before the document was presented for signing. Mana became kawanatanga, which means something closer to governorship.

The point is that rangatira would never have signed anything that said they would give up their mana.

There were very good pāua fritters and a lot of motivational merch. The swimming is sublime, say those who found the time to do it. Warm flat water: you lie there soaking in beauty.

Favourite moment? The waka flotilla, about two dozen canoes, many double hulled, took to the water all at once on Thursday after an enormous haka, with more than a thousand people on the beach to see them off and many wading out as well.

Kuia send the kohanga generation in the waka ama on their way, Waitangi Day 2025. Photo / Dean Purcell

I was standing knee-deep, watching the kohanga generation all lined up with their mentors, paddles hoisted, bursting to go, when a large flounder rubbed its way over my foot.

At least, I think it was a flounder. A woman next to me said that the day before there had been an eagle ray.

Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.