The fights over the true meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi (TOW) have been growing louder and more disputatious for decades now. Starting in the 1970’s with the idea that breaches of the Treaty by the Crown should be investigated and, in order for justice to be seen to be done, rectified within the bounds of State power with land and money, the fight has now moved into a far more existential phase.
Maori activists, including lawyers and politicians, are growing harsher in their demands that Maori sovereignty be accepted, as they argue it was in the TOW, and then breached by the Crown. The implications for the democracy and civil society of New Zealand are profound, and that is increasingly being recognised by opponents of this view.
Here are two excellent recent articles on the subject, one by Chris Trotter, which has been reasonably well circulated, and one by Peter Cresswell which has not.
Chris Trotter: Contested ground
[T]he Waitangi Tribunal has taken upon itself the risky business of inserting indigenous moral judgements into the amoral narrative of New Zealand’s past. I say “amoral” for the very simple reason that the events of the past, like those of the present, are driven by such a multiplicity of factors that expecting them to elicit universal approval, or condemnation (like the Holocaust) is nonsensical.
The current Minister for Treaty Settlements, for example, Paul Goldsmith, sees as much virtue as vice in the colonisation of New Zealand – an historical perspective that would find few supporters among Māori Treaty historians. Māori scholars, and their allies, present colonisation as an unmitigated disaster: an historical catastrophe from which the indigenous people of New Zealand are only now beginning to recover.
Trotter points out that the TOW Tribunal, with all its historians, is completely onboard with this historical take, what he calls a “Manichean historiography” that sees and hears only the aggrieved and “carefully curated historical grievances”. What the Tribunal wants according to him – what it needs – is a Treaty that leaves the sovereignty of the chiefs intact and unhindered by the decisions of a British government literally on the other side of the planet.
He asserts that this makes the Maori chiefs of the time seem like infants who didn’t understand what they were doing, or more precisely, what they were giving away.
It’s that last point that Cresswell takes up with argument, not just assertion. He quotes (with footnotes) a number of the Chiefs who were present at Waitangi in 1840 and signed the document even after expressing their concerns and disagreements with the idea of even some of their Chiefly powers being taken away:
Tareha, of the Ngatirehia tribe, who objected: “We only are the chiefs, rulers. We will not be ruled over. … Thou high, and I, Tareha, the great chief of the Ngapuhi tribes, low!” He clearly understood the position proposed. And he signed.
And Kawiti, rangatira of the Ngatihine tribe, who objected initially on the understanding that the Kawana would have the power to regulate, saying in horror, “What! … even I, Kawiti, must no paddle this way, nor paddle that way, because the Governor said ‘No’ …” He signed.
As important as what is recorded is what is not:
But not one of the speakers in any of the meetings recorded, even speaking in opposition, used the term “partnership.” And no assurance was given anywhere that chiefs would be “up high” with the governor in authority, somehow sharing power. The positions were clear to all. Like Pilate’s governorship, Hobson’s kawanatanga would mean only the Kawana would be “up.”
Cresswell also adds in the history of what the surviving Chiefs who had signed the Treaty said twenty years later in a meeting at Kohimarama, including more than 100 rangatira from Nga Puhi in the north to Ngai Tahu in the south, and this at a time when the Kingitanga movement in the Waikato was in full, violent opposition to the government and the European immigrants outnumbered Maori. He quotes a lengthy piece from one Tamati Waka Nene, which I’ll only partly quote in turn:
I am not accepting the Pakeha for myself alone but for the whole of us. My desire when Governor Hobson arrived here was to take him as our Governor in order that we might have his protection. Who knows the mind of the Americans or that of the French? Therefore I say let us have the English to protect us. Therefore my friends, do I say, let this Governor be our Governor and this Queen our Queen. Let us accept this Governor, as a Governor for the whole of us. Let me tell you, ye assembled tribes, I have but one Governor. Let this Governor be a King to us.
Same with the other Maori speakers, making it quite clear that they were not confused or fooled, then or later, about the powers they were yielding to the Governor representing Queen Victoria and the British government.
As for the Europeans Cresswell quotes part of a speech by then Governor Gore Browne to the assembled rangatira (again my quote is a partial one of that).
In return for these advantages the Chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi ceded for themselves and their people to Her Majesty the Queen of England absolutely and without reservation all the rights and powers of Sovereignty which they collectively or individually possessed or might be supposed to exercise or possess.
As Cresswell notes, the claims of the current protestors which, “expressed such violent objection” to that amounts to a recapitulation of the Treaty terms.
I don’t think the other side, the Te Paiti Maori side specifically, have a leg to stand on historically or legally in such a challenge to the State. Unfortunately such challenges in history have rarely given a damn about such things if they thought they had or could gain the power to make their wishes come true.
And this we spy the possibility of a civil war ahead, likely a guerrilla action.
No Minister 
I think all the arguments about the Treaty are an avoidance of the real discussion that needs to happen – why in the 21st century New Zealand is one of the remaining industrialized countries that continues to be governed by a a hereditary monarchy. What we need to be debating is breaking away from the UK, adopting a constitution and becoming a true republic.
No not all. What would a Republic bring us that is better than what we have.?
In fact the outcome could be sub optimal, look no further than our current Parliamentary system, MMP. A system that has under undermined and diminished our economic wealth. It has taken away direct Parliamentary accountability and replaced it with a system that allows “the Party” to control who sits in Parliament.
It has also allowed the Left and Far Left to become over represented.
A Republic , would in my view, just embolden the Left, and speed up our relative and absolute decline viz the rest of the world.
The solution to the current Maori woes is to finish the grievance industry, to finish the idea that Maori (elites) are special and to move forward with New Zealand the way New Zealanders want it, a stable, multi cultural Parliamentary democracy that generates wealth for all.
One way to do that is a referendum. Another is to remove Maori language as an official language on the same status as English, another to state the true implication of the TOW and end the bullshit of the falsehood around it, and the Maori people.
The next 3 years should be interesting.
Much as I am a Republican who could not care less about the UK monarchy the fact is that there are two huge obstacles in the way of our becoming a republic.
First is none other than the TOW itself, connecting Maori not just to British government but to the British Crown in ways that the rest of NZ’s citizens are not. Sure, you might sidestep that by transferring the TOW into a new constitution, even though it’s less a traditional “founding document” than a land contract.
But that brings me to the second obstacle. We would never be able to create a constitution as clean and simple as the US one, even without the TOW. More likely we’d end up with something like the Euro monstrosity that ended up being rejected by voters from France and Denmark.
However, since you seem interested in the subject do you have studies you can point me to that analyse both a republic and a constitution for New Zealand?
Precisely. We’d end up with one of those Soviet era constitutions with TOW bullshit all thru it like a cancer . . . and Helen Clark as President.
My thinking is that declaring a Republic nullifies the TOW since it’s a treaty with the Crown. I’m not a fan of studies. My belief is that if enough people want a Republic and are willing to fight for it, it happens.
Fair enough. I’m just a fan of the Founding Fathers and all the thinking, arguing and writing effort they put in even before 1776, and certainly during the Constitutional Convention in the late 1780’s.
Me, too, Tom.
No Republic while Jim Bolger, Helen Clark, Jacinda Ardern, Winston Peters or I am alive – I am the same age as Peters but have never smoked and don’t drink anywhere near as much.