by Ranginui Walker
Last week Rip Van Winkle breezed
into town to give a state of the nation address to an organisation called the
Orewa Rotary Club. He must have fallen asleep in 1950 and missed all the
exciting and liberating transformations from our colonial past that have
occurred in our nation over the second half of the 20th century. Consequently
his catalogue of the nation's woes has a strange disconnection from reality.
He talked about a dangerous "drift towards racial separatism", when
all the evidence points in the other direction. The first significant change
occurred when Maori migrated from their isolated rural hinterlands to Pakeha
towns and cities in search of work. With the exception of a small minority
unable to find work, following the restructuring of the economy by monetarist
ideologues in the last two decades, the majority are now firmly integrated into
the political economy. As early as 1960 an anthropologist found that as many as
50 percent of the marriages contracted by Maori were cross-cultural. The
lizards of our colonial past are being laid to rest in the bedrooms of the
nation. That is certainly the case in my family, which is not exceptional. Our
children, who could have assimilated into the social mainstream, opted to
identify as Maori of their own volition. They brought into our life an Irish
son-in-law, a Thai daughter-in-law, one Maori daughter-in-law and nine
mokopuna. All nine of our mokopuna identify as Maori. Five of the adult
mokopuna have Pakeha partners. We love them all. My Pakeha sister-in-law has
three Maori daughters-in-law, one Pakeha son-in-law and one European
son-in-law. The offspring of the unions in our whanau are the new New Zealanders,
the browning of the country by a new generation who see no future in the
oppositional discourse towards Maori that pervades our media.
When Mr Winkle woke up he did not like what he saw in the "divisive trend
to embody racial distinctions into large parts of our legislation" in
health care, education and local government. Take health, where Maori have a
lifespan 10 years shorter than their Pakeha compatriots. There are now 198
Maori doctors among the 8615 registered doctors in New Zealand. Many of those
Maori doctors work with Maori health providers. Because there are so few of
them, they are overworked and have little time for advanced study to qualify as
fellows of the Royal NZ College of General Practioners. They also suffer
burnout because they are unable to get locums. Instead of lamenting that the
number is well short of parity with Pakeha, Mr Winkle would deny Maori access
in future by closing down MAPAS, the Maori and Pacific Island Admission Scheme,
because he perceives it as separatist favouritism. He would also shut down the
Maori admission scheme into law school that in recent years has produced four
judges for the Maori Land Court. Perhaps Mr Winkle does not like having Maori
in the professions and wants to return to the 1950s when Maori were out of
sight, out of mind and out of contention in an island universe run unilaterally
by Pakeha.
Mr Winkle, being an economist, reduces what he calls the "Treaty
process" to an economic transaction to put right historic injustice by
making a "gesture at recompense". He said that "it could be no
more than that". He has obviously missed the Waitangi Tribunal's statement
of its mission as seeking truth and reconciliation between Maori and Pakeha.
Perhaps bringing Maori and Pakeha together in a unified nation is not in Mr
Winkle's vision. He has no idea how transformative the Treaty has become in our
education system. Treaty audits of universities and polytechs are now de
rigueur. Tertiary organisations are interrogated on what they do in their charters
and profiles to improve the recruitment, retention and graduation rates of
Maori students. The objective is to bring Maori and Pakeha closer together by
closing the education gap. The Tertiary Education Commission goes a step
further, exhorting tertiary institutions to integrate Maori into their
governance and management structures. Thus the Treaty, often referred to as a
charter for "partnership", is belatedly doing what the Maori
signatories envisaged when they signed it 164 years ago.
In local body politics, councils and regional authorities have throughout our
history been largely run by Pakeha. Only four percent of people elected to
local councils are Maori. This reflects a flaw in the ideology of democracy,
that one of the founding cultures dominates local government while the other is
marginalised. The consequence of this marginalisation is that tribes at the top
of the South Island are being shut out of participating in marine farming by
the Marlborough District Council. Those tribes had no option but to fight for
their rights through due legal process, thereby precipitating the unnecessary
furore over the foreshore and seabed debate. One regional council, Environment
Bay of Plenty, found there was no consistency in the election of Maori to the council.
The council decided it needed Maori members to give guidance on requirements to
take cognisance of Maori culture and values under the Resource Management Act.
Environment Bay of Plenty accordingly sought legislation, which went through
the house last year, for the establishment of Maori representation on the
Regional Council based on the Maori electoral roll. That was a voluntary
decision made by Environment Bay of Plenty and approved by Parliament. That
legislation is not binding on any other local body, but if it is proved to be
successful, then it is their choice whether they follow suit or opt for the
status quo of Pakeha-only councils.
Although Mr Winkle appears to have missed out on perusing the recent scholarly
literature on the Treaty of Waitangi because of his somnolent affliction, it
did not deter him from making authoritative pronouncements condemning its
contemporary interpretation and application. He condemns Parliament for
creating a "new concept" – the "principles of the Treaty of Waitangi",
which he asserts were never defined. There is nothing new about the Treaty
having underlying principles. Consider the word kawanatanga, understood by the
chiefs of 1840 to be "governor". Kawanatanga is what they ceded to
the British Crown, the right to govern and make laws. For the coloniser, the
first clause of the Treaty encompassed much more than the single entity of a
governor. Embedded in that one word were the Pakeha principles that encompassed
the complete apparatus of a modern nation state. That included a militia, civil
service, judiciary, law enforcement officers and a charter to divide the colony
into districts, counties, towns, parishes and reserves. Once these rudimentary
elements were in place they were expanded to include a constitution, a house of
representatives, local bodies, a system of state education and departments of
state to manage the political economy. These were the Pakeha principles
underlying the Treaty that were developed progressively between 1840 and 1854.
For Mr Winkle to deny the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi is to deny the
foundations of our nation. That is not, of course, what he had in mind. But to
deny the equal application of Treaty principles to Maori under the guarantee of
"tino -rangatiratanga" in article two of the Treaty is a denial of
equality. Furthermore, implicit in the guarantee of citizenship under article
three are other rights and principles including Magna Carta, habeas corpus, the
Bill of Rights and the democratic values of freedom, equality and justice. In
other words, the Treaty is a charter for equality between Maori and Pakeha. It
legitimates strategies for "closing the gaps" between Maori and
Pakeha, the Equal Education Opportunities provisions in our tertiary
institutions, and the Equal Employment Opportunities policies being followed in
the whole of the state sector.
Far from being separatist, everything that the government, whether Labour or
National, has done has been to level off the playing field for Maori so that
they can participate equally in the life of the nation. Mr Winkle would abolish
the Maori Television Service, the Maori Language Commission, the Ministry of
Maori Development and Maori representation in Parliament. This is a recipe for
cultural genocide. The only thing missing in his policy is euthanasia.