Waitangi Day firsts for leaders
All of a sudden, the Waitangi Day barbecue seems a long time ago. Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern cooked up the idea, and she and other ministers put on aprons and made bacon butties for the masses.
It was a nice piece of political symbolism that related to hopeful promises Ardern made at her first outing to Waitangi in 2018, when she talked about child poverty and Mā ori wellbeing. She urged Mā ori at future events to criticise her Government’s progress.
Naysayers might have dismissed the barbecue as mere symbolism or an exercise in communication. But those who have just lived through the Auckland floods will know the value of good communication.
The cancellation of the 2023 barbecue pre-dated Ardern’s resignation. It was said in December that it was off because of security concerns that seemed all too familiar in an overheated political year.
It remains to be seen if dire predictions about a disrupted election campaign and census come to pass now the political temperature has dropped somewhat.
In the Ardern era, hopes about cogovernance and Treaty relationships were distorted into dark mutterings about separatism and control. It has been said the Government did a poor job of explaining what co-governance meant, particularly around the contentious Three Waters reform.
Oddly, former National Party Cabinet minister Chris Finlayson has been more effective than anyone in Government at explaining what it is and is not.
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins is clear that communication has failed when he says he wants ‘‘to make sure we are bringing all New Zealanders with us in that conversation’’, while also arguing that some have exploited confusion about co-governance. Three Waters and co-governance dominated his first meeting with the Iwi Chairs Forum yesterday. It seems likely cogovernance will soon be presented in a less loaded way, perhaps using words such as ‘‘partnership’’.
Two reports released by the Human Rights Commission yesterday provide some background. Ki te whaiao, ki te ao Mā rama is a community engagement report for developing a national action plan against racism. The United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended in 2017 that the Government develop such a plan, which it fully committed to after the 2019 mosque attacks in Christchurch. The report will not be welcomed by all New Zealanders, especially those hoping for a less explosive discourse about race in politics than we have had since 2019.
The first line of the introduction is stark and uncompromising when it says ‘‘racism is entrenched in the fabric of society in Aotearoa New Zealand’’. That report and an accompanying one, Maranga Mai!, call on the Government to commit to constitutional transformation and co-governance.
The Rā tana celebrations a fortnight ago acted as a rehearsal for the political stances of Hipkins and Opposition leader Christopher Luxon before their first Waitangi appearances as leaders. Luxon’s claim that the co-governance debate had been ‘‘divisive and immature’’ set a more confrontational tone than many expected, suggesting race issues and co-governance will be central to National’s strategy in 2023.
Hipkins offered a folksy and unthreatening impression of cogovernance at Rā tana. He explained that the Mā ori world was distant to him in the 1980s and 1990s but when a local park in Lower Hutt became part of a co-governance arrangement in a Treaty settlement, Pā kehā fears dissolved after they realised the park and nearby stream were better looked after than ever.
While not an entirely transferable story, the anecdote did attempt to find a middle ground between the conspiracy theorists on one side and those on the other who argue New Zealand is built on white supremacy.