Elegant solution on Ihuma¯tao

Let’s get the hyperbole out of the way first. The Government reaching a deal over the disputed land at Ihuma¯tao, south of Auckland, is not ‘‘the equivalent of the US president siding with Antifa over the businesses they vandalise’’, as ACT leader David Seymour put it on Thursday.

Some might detect an unpleasant dog-whistle in Seymour’s comments, which evoke the racially polarised battlegrounds of the US in 2020. He unfairly equates the peaceful occupation of Ihuma¯tao with the destructive street violence seen in US cities.

The Ihuma¯tao solution comes four years after the historically valuable site was occupied by Save Our Unique Landscape (Soul), and three years after Soul travelled to the United Nations to contest an alleged breach under the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The land was farmed by Ma¯ori for hundreds of years before it was confiscated during the New Zealand Wars in the 1860s and granted to a Pa¯keha family. It was sold to Fletcher Building in 2014 and a 480-home housing development was planned.

While Soul’s occupation was derided by some as a ‘‘woke Woodstock’’, it also revealed important ruptures in the understanding of New Zealand history for many Pa¯keha. It was easy to grasp the issues at stake and to sympathise with the sense of grievance and loss that sat behind the history of Ihuma¯tao.

A solution was politically tricky. NZ First leader Winston Peters boasted that his party ‘‘staved off any action’’ over Ihuma¯tao, called the protesters malcontents and predicted that more occupations and challenges would follow. That picture of copycat actions is an old archetype designed to strike fear into the hearts of property-owning Pa¯keha who imagine Ma¯ori radicals coming for their suburban quarter acres.

But Ihuma¯tao is an unusual situation. There is no need for such fear-mongering.

In the end, the solution is an elegant one in which all parties walk away happy. Fletcher Building gets $29.9 million, which is $10m more than it paid six years ago. The Government has tidied up a potentially messy issue while avoiding ugly images of police clashing with protesters.

Soul claims a powerful victory, and the Ma¯ori King, Tu¯heitia, who negotiated with the Government, now leads a process to determine the future of the land and to establish who is mana whenua. It was importantly a Ma¯ori solution, brokered by the Ma¯ori King, who stepped in when the issue risked becoming intractable in 2019.

While it is hard to ignore the appealing symbolism of a tidy solution arriving at the close of a fraught and emotionally draining year, this is not the conclusion of the Ihuma¯tao story but an important step in a long history.

Yet there is an irony that the Government’s deal, which is funded through the land for housing programme, comes with a strong expectation that houses will be built on the land. It will be ‘‘a sensitive housing solution’’, according to the Government, that will include papaka¯inga housing, housing for mana whenua and some public housing.

Cynics might wonder if the story has merely taken years to go full circle, with Fletcher Building walking away from a much-needed housing development so that another one can be designed instead. But issues of ownership and agency are important here. The decision-making is different, the scale is smaller and the development will support the mana whenua and wider community, while respecting history and culture.