Waitangi Day firsts for leaders
All of a sudden, the Waitangi Day barbecue seems a long time ago. Cooked up by former prime minister Jacinda Ardern, she and other ministers put on aprons and made bacon butties for the assembled 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 Māori wellbeing.
She urged Māori at future events to criticise her government’s progress.
Naysayers might have dismissed the barbecue as mere symbolism or an exercise in communication over substance. But those who have just lived through the Auckland floods will know the value of good communication.
The cancellation of the 2023 barbecue predated 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 that the political temperature has dropped somewhat.
In the Ardern era, hopes about co-governance and Treaty relationships were distorted into dark mutterings about separatism and control.
It has often been said that the government did a poor job of explaining what co-governance meant, particularly around the contentious issue of Three Waters reform.
Oddly, former National cabinet minister Chris Finlayson has been more effective at explaining what it is and is not than anyone in Government.
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 the idea of co-governance.
Three Waters and cogovernance dominated his first meeting with the Iwi Chairs Forum yesterday.
It seems likely co-governance 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 Mārama is a community engagement report for developing a national action plan against racism.
The United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended to the Government in 2017 that it 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 Rātana 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 cogovernance 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 Rātana.
He explained that the Māori world was distant from him in the 1980s and 90s but when a local park in Lower Hutt became part of a cogovernance arrangement in a Treaty settlement, Pākehā 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 who argue New Zealand is built on white supremacy on the other.