Are voters ready to accept co-governance?
On Wednesday a local member’s bill was passed. It made a fundamental change to a small bit of New Zealand’s democracy. It will allow South Island iwi Nga¯ i Tahu to appoint two people to the elected board of Environment Canterbury (the Canterbury regional council).
Nga¯ i Tahu is a player of fundamental importance in the South Island and the mana whenua of the land. It’s by far the largest and, for the most part, the only iwi local government entities in the South Island will consult.
Seen in this light, the law change will – proponents argue – simply codify something that to some degree exists anyway and recognise the growing and evolving role of Treaty partnership.
What its opponents have issue with is the process and the practical outcome of unelected members on elected boards, which they say undermines democracy.
Labour, the Greens and Te Pa¯ ti Ma¯ ori voted in favour of the bill; National and ACT voted against.
It was a local bill, which means it is not primary legislation but concerns a change to a law in relation to a particular area – in this case Canterbury. Its passing was met with acclaim by Nga¯ i Tahu representatives, including Sir Tipene O’Regan.
The bill’s opponents, however, say it will fundamentally violate the principle of one person, one vote. This, it is argued, is the bedrock of liberal democracy in New Zealand since women got the vote in 1893.
More broadly, they take issue with the fact that there is, ultimately, no democratic accountability at the ballot box for the Nga¯ i Tahu representatives.
In giving his speech, the bill’s sponsor, Te Tai Tonga MP Rino Tirikatene, said that under the promise of the Treaty, Nga¯ i Tahu were entitled to the seats.
‘‘This bill is an historic bill. This bill is about the evolution of our
Treaty partnership and representation of Ma¯ ori, of iwi, at the local government level,’’ Tirikatene said during the third reading debate.
‘‘Nga¯ i Tahu are entitled to this representation. They’re entitled to this representation because that is the promise of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and this is a modern-day expression of that promise.’’
Maori Development Minister Willie Jackson took aim at what he called the political right ‘‘weaponising the one-person, onevote principle’’.
’’What makes the struggle for equality under the Treaty so much more difficult is when our colleagues on the right pull political stunts to manipulate Kiwis’ ignorance of our past by weaponising the one person, one vote principle.’’
It says a lot about the evolution of New Zealand’s politics that none of the speeches over the bill – and the opposition to it – were sceptical of Nga¯ i Tahu’s role, or its right to be involved in decisions concerning its rohe (this is very much at odds with the tenor of much of the Three Waters debate).
Instead, the debate is over a constitutional question around unelected members of elected boards.
Now, this is only one regional council, and it is a much simpler task in the South Island – many other regional councils have many iwi that fall within their
boundaries. But the principle is an important one and worth debating.
‘‘This bill undermines that principle of universal suffrage – that’s everyone having one person, one vote,’’ Joseph Mooney, National’s Southland MP and its spokesperson for Treaty of Waitangi negotiations, said in a considered contribution to the debate.
‘‘Not only that, but it actually undermines the principle of voting, because these will be two members who are appointed to the regional council.’’
Co-governance will likely play some role at the next election – the
question is how much. And there are several dimensions to the issue.
The first is the evolving law and political decisions that have evolved into cogovernance. In the ECan situation, Treaty considerations essentially trumped what is traditionally understood as democratic process. There can be no doubt now that the political debate is really around whether this change is desirable, and the extent to which it is – not whether it is occurring.
It is a political project that has been pushed along by Labour’s
Ma¯ ori caucus and a longer-term project and determination that it is time – after nearly two centuries of Ma¯ ori copping it – to correct the ledger and entrench the Treaty more fully as part of New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements.
Politics is about power, derived from numbers, and there are a couple of important ones:
■ 15: the size of the Labour Ma¯ ori caucus (nearly a quarter of Labour’s caucus).
■ 836: the number of votes by which Rawiri Waititi beat Tamati Coffey in the seat of Waiariki, thus making Te Pa¯ ti Ma¯ ori a constant threat nibbling away at Labour’s
vote in Ma¯ ori electorates.
As with any party, Labour needs to deliver, and be seen to be delivering, to its supporters.
While the National Party meets at its conference this weekend and will be focusing on the economy, the co-governance issue will still be there in the background. The question for National over coming months is the extent to which it gets involved in the co-governance debate, or leaves it to ACT to campaign hard on.
For National, the shadow of 2005 looms large over this issue.
There are many competing political theories about the legacy of the Don Brash Iwi/Kiwi election. One is that it brought the issues out in the open, and then John Key moved past it when he invited the Ma¯ ori Party into government in 2008, setting a cracking pace of settling Treaty negotiations.
Another is that, really, the postBrash era marked an extended de´ tente and that a general race divide in the country has instead lain dormant, ready to emerge again with the right set of issues.
On that theory, Labour risks pushing co-governance too far and prompting a backlash.
The Three Waters legislation is massively overblown as a negative for the Government – it’s not in the top-five issues for most voters – but it has had a hand in getting the National and ACT bases excited.
It has also been an example of how politically potent cogovernance can be. The mixture of taking council assets and putting them into a new structure where iwi will have some influence in governance has riled many people – both the reasonable and the racists. More than anything else, it has been the primary political problem with Three Waters; rather than the infrastructure bit of it.
Only three months ago, a local bill for the Rotorua District Council to put three Ma¯ ori seats on the council was quickly nixed by the Government. Labour knows it is potentially fraught territory.
And it won’t go away. The ECan bill, now law, has clearly opened up some fissures around what will be an extremely contested issue over the coming year or so.
National’s Gerry Brownlee finished his speech on the bill with an insight that to some degree seems to sum up the politics around this issue. He expressed his ‘‘personal regret that there seems to be an apparent breakdown between the relationship of my political party and Nga¯ i Tahu’’.
‘‘There is, perhaps, not a deep enough understanding on either part about where either party might be coming from.’’