JUSTICE JOE WILLIAMS

Language and the law

It’s a personal portrait: a portrait of a nation, too. To start with, just hiswords: ‘‘As a child, I was raised with my cousins: my kuia, koroua brought up a whole generation of us . . . Iwas raisedwith my cousins as if they were my brothers and sisters. And Iwas very aware of the fact thatwe were not treated the same as my Pa¯keha¯ peers.

‘‘It was very obvious to me from a young age, that being brown was not a good thing.

‘‘There were small things. You walk into a shop – they watch you. We would go to a place to buy something significant: Like a piece of furniture, not just the dairy, and I was just a little kid, 10 or 11, something like that, and I noticed the way people who worked in the shop treated us, compared with others.

‘‘This is as a child . . . I could just tell, we all could.

‘‘I think it internalised withinme the idea that Iwasn’t much good, and that if I needed to be much good I needed to be different to what I was. I needed to minimise my upbringing, and maximise the vanilla-isation of my education.

‘‘My home was my home, a very Ma¯ori, poor home. My kuia and koroua, by the time Iwas 10 they were pensioners, almost nomoney. So my home was a railway station of relations and all those sorts of things, and no money. Whereas, because Iwas a bright kid, my peerswere kind of lower middle class white kids. And they smelt like success – and they [my wha¯nau] didn’t.

‘‘And to a kid growing up it was as obvious as hell.

‘‘And, so I kind of tried to fit and I couldn’t, and that was very difficult. I got a scholarship to go to Lindisfarne College in Hastings . . . and that was worse, because you were with the doctors’ and dentists’ and lawyers’ sons, and farmers’ sons and so on, and still, home was a railway station. Poor and hard.

‘‘And every minute of every day you got reminded that that’s success, and that’s not.’’

Supreme Court Justice Joe Williams hails from an iwi called Nga¯ti Pu¯kenga. It was once described, he says with a smile, as a ‘‘small but pugnacious tribe’’, by a native land court judge in the 1870s.

I asked him about the integration of Ma¯ori kaupapa, tikanga, into the modern legal system. Then I asked about te reo Ma¯ori – how it felt gaining fluency at university.

Of course as the Ma¯ori son of a farm labourermyself, who will hopefully never set foot on a farm again, I should have known the second question is what makes sense of the first.

To me, the need to reconcile competing worlds – and, yes, racism – plays out at a personal level, as it plays out between people, and even within the law itself.

Justice Williams was raised by his great uncle and great aunt, who moved to Hastings to work at a freezing works before he was born.

His great unclewas a fluent speaker of Ma¯ori, but didn’t use itmuch. ‘‘He belonged to that generation that believed if you want to get on, you need to be as Pa¯keha¯ as you can, because his experience as aMa¯ori from the bush, was that this was a handicap, not an advantage.’’

It was not till Williamswent to Victoria University in the early 80s that he decided to studyMa¯ori – then law.

‘‘I learned the reo out of joy for the world finally making sense. And I learned the law out of optimism that if it was the agent for the destruction of my koroua’s mana then it equally could be the agent for the reconstruction of the mana of his mokopuna and great mokopuna, and that is how I get here, really.’’

Justice Williams was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2019, the first Ma¯ori to sit there.

We used to think our law was amodern antipodean version of laws transported here in 1840 – what he calls ‘‘Cook’s law’’.

‘‘But that doesn’t really wash any more, because Kupe’s law has walked into the room.’’

Kupe was the explorer who many iwi say discovered Aotearoa.

Cook’s system, Justice Williams says, is based on the idea of ‘‘the dignity and autonomy of the individual’’. A person’s relationship with the planet is expressed in terms of property rights, and their economic and social well-being are controlled by the law of contract.

Tikanga Ma¯ori would at first glance seem to be the opposite, he says. ‘‘It does recognise the dignity and autonomy of the individual. But only as part of a group.’’

It emphasises communitarian values – called whanaungatanga, the law of kinship, so that rights and obligations are defined by virtue of blood relationships, he says. This whanaungatanga extends to the world – to rivers and the land.

The difference between property rights in a river, and kinshipwith a river, is that one entitles you to use it up, unless there’s a parliamentary law that says you can’t; the other imposes obligations because it’s your relation.

Justice Williams says there is danger in an approach that only considers property rights, individuality-above-all, and contractcontrolled relationships.

But the legal system doesn’t necessarily have to be binary, he says. The tikanga approach has started to capture people’s interest in Aotearoa.

‘‘Interestingly, I think where we’re getting to is that tikanga appears to be civilising the more barbaric aspects of the individualisation of the Enlightenment. Put it that way.’’

The challenge is to ‘‘integrate, to synthesise, to weave, the best of both of these two systems into something that is bigger and better than each individually’’.

Nowadays there is almost no government operation that doesn’t have aMa¯ori aspect to it, in which tikanga Ma¯ori are drawn into its operation.

Justice Williams says he understands there is now a proposal for mainstream universities to include compulsory tikanga education in their law degree, and a separate Ma¯ori law degree.

His sense is that the majority of students at Waikato now are Ma¯ori, and theymake up ‘‘maybe 20 per cent, 25 per cent’’ at Auckland and Victoria.

The growing inclusion of tikanga Ma¯ori into law didn’t happen through any revolutionary means, he says.

‘‘It’swalked into the room because Parliament has said so . . . it’s extraordinarily difficult to be an effective lawyer these days if you don’t have some grounding in the basics of tikanga.’’

Judges themselves ‘‘don’twant to be the instrument of racial oppression’’.

‘‘They don’t.’’

However, the situation is still pretty grim for Ma¯ori and the law, he says. ‘‘There are still, as you know, far too many Ma¯ori going through as clients of the criminal justice system or the child welfare system.’’

To ‘‘pick up those pieces and glue them back together into some sort of semblance of cohesion’’ is not going to happen overnight.

Part of achieving that is to mainstream the idea that the reo is something for everyone, he says. Something that everyone can be proud of.

The language makes you a better person, he says, and it’s something you should be proud of – not something you should shed.

‘‘... tikanga appears to be civilising the more barbaric aspects of the individualisation of the Enlightenment.’’