9 December 2024
The Three Spheres of Te Puapua and the Treaty Principles Bill
This article was also published in "The Daily Blog" 18 November 2024 and as a comment on "The Democracy Project"
The situation in Aotearoa/New Zealand is less complicated than it seems, once we have all the pieces of the puzzle at hand. In a nutshell, since first contact and up to the present day we have had two social orders, Maori and European, which have conflicting claims to sovereign authority going back to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. At times the Crown has been troubled by Maori claims to sovereignty, because it has been unable to tolerate the idea of a parallel Maori authority in the land. So we had the nineteenth century invasion of Maori lands by British and Australian forces, in the immediate aftermath of which Premier Julius Vogel contemplated a final war of extermination against Maori, before deciding that mass immigration of European settlers would offer the same gain for less pain.
From the British point of view, mass immigration worked well. It largely achieved its object, though not entirely. Today Maori still exist as an entity separate from the British system. One reason immigration was only partially successful was that not all immigrants were dyed-in-the-wool colonialists. Many integrated into the Maori system, mainly through marriage. As Maori assimilated Pakeha, the Maori social order changed, and there developed a Maori sphere, a European sphere, and a joint sphere where Maori and European engaged together. This joint sphere was large, covering the fields of work, religion, sports, culture, and politics. We had Maori shearing and logging gangs working for European farmers and foresters, and at the same time we had Maori farming their own remaining lands in Maori ways. In the Anglican Church/Te Hahi Mihinare we had two wings (actually now three) Tikanga Maori and Tikanga Pakeha and at the same time we had specifically Maori churches, Ratana and Ringatu. In opera we had Kiri te Kanawa and Inia te Wiata, in popular music we had Howard Morrison and the Maori show bands, but we still had waiata and kapahaka on the marae. We had the All Blacks, but still had the Maori All Blacks. We had general seats in parliament, but still had Maori seats, and back home we still had the Maori runanga.
In social terms, one can see that we had a "Maori sphere", a "joint sphere" and a "European sphere" (which was rather constricted because there was no field of endeavour where Maori did not make their mark). The one area where the European mode dominated completely was political power and this was due to the peculiarities of the Westminster system, tempered somewhat by the introduction of the MMP system of representation. So along came He Puapua, the idea of cogovernance, which was founded on the notion that this workable "three sphere" social reality could be replicated in the realm of governance.
The call for cogovernance sparked a reaction very similar to the demand from Governor Grey that Maori must swear allegiance to Queen Victoria or forfeit their lands. Grey was not a simple "white racist" but he had insisted there could be only one sovereign in the nation and he was willing to go to war to that end.
David Seymour and the ACT party have the same view as George Grey. (While they talk about Hobson, they model themselves on Grey). The difference is that they do not intend to go to war. They believe that they can legislate Maori out of existence. They believe that a three page document can achieve what decades of war and two centuries of mass immigration have failed to achieve: the extinction of Maori as a separate social entity.
That is unrealistic. Notwithstanding the demographics, it is more realistic to assume that Pakeha can and should be fully integrated into Maoritanga.