The Prime Minister was conspicuously absent when a national conversation kicked off this week, writes political editor Jo Moir.
Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson has set out the Government’s next steps for meeting obligations set out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
It’s been billed as a national conversation that will first consult with Māori on what a Declaration Plan should look like before being put out to the rest of New Zealand for debate.
It comes after the controversial He Puapua report was thrown into the public sphere in April by ACT leader David Seymour after the previous Labour Minister responsible for the report, Nanaia Mahuta, chose not to release it ahead of last year’s election.
It immediately put the Labour Government on the back foot, as ACT and then National led the conversation and touted He Puapua and its most extreme recommendations as government policy that Cabinet had tried to keep quiet.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has offered very little opinion on He Puapua other than to rule out one of the recommendations - a Māori Parliament or upper house – and insist it isn’t government policy.
She’s also rightly pointed out it was the previous National government which signed New Zealand up to the UN Declaration in 2010 and committed to forming a work plan in 2014.
Fast forward to 2021 and the conversation has descended into a political race row before the first talks have even been had, and Ardern is keeping an arm’s length.
It would have sent a strong message if she had joined Jackson at Ngā Whare Waatea Marae in Auckland on Thursday to lay out the consultation process.
The future partnership and co-governance required to meet the Declaration commitments requires a communications maestro, to keep the focus on what is actually being debated and make clear what is not.
While Jackson holds his weight in the Māori Development role, for many already scared New Zealanders, they would have simply seen Jackson as someone with a vested interest pushing his own agenda.
Māori went through their entire schooling and work life literally banned from speaking what is thankfully now an official language of New Zealand.
Sure, Māori had a right to cast a vote, but it was casting a vote within a system that already prejudiced them.
The scaremongering isn’t just a result of what has been seen in Parliament in recent months.
Look no further than an opinion piece by Magic Talk’s Peter Williams this week for further evidence of that.
Williams argued “every adult citizen and resident has been able to take part in the democratic process since 1893, where one person’s votes carry equal weight with all others’’.
He feared He Puapua “might be wanting to challenge that concept’’.
Williams is misled if he thinks Māori have had the same rights as Pākehā since 1893.
There are plenty of examples to point to but to name just one, Te Reo Māori is only just going through a rejuvenation in recent years after a whole generation of Māori lost the language due to being disciplined if they uttered a word of their native tongue.
Māori went through their entire schooling and work life literally banned from speaking what is thankfully now an official language of New Zealand.
Sure, Māori had a right to cast a vote, but it was a vote within a system already prejudiced against them.
Williams went on to ponder what proof of Māori ancestry would be required to benefit from whatever comes out of the He Puapua debate.
“The lead author of He Puapua, Doctor Claire Charters from Auckland University, is at most 25 percent Māori. She has a Pākehā mother, and a paternal Pākehā grandfather.
“Her Māori line only comes from her paternal grandmother. And that’s just fine. But the lead author of this report recommending significant changes to the way New Zealand is governed is herself descended more from the colonisers than from the original settlers on this land,’’ he wrote.
“Why should a group of people in this country with a fraction of their genetic makeup which may have come from a Māori ancestor 200 years ago have privilege over someone who’s wholly Scottish family has been here just 170 years?’’.
There really is little hope of a mature debate when a conversation centred on honouring the Treaty and giving Māori some sense of governance over systems that have failed them for generations is reduced to rants about “how Māori” someone is.
For whatever reason, there is a certain group of New Zealanders who take issue with somebody getting something they won’t - even when their starting point (their health, their education, their homeownership) is leaps and bounds ahead.
An announcement as significant and controversial as the one made by Jackson on Thursday is going to require careful treading.
For that reason, it’s a politically-savvy move not to front Jackson for this weekend’s political TV shows.
It’s inevitable Jackson would have been asked to respond to examples of what might or might not qualify under co-governance – before the Declaration Plan has even been drafted.
Jackson’s colleague, Justice Minister Kris Faafoi, fell into the same trap last weekend in regard to the Government’s hate speech legislation.
In that case the policy is much further along and Faafoi should have been able to rule examples in and out.
But Jackson has no idea at this early stage as to what Māori might put on the table for consideration.
To start to speculate so soon would be well and truly putting the cart before the horse.
When a plan has been drafted, the next politically-savvy move would be to front Ardern and Jackson as a duo.
The longer Ardern stays out of the debate, the more room there is for the likes of Williams, National and ACT to fill the vacuum.
