Can New Zealanders design something better than a system in which the people who came here second always win, and the people who were here first always lose?

By Chris Trotter*

At some point, the perennial argument about the constitutional propriety of the Māori seats will have to be resolved. These curious historical anomalies, introduced in bad faith and preserved as a sort of harmless electoral safety-valve, have morphed, as they were always bound to do, into the ideological bridgehead for an altogether more radical, te Tiriti-driven, constitutional transformation.

The vector for this dramatic change of function has been Te Pāti Māori.

The clue is in the name.

Tariana Turia’s “Māori Party” utilised the Māori seats in the manner pioneered by the Māori politicians of the late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth-Century. (James Carroll, Sir Apirana Ngata, Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana.)

In 2008, having won five of the seven Māori seats, the Māori Party was able to extract concessions from the victorious National Party, with which it subsequently formed an enduring parliamentary alliance.

This was ethnic brokerage politics of the kind with which most New Zealanders had become familiar – if not entirely comfortable. The Labour Party had, after all, forged a similar bond with the Ratana movement back in the 1930s.

These political alliances accepted the historical victory of the European settler state as a given. That did not mean, however, that the attitudes of the victors towards Māori and the Treaty of Waitangi could not be changed. Unquestionably, “re-educating” Pakeha was likely to be a long-term project, but not an impossible one.

Since the 1980s there had been a pronounced shift in the Pakeha view of both Māori and the Treaty. Guided by Jim Bolger and Doug Graham, National had led that shift in the 1990s, and between 2008 and 2017 it was the particular political achievement of John Key to keep edging it forward.

These parliamentary manoeuvres notwithstanding, the essential political economy of Māori-Pakeha relations in the post-war era could not be wished away. A clear majority of Māori remain urban-dwelling members of the working-class. As such, the Treaty Settlement Process initiated by National and negotiated with what remained of the traditional iwi leadership core took place well above the typical urban Māori’s pay grade and almost entirely over their heads.

The Ratana movement had grown in spite of, not because of, traditional Māori allegiances. It was composed of the socio-economic remnants of the collapse of traditional Māori society. The synergy between Ratana’s “morehu” and the working-class oriented Labour Party had been obvious from the very beginning of their 60-year partnership. What broke it, if only partially and temporarily, was Labour’s foreshore and seabed legislation.

When Labour won back all seven of the Māori seats in 2017 it was on the strength of a campaign that highlighted the needs of working-class Māori, bolstered by what many Māori voters saw as the Māori Party’s “treacherous” alliance with the National Party.

Had Labour lived up to the class-oriented rhetoric of its campaign propaganda, all might have been well. But Labour has not been a genuine working-class-oriented party since the 1980s. Accordingly, the focus of the Jacinda Ardern-led Labour Government was overwhelmingly on culture not class.

This played well among the rapidly expanding Māori middle-class but left most working-class Māori scratching their heads. No one disputed that advancing Māori culture and te Tiriti were important goals, but so, too, was making sure the people had homes and jobs.

Enter Te Pāti  Māori. If they could no longer afford to so much as bat their eyes at National and its right-wing allies, then, equally, the electoral successors of Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples felt no burning desire to shack-up again with Labour. With its proudly Māori name, the restructured party needed to move beyond an acceptance of colonisation and the ethnic political brokerage it fostered. Te Pāti  Māori had to present a political face considerably more radical and unaccommodating of settler expectations than either the early Ratana Movement or the Māori Party.

Equal but separate from the general parliamentary seats, the seven Māori seats were no longer occupied by people committed to operating respectfully and successfully according to the rules of Pakeha politics. Henceforth, each seat would be turned into a stage upon which to act out the angry politics of wronged indigeneity.

Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer had no interest in being fêted by the Press Gallery as talented and industrious legislators dedicated to fostering productive working relationships with their colleagues. What mattered to them was that Māori voters – especially young Māori voters – saw their MPs bearing witness to the inescapable racism of a western representative democracy operating in a nation where the colonisers outnumber the colonised.

The problem, from the colonisers’ perspective, was that Te Pāti  Māori were proving to be extremely powerful performers. Millions of people around the world watched Hana-Rawhiti Mapai-Clarke’s spine-tingling destruction of David Seymour’s Treaty Settlements Bill. What sort of politics was this?

There is now little chance that the altogether more congenial politics of ethnic brokerage can be resurrected. Either the House of Representatives will learn to live with these angry indigenous cuckoos in its nest, or it will have to throw them out.

Winston Peters, himself a master of ethnic brokerage politics, understands completely the futility of trying to restore the status quo ante. The Maori seats were created in 1867 as a sop to the Cerberus of indigenous outrage and resentment. What’s more, while the first-past-the-post electoral system remained in place, keeping the Māori seats made a lot more sense than abolishing them. Better by far to have Māori leaders sitting respectfully inside the House of Representatives than fighting furiously outside it.

As the Royal Commission on the Electoral System observed back in the 1980s, however, the much more representative MMP electoral system, if adopted, would make the Māori seats obsolete. That the arrival of MMP in 1993 did not result in their elimination is due to the fact that, even then, Māori politicians understood the political wisdom of preserving a clutch of seats that the Pakeha did not control. They knew exactly what sort of Māori candidates a committee of Pakeha politicos would promote to the top of their Party List. (That the Māori seats were retained also bears testimony to just how much the threat of branding a bunch of Pakeha politicians “racists” can achieve!)

A referendum on whether or not the Māori seats should be retained would point the way forward for New Zealand far more effectively than David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill. If the country votes to retain them, then it will be clear that we lack the confidence collectively to move forward either culturally or constitutionally. The smart money, surely, should be placed on finding a new way for Māori and Pakeha to live together in these islands.

Will it be classical Western liberalism in all its colour-blind glory? Or will we New Zealanders find the courage to design something better than a system in which the people who came here second always win, and the people who were here first always lose.

In spite of Captain Hobson’s optimistic pledge, we have never been one people.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.