DELIVERING CONSTITUENCIES

Under the current constitutional arrangements in this country, or lack thereof, the governing party in Parliament can pretty much do what it wants to engineer the society that best promotes its interests.  Even the voting system supports that.

Under MMP, the government of the day can bypass the voter and hand pick much of the legislature and Cabinet.  The government appoint the judges, so if their legislative decisions run contrary to the judicial view, they rewrite the legislation.  If a caucus becomes argumentative, the PM can shuffle Cabinet and play his constituent MPs off against his list members. 

Yes, at the macro level, a government in power in New Zealand today can now pretty much do what it wants. And by and large the Pākeha majority will let them do it.

However, things become less clear in their dealings with Māori.  The Māori world is complex to many Māori; imagine how frightening it must be to Pākeha with little or no knowledge of things Māori.   In response to these fears from its voter base, government deals with Māori from a risk management perspective.  And to help them manage that risk they use two methods; advisory and mandatory.

The advisory method involves setting up and resourcing Māori to fill committees and positions that government can then call upon to advise them on how to manage and neutralise, if not solve, a particular Māori risk. 

The mandatory method involves mandating and resourcing Māori negotiators that the government can then call upon to deliver a constituency of other Māori into its hands, again neutralising, if not solving, particular Māori risks.

The success of both methods hinges upon the appointed Māori advisors and mandated Māori negotiators playing the game by the government’s rules and giving the government what it wants. 

With regard to Māori negotiators, what government want is to be forgiven the massive financial liability it carries over the numerous, well-founded claims that Māori have against it for breaching Te Tiriti o Waitangi.  And it wants to do so for as little as one cent in the dollar. 

It had aimed to complete this exercise of self-determined forgiveness by 2014.  It has now quietly changed that deadline to 2017, but its methodology remains the same. 

It mandates a group of negotiators who originally got their people’s support with stirring rhetoric such as, “100 percent and not an acre less.”  

It then isolates those negotiators from their people through confidentiality requirements, refuses to discuss anything outside its settlement policy, and threatens to send them to the ‘back of the settlement queue’ if they don’t toe the line.

Finally it resources them to take its cheapo offer back to their people and manufacture their consent by telling them, "Take the deal.  It’s the best we can do.”  And it watches the resultant backlash against those negotiators or their supporters with calm detachment because it too is playing the same game, but on the international scene; i.e. manufacturing our consent to deliver the New Zealand constituency into the hands of multinational corporates.