WE ARE THE PEOPLE

Last week I re-watched The Grapes of Wrath.

Directed by John Ford in 1940, this film was based on John Steinbeck's 1939 novel.   And yet 76 years after it was released it remains relevant to the people of today.

The film opens with Tom Joad, a man who has been recently released from prison, returning to his parents' family farm in Oklahoma.  Along the way he meets an ex-preacher named Jim Casy who had baptised him many years before, but has now lost his faith.

In his 2014 essay, In Nothing We Trust, Jim Greenfield reports that two-thirds of Americans today distrust everything from churches to public schools; and only 19 percent trust the government, down from 77 percent in 1964.

In the film Casy goes with Tom to the Joad property and finds it abandoned because the family and other farmers all over the area have been forced off their farms by the deed holders of the land.

In Australia today this is the story of farmers caught in non-sustainable climate cycles of drought, floods and heat, as well as insatiable banking cycles of boom-bust lending and borrowing.  

In the film Tom and Casy join the rest of the Joad family and set out for the promised land of California.  Along the way, the elderly grandfather dies and is buried beside the road.  But when the family finally arrive at the first transient migrant campground, they find it already crowded with other starving, jobless and desperate travelers.

This is the story of today’s European migrant crisis. 

After some trouble, the Joads make their way to another camp where they discover the food prices at the only store for miles round, owned by the company which also runs the camp, means that no matter how hard or long they work, they end up more indebted than when they arrived.

In Canada today, Syrian refugees who survived dangerous sea journeys are now drowning in debt due to cruel refugee loans they’ve been forced to take out.

In the film Tom finally leaves to join the revolt for social change.  But before he goes, he comforts his mother who grieves that she may never see him again.  

“Ma,” he says, “Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready. And when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build, I'll be there, too.”

This is the story of today’s rangatira who fight to remove the inequities that spineless governments, gutless media, brainless celebrities, and heartless authorities try to hide or excuse.  It is a story that is echoed in the 2015 book, The Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, by Chris Hedges.

As Ma Joad says at the end of the movie, “Rich fellas come up and they die, and their kids ain't no good and they die out, but we keep a-coming. They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, cos we are the people.”

 

HUMAN RIGHTS' HISTORY

In the Western world, the history of human rights can be traced from the little known legal codes of Near Eastern antiquity through to the slightly better known international human rights instruments we have today like the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Although there are references to even older codes, the oldest legal codex still in existence today is the Neo-Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu (ca. 2050 BC).

Much of that code would nowadays be considered a repressive denial of many of the rights we claim, like the right to freedom from slavery.  But it shows that human rights are not new, and even 4,066 years ago people were concerned about basic human rights like the rights to life and dignity, to not be arbitrarily deprived of property, and to enjoy equality with one’s peers before the law.

Following the Code of Ur-Nammu, the Mesopotamian Empire issued the Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1780 BC), which set out the rules, and punishments if those rules were broken, on a wider variety of human rights, including women's rights, men's rights, children's rights and slaves’ rights.

Importantly, both the Code of Ur-Nammu and the Code of Hammurabi arranged their laws in casuistic form of IF (crime) THEN (punishment), a pattern followed in nearly all later codes, including those written and used by the Greek and Roman Empires.  

It was also followed by the Achaemenid Persian Empire of ancient Iran which established unprecedented principles of human rights in the 6th century BC under Cyrus the Great.  Those principles were later witnessed to by the writers of the Books of Chronicles, Nehemiah, and Ezra in what we now know as the Holy Bible.

They were also followed and supported by the Constitution of Medina that Muhammad drafted in 622 AD which led to Islamic social reforms in areas such as social security, family structure, slavery, and the rights of women and ethnic minorities.

After the fall of Rome came the Dark Ages when human rights existed mainly in the negative.  I.e. they were ruthlessly denied during centuries of unprecedented migration and loss of trade plus huge drops in cultural and literary output as whole populations fled from one dreadful regime to another. 

The end of the Dark Ages correlates with the issuance by the English in 1215 of the Magna Carta, and that document’s most enduring legacies are the right of habeas corpus and the right to due process.  It also influenced the development of the common law and many later constitutional documents, like the United States Constitution and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. 

As this very brief essay shows, the desire for human rights is in-born and has driven most every human endeavour since the beginning of recorded time.

And yet I wonder, how likely is it that even this once-over lightly essay is more exposure than the majority of its readers have had in their entire lives to their human rights’ history? 

WHY NOT

For me this year’s Waitangi Day commemorations in Waitangi were the most enjoyable since 2008.  Why?  Well, the common denominator in 2008 and 2016 was that no Prime Minister came to Waitangi in either of those years. 

So with that in mind, I asked two questions of many of the people I met this year at Waitangi; “Do you think the PM should have come to Waitangi?” and, “Has his absence had a bad affect?” 

Most thought he should have been there, but few felt badly affected by his absence.  “He needs us more than we need him,” was the comment of one of the kuia.  “It’s no loss.  The day goes on without him,” said a whaea who has been attending Waitangi since she was a child in the 1970s.  And a rangatahi asked, “Why would we want him here?”

The views of these commenters have some validity; neither Helen Clark in 2008 nor John Key in 2016 were terribly missed by anyone.  But my view is that, while the absence of a Prime Minister clearly makes for a happier time at Waitangi on the day, in the long run it is not a good thing unless it leads to fundamental constitutional change in this country. 

The fact is that we who are the rangatiratanga, as declared by He Wakaputanga o Te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tireni in 1835, uphold the right to govern ourselves.  That right was recognised by the Crown in 1835 and 1840 and renewed by its New Zealand parliament in 1960 when that body signed the United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, and again in 2010 when it signed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). 

But we, the rangatiratanga, also have always upheld the kawanatanga right of the Crown’s New Zealand parliament to govern all other peoples in our lands, as it was mandated to do in 1840 by Te Tiriti o Waitangi. 

Why would we want [the PM] at Waitangi? The answer is simple.  To show and uphold what it means to have a balanced relationship between the kawanatanga and the rangatiratanga. 

But when has a New Zealand Prime Minister ever come to Waitangi with that purpose in mind?  The answer is, never.  

So, when will such a thing happen?  Only when we have a Constitution that allows the kawanatanga and the rangatiratanga to operate independently in our own spheres of influence on all matters that don’t require our mutual agreement, while also providing us with a relational sphere to deal with those matters that do.

The same vision of the members of Te Wakaminenga o Nga Hapu o Nu Tireni who signed He Wakaputanga in 1835 and Te Tiriti in 1840 also galvanised the founders of the Kingitanga movement in the 1850s, as well as the authors of the Kotahitanga Movement and first Maori Parliament in the 1880s and those who were part of the second Maori Parliament  from 1892 to 1902. 

It is the vision my generation inherited and have now passed on to the rising generations as their blueprint in He Whakaaro Here Whakaumu mo Aotearoa; The Report of Matike Mai Aotearoa – the IndependentWorking Group on Constitutional Transformation.

It is why Ngati Kahu take our rangatahi as well as our kuia kaumātua with us everywhere we go.

And what is the essence of that vision? Nothing less than a constitutionally balanced relationship between all the peoples in our lands; both Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti.  

To paraphrase the late United States Senator, Robert Kennedy, “Some men see things as they are and say, why; we dream things that never were and say, why not.”

A CARING CONSTITUTION

Leading up to the 176^th anniversary of the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the governing of this country has never seemed more corrupt and divisive nor less accountable and transparent.  Neither has it ever been so unrepentantly arrogant, nasty and uncaring about the human rights of its citizens. 

Three months ago, 88 year old Selwyn Clark’s Veterans’ Pension was suspended over his involvement in a peaceful land repossession.  Apparently in 2013, government politicians changed the law to make WINZ part of the judicial and penal systems. 

That same year politicians also polled as the least trusted profession in New Zealand, and they have remained close to the winning post in a race to the bottom ever since.  The government’s record shows why.  It routinely ignores referenda and submissions, accepts indecent pay rises, changes laws with disdain, attacks and punishes those who challenge it.  The list goes on.  How does it get away with such consistently rotten behaviour?

A large part of the reason is down to poor Civics education in this country.  Instead of educating our tamariki to become participatory or questioning citizens, we educate them to keep the rules as defined by governments.  But mostly, the reason we allow governments to run roughshod over us is because we have few avenues to stop them doing so. 

There is no legal document in this country that enshrines, protects, and upholds our human rights against government breaches.  We have no written Constitution to sit above the politicians in government who make the laws, and to make sure they keep those laws.

Without such a Constitution, not only have the indigenous people of New Zealand never had any guaranteed protection against government lawlessness, but the rights of all other peoples in Aotearoa New Zealand have also been, and remain, unguaranteed. 

The fact that it maintains any human rights at all is more down to political expediency and will on the part of the government, and not to any constitutional requirement for it to do what is right.  As the growing number of New Zealanders who have fallen foul of government know, our claim to human rights in this country is very fragile indeed.

On Friday 5^th February, this Thursday, the long-awaited report of the Independent Constitutional Transformation Working Group, Matike Mai Aotearoa, will be officially released in Waitangi.  Copies can be obtained now from Te Runanga-a-Iwi o Ngati Kahu or read online at https://www.facebook.com/groups/710824102388321/

This report comes from and belongs to those who have long dreamed of an inclusive and caring constitutionalism in this country; one that is vastly different from what we have now.  

There is still a long way to go, but we’re getting there.  Meanwhile we celebrate the victories along the way, including the return of Selwyn Clark’s Veterans’ Pension which will resume on Tuesday 9^th February. 

Under a caring and inclusive constitutionalism, he would never have lost it in the first place.   Now we just have to ensure it’s backdated.