PEOPLE POWER

¹Crucial to any notion of constitutional balance between Māori and the Crown is the idea that within their own spheres of influence, each has jurisdictional choice to exercise their rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga in different ways, subject only to their respective tikanga and laws and the need to honour the authority of the other.  

 

The right to be self-determining has always meant that people are free to chart their destiny in their own way and it has always taken different forms in different cultures.  The very difference in form is also the very ideal of democracy. 

 

The Westminster form of democracy for example is as culture-bound as was the original Greek “demos” from which it traces its history. In Ancient Greece the rules about who could participate in political decisionmaking were distinctively shaped by the culture of the time and never allowed for the inclusion of women or the lower classes known as “the mob,” or those non-Athenians who were regarded as “natural born slaves”. 

 

For Māori, the site of power (arikitanga or rangatiratanga) and the concept of power (mana) that facilitate how we make decisions and exercise our power, are different to those in Athens and Westminster because they grew from our culture and our understanding of our relationships with each other and with Papatūānuku. But the legitimacy of our power, like theirs, lies in its cultural distinctiveness. 

In a Tiriti-based constitution that kind of difference would allow Māori and the Crown to make law within their own spheres by following their own processes.  

 

“The idea of doing things our way is crucial otherwise it’s not mana we’re talking about…it will probably lead to arguments about what our way is but that’s part of who we are…we always do things differently anyway…it’s what the kawa on the marae is all about…it’s what being Ngāti Porou or Apanui is all about…it’s not new”.   

  

“I know that in the Māori Parliament they decided to have voting which was not our way but they also worked on a consensus and used other kawa that was quite different…I don’t see why that can’t be done now if it’s tika and I don’t see why we couldn’t figure out how we’d work together either”.  

  

“If we can agree that we will do things differently to the Crown…that’s all we’d have to know when we’re in our whare or whatever and the Crown’s in theirs…trust each other to do what’s right…and then meet regularly with the Crown to negotiate what we need to do together”.   

When John Rangihau described rangatiratanga as being “people-bestowed” he actually accentuated something very democratic – that legitimate power is always from and for the people, and that it is for the people to determine how and when it will be exercised.  

                                                     

^{1 1} Thirty-ninth edited extract from pp. 87 – 88 of He Whakaaro Here Whakaumu Mō Aotearoa – The Report of

Matike Mai o Aotearoa

SHIFTING THE IMBALANCES

Whenever and wherever we find one group of people denying the humans rights of another group, we find an imbalance.  In order to shift that imbalance we have to bring about external change.  And to achieve external change there must be an internal transformation.  When transformation happens, change becomes inevitable.

Kate Sheppard knew it when she published Ten Reasons Why The Women of N.Z. Should Vote (1888). Ngā Tamatoa knew it when they petitioned for Māori to be taught in schools (1972).  We know today it when we claim our right to self-determination.

[1]“We’ve done a good job in shifting lots of things since the Ngā Tamatoa days, but there’s still a long way to go…there’s still no real entrenchment of a constitutional understanding between us and Pākehā that recognises our right to be the decisionmakers on our own issues…that’s what we meant when we used to say the Treaty was a fraud because it’s been used against us by the Crown until it makes all the decisions for everyone”.

A constitution which enshrines a more balanced and nuanced understanding of rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga will be a long overdue honouring of the political and diplomatic conventions which made treating possible in 1840. 

“We would never have gone into a treaty thinking that the Crown was better or more powerful...hell there were hardly any Pākehā here… we knew it was different because Pākehā were different and what our people have been saying to them ever since is just accept the difference…go with the equalness”. 

“Every treaty is about reciprocity just like human rights are about recognising that people are equal and no person is better or more entitled than another…What we have to do is get to a point where a constitution can say that…this is what you do, this is what we do, and you don’t make the final decisions just because you’ve been doing that for so long”.

"If tikanga and manaaki…and democracy is going to mean anything there has to be a way of having kāwanatanga and rangatiratanga in some kind of balance…we need to get away from the idea that rangatiratanga is just a resource management right or something that the Crown has delegated to Iwi…or a co-governance thing where the Crown nearly always ends up having the final say”.

“No-one has done this before which is what makes the treaty special…whatever we come up with will be one way of showing that different sovereignties can live together which is what the treaty was always about…and they can live together by respecting what they are each entitled to do”.

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[1] Thirty-eighth edited extract from pp. 86 – 87 of He Whakaaro Here Whakaumu Mō Aotearoa – The Report of Matike Mai o Aotearoa

LOVE FOR THE LAND

[1]Whenever people spoke with the Matike Mai o Aotearoa Working Group they invariably began by naming their mountains and rivers and Iwi, as we always do. They linked themselves to Papatūānuku and in that simple poetic identification they also stressed the importance of the whenua and their relationship to it. Through their whakapapa they actually illustrated why the whenua value was so fundamental to this constitutional kōrero. 

 

“The most important value of all is love for the land…everything else depends on it. Unless we get the relationship with Papatūānuku back in balance and maybe have it in a constitution then there’ll be no other relationships at all…no politics, no economics, no anything”.

“It’s not a green or conservation issue or whether the Resource Management Act is any good or not …it’s about the much more basic relationship in whakapapa between ourselves and Papatūānuku, between the whenua we bury when we are born and the whenua that is our land…I can’t think of a value that’s any more basic than that”.

The kōrero about the value of the whenua also frequently included a discussion about economic policy. Many participants, including a number of rangatahi, were especially concerned about the effects on land retention and protection of the pervasive influence of neo-liberal ideologies and what they perceived as the shift from a market economy serving society to a society now serving the market.

“I think that Papatūānuku should be in the constitution for survival reasons if nothing else. There’s all the tikanga of course but if we don’t look after Papatūānuku there’ll be no tikanga left…a constitution by itself won’t do it but it would certainly help”.   

“Rangatiratanga was never just about money and I know for sure that kaitiakitanga wasn’t either – it was about looking after each other and the whenua…but with all this New Right stuff even the whenua gets talked about by some of our people like it’s just a resource…I’d like to see a constitution get back to rights and looking after Papatūānuku and maybe that would help get some economic balance as well”. 

People also indicated in their kōrero that the value of place was something which others were entitled to and which many Pākehā have developed over time. It does not make them tangata whenua as the term is defined by Māori through a discrete and unique whakapapa relationship and it does not make them indigenous as defined internationally. However it does give a special meaning to being tangata Tiriti and therefore belonging to this land.  The constitutional recognition of that shared value would reaffirm that fact.  

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[1] Thirty-sixth edited extract from pp. 83 – 84 of He Whakaaro Here Whakaumu Mō Aotearoa – The Report of Matike Mai o Aotearoa