PLUTOCRATS, PROPHETS AND PITCHFORKS

American, Nick Hanauer, is a proud and unapologetic capitalist who has founded, co-founded or funded more than 30 companies, including aQuantive which he onsold in 2007 to Microsoft for $6.4 billion. 

With numerous homes, his own plane, a super-yacht and a bank, Hanauer is by definition also a plutocrat; i.e. he derives his power from his wealth. 

He describes himself as “not the smarted person” nor the hardest working, and credits his success to a combination of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance, and of timing. 

But Hanauer is demonstrably very good at a couple of things.  First, he has an unusually high tolerance for risk.  Second, he has a good intuition about what will happen in the future. 

In June 2014 he wrote a prophetic piece for Politico magazine in which he foresaw pitchforks coming for him and his "fellow 1%ers” because of the increasing wealth inequality between themselves and the rest of us.

To demonstrate, in 1980 the top 1% of Americans shared about 8% of national wealth while the bottom 50% shared 18%.  Today the top 1% share over 20%, and the bottom 50% share less than 13%. 

Are wealth and income inequality rising to the same extent in New Zealand? Last year, Treasury reported that while there are inequalities here, they haven’t increased in twenty years.  Of course that is cold comfort to those with whom the Salvation Army work.  

The fact is that we don’t have access to the kind of data that Hanauer uses. The only in-depth report ever done on wealth distribution in New Zealand was completed in 2004, and the annual Household Economic Survey doesn't capture wealth and income inequalities at all.  So we must rely on informal indicators and our own intuition.

For example, the Salaries Interactive app shows the top annual salary earned in New Zealand by an individual last year was almost $5million.  But we know the average income for individual full-time workers was only $45,000.  We also know that during the same period, the average income of beneficiaries was a mere $13,000 per annum, including allowances.  

Although they are informal, those are all very powerful indicators of inequality.  But how can they be resolved?

Because middle class consumers are far greater job creators than wealthy entrepreneurs like himself, Hanauer argues that he and his fellow plutocrats need to give higher median incomes to the workers rather than lower tax rates to the wealthy.

Although it sounds simplistic, a living wage is the pivot to addressing the poverty and inequality cycles which Hanauer knows must be broken.  However, if the plutocrats do not address the growing inequality at all, he predicts the inevitable destruction of the middle class and an uprising against the wealthy class that will match the French Revolution in ferocity.

He is right.  No free and open society can long sustain rising economic inequality.  It has never happened.  There are no examples.  You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising.  

While the inequalities here are not as bad as those in America, they are similar, and so too will be the results if the plutocrats do not heed the prophets.  Pitchforks.  

CULTURAL SETTINGS

Because we have always lived with and amongst all the different cultural traditions in our rohe, Tangata Whenua are multi-cultural.  No matter how closely those traditions run together, or how often they intersect with others, they each retain their own uniqueness within our jurisdiction.  And that is the defining essence of multi-culturalism.

However there is another definition of multi-culturalism which a few Tangata Tiriti have tried to foist on us.  At its most benign, it is something that over-rides our culture.  But at its most malign they use it to try to control and constitutionally disempower us. 

Nowadays we see it in action from the way racism against us is tolerated and trivialised in the mainstream media, through to legislative theft by Parliament of our resources.

Possibly as a result of this twisted version of it, some of us have rejected multi-culturalism as a concept, preferring bi-culturalism instead.  But just because a few haters twisted and used it against us, does not require us to abandon our multi-culturalism, or any other culturalism for that matter. 

To understand how and why that is, we need only check our cultural settings.  Culture is socially defined, not biologically fixed.  When we are at least bi-lingual we are not limited to being mono-cultural.  However, when we are in a mono-cultural setting we could describe ourselves as mono-cultural.  So too can we describe ourselves as bi-cultural when we are in bi-cultural settings. 

To illustrate, in 2011 Miria Simpson, known as a Taniwha of the reo, was asked by a reporter what it had meant to her to be fluent in te reo all her life.  The then 79 year old answered, “When I compare myself with people who do not have the language, then the only explanation I can give is that I am whole, W-H-O-L-E.  Because I know what it is like to be able to do both things [speak te reo and English] I consider myself absolutely both bi-lingual and bi-cultural.” 

Experience tells us that when we are well-grounded in at least two cultures, we are also able to experience true multi-culturalism in its setting.  The recent tangihanga of Ta Ranginui Walker was a wonderful example of that, and it simply could not have been wholly appreciated within a mono-cultural setting. 

The beauty of cultures is that they can be learned by the willing.  One outcome of the cultural exchange between Ngati Kahu and Shanghai is the sharing of our languages.  Some of us are also learning New Zealand Sign Language.  Already we appreciate how much we miss in those cultural settings without their respective languages, and we love the learnings.

As heirs of the Rangatira who declared sovereignty in He Wakaputanga oTe Rangatiratanga o Nga Hapu o Nu Tireni 1835 and reaffirmed it in Te Tiriti o Waitangi 1840, we embrace our multi-culturalism in its true form.

And as successors to Taniwha like Miria Simpson, we remain whole, regardless of our cultural settings.

  

SPURRING ON TRANSFORMATION

In the introduction to the report of Matike Mai Aotearoa – the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation, Moana Jackson wrote, “What some might see as an ‘unrealistic’ discourse, [is] in fact an expression of a deeply-held understanding about what was promised in Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

For te rangatiratanga of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the reality that is being lived now is therefore never seen as a straitjacket that inhibits discussion.  Rather it is a spur to imagine and work towards something different. 

Yes, we know that any constitutional change of the magnitude we envisage will require time, but we also know that seeking constitutional transformation is simply the tika thing to do, and so we will do it.

Matike Mai Aotearoa’s report was released on 5^th February, less than four weeks ago.  Since then we have been provided with more spurs to not only ‘imagine something different’ in the constitutional arrangements between us and te kāwanatanga, but to also do it.

For example, in 2013 te kāwanatanga changed its law regards burials at sea, putting that activity under the consenting authority of the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA].  At the time Ngāti Kahu reissued its consistent statement to the EPA and all other government agencies reminding them that they do not have authority to issue any consents for any activities in a rohe without the express consent of the relevant hapū, and that anyone seeking to action such a consent will be dealt with directly by the hapū.   In short, kāwanatanga laws do not override rangatiratanga sovereignty.

It generally takes a little time for kāwanatanga to action its laws, so we will fast forward to today. This particular law is now being rolled out under the Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf (Environmental Effects—Burial at Sea) Regulations 2015. 

Yesterday (Monday 29^th February 2016) we were alerted by a Radio New Zealand reporter that under those regulations, one of the five places the EPA will give consents for burials at sea to take place is an area 38 kms northeast of Rakaumangamanga (Cape Brett).  That was news to Ngāti Kahu.

How did we not know before yesterday what the EPA was up to?  It didn't consult us, that’s how.  Instead it consulted with a group called Te Hiku Fisheries Forum which, according to the EPA, represents Ngāti Kuri, Te Aupōuri, Ngāi Takoto, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kahu.  That was also news to us.  We are not a member of that forum, and our hapu never authorised it to represent us.  Additionally, that had already notified the EPA of our position. 

We know none of our whanaunga from the other iwi consented to this, because the area 38kms northeast of Rakaumangamanga is not in any of their hapu rohe, it is in ours. 

 

So why has this kāwanatanga agency chosen that area without consulting us?  We can only surmise that it is either not yet capable of imagining and doing something different in its relationship with te rangatiratanga, or that it has chosen to deliberately thumb its nose at that relationship. 

Either way, it is spurring on transformation.

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.

PEACE WITHIN OURSELVES

Under the current constitutional arrangements in this country, sovereign Maori cannot work for the government and be at peace within ourselves, because inevitably we will be forced to do things that uphold and apply racist policies designed to do our people over. 

There has to be an internal conflict for Maori enforcing such laws and policies against their own whanaunga who are tūturu Rangatira Maori (real about being sovereign). 

If they are tūturu, Far North District Council’s rating department employees are conflicted when they see another block of Maori-owned land go up for rating sale.  They know that more often than not these are blocks of land which have been rendered unusable or unused by past racist policies and laws on rating. 

If they are tūturu, Maori Land Court staff are conflicted when they must process the FNDC’s applications for charging orders against Maori land.  They know that, regardless of its own culpability in forcing Maori off their lands in the past, these charging orders enable the FNDC to forcibly sell those same lands to the highest or any other tenderer in the future. 

If they are tūturu, Maori who work for the New Zealand Police are conflicted when they are required to forcibly remove their own people from their own lands and charge us with trespass.  The same goes for Maori who work in Corrections and have to process, transport, deliver and store their own people who refuse to comply with these racist laws?

If they are tūturu, Maori teachers at mainstream schools are conflicted when they see Maori children marginalised for being tūturu within a system that in their hearts they know is not teaching the truth about our history let alone about our present and future.

So what are Maori who work for government agencies to do? 

They could do ‘plausible deniability’ as in, I didn’t know the truth about what was happening, so I can’t be blamed for it.  They could do justification as in, at least I am a familiar face doing this to my whanaunga.  They could do cession of sovereignty altogether as in, I accept the Magna Carta over-rides He Wakaputanga and the Crown is sovereign in this country.  Or they could do repentance and quit, as in Ross Meurant.

Conflict happens when our talk does not match our walk, as in when our government agency boss declares that what is being done to our whanaunga within the agency we work for is not actually ‘racism’, it’s just ‘unconscious bias’.

Peace happens when our external rules and actions match our internal sense of right and wrong.  

In the case of a nation, these rules are codified within a written constitution which outlaws racism, stops governments from watering down those laws that protect all human rights, and supports us all to be at peace within ourselves.

FINDING OURSELVES

Mokopuna Rapaere Karu Kamira spent 45 years finding and helping our people in Australia move from a state of ngoikore (weakness) to one of toiora (wellbeing).

In 1995 he came home to ask advice from his kuia and kaumātua, and deliver a warning: the number of Māori turning up in Australian prisons, he said, was rising.  What could the whānau, hapū and iwi at home do to help change the emerging pattern?  Implicit in his question was the knowledge that Māori were losing their identity in Australia. 

This pattern was first seen during the so-called urban drift of Maori from our rural kāinga (settlements) after World War II.  Its warp was woven when Maori who migrated with hope ended up becoming just another minority lost in transit. 

But at the same time a matching weft pattern was woven by those Rangatira Maori who saw the holes appearing in our social fabric, and worked hard to stitch and mend it. 

Although written from the perspective of one such kāinga, Melissa Matutina Williams’ recently published book, Panguru and the City: Kainga Tahi, Kainga Rua: An Urban Migration History, captures the warp and weft of that migration pattern with clarity and compassion.

By 1995, Moko’s kuia and kaumatua had seen and lived through several such migrations.  So their advice to him was simple: teach te reo me ona tikanga to our people in Australia so that they may remember who they are and where they come from.

Although still relatively young at the time, Moko was like a living Ark filled with the mita o te reo me ona tikanga (the rhythm, intonation, pronunciation and sound of our language, and the customary system of values and practices developed over time and deeply embedded in our social context). 

As a former film stuntman he also had a showman’s charm and cheek, but tempered with morals and mana.  In short, he had what it takes to do what his kuia and kaumātua advised him to do. 

Although he worked fulltime as a Funeral Director, Moko never stopped helping Māori who had become lost in Australia to find their identity.  He was not the only one. 

To this day, others like him are teaching and strengthening Māori identities within the social fabric of Australia.  But as recent developments have revealed, since 2001 they have been really up against it.   

This facebook post captures some of that:  “Australians are more upset that their cricket players didn't shake some Black Caps hand than they are that their government is shaking down thousands of kiwi taxpayers.  Advance Australia Fair?  Yeah right.”

Twenty years after he first put his question to them, Moko and most of his kuia and kaumātua are dead.  Yet the question he asked in 1995 remains the same:  What can we do to help?  So too does the answer: te reo me ona tikanga.

Without them, we are likely to become or remain ngoikore.  With them, we can achieve toiora.  And it all begins and ends with finding ourselves. 

ASSIMILATION BY AGREEMENT

The assimilation of New Zealand is just about complete.  

Trekkies will remember “The Borg”; that fictional race of aliens that moved throughout the Galaxy sucking dry every planet in their path.  

Every species they came across were transformed into cybernetic organisms to become drones in a hive mind called the Collective.  
Long after the series ended, The Borg continued as a cultural archetype when describing the futility of resisting a juggernaut – which brings us to the TPPA.

New Zealand's government is highly unlikely to vote against signing this agreement since it has been the one pushing it from the start. 

The TPPA was built on the framework of the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement, or P4 agreement between Brunei, Chile, Singapore and New Zealand completed in 2005.  That agreement was an expansion of the P3 (Pacific Three Closer Economic Partnership) begun by Helen Clark during the 2002 APEC meeting at Los Cabos.  And P3 was simply an expansion of the 2001 trade agreement between New Zealand and Singapore. 

The road to TPPA is just the latest in a series of political scrums, rucks and mauls in which New Zealand governments have played the role of number 8.  In this age of manufactured consent and delivered constituencies, the current government is very unlikely to change sides one meter from touch. 

Negotiated in secret, this agreement, more than six thousand pages long (and that’s without the supporting documents), has implications for all New Zealanders that will resonate far beyond what might be expected in a trade deal.  And we, the people, will not be given the opportunity to vote on it.  Instead we will be given “Bread and Circuses”.

Taken from the Latin: panem et circenses, ‘bread and circuses’ is a metaphor for superficially satisfying people with diversions, in order to distract them from the big issues of their day. 

In politics, the phrase is used to describe how governments generate public approval and acceptance, not through excellent services or policies, but through diverting us with ‘bread’ and distracting us with ‘circuses’. 

So in typical ‘Bread and Circuses’ fashion the Key government is diverting us with the illusion of choice by mailing out the first in a series of referenda about our flag.   

It beggars belief that we can be so easily distracted by the symbols of our culture, while its unique substance is traded for a global identity that threatens our very existence.

On November 5^th 2015 (Guy Fawkes Day) the full text of the TPPA was finally released simultaneously in the nations of all the signatories.  It reminded me of Star Trek and the collective audio message that the fictional Borgs always sent simultaneously to every nation on each planet just before their conquest and assimilation: 

“We are the Borg.  Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own.  Resistance is futile.”