Nevertheless, it is still fair for Luxon to call a Labour-Green-TPM Government a “coalition of chaos”.
Today’s TPM has aspirations well beyond what either Labour or National could ever agree to, without themselves collapsing to single digits in the polls.
Since 1972, great New Zealand leaders have tried to begin honouring the promises of the English text of the Treaty of Waitangi and also the vague “principles of the Treaty” defined by the courts.
National governments tended to focus more on providing choice, property rights and on addressing the theft of land after 1840.
In education, for example, after strong lobbying by Māori leaders, it was the Muldoon Government that first funded Te Kohanga Reo, and the Bolger Government that first funded Te Kura Kaupapa Māori and Wānanga.
Likewise, the Bolger Government launched the historic settlement process over land confiscations and began respecting Māori property rights in everything from fisheries to radio spectrum.
For their vision and bravery on these issues, the likes of Iritana Tawhiwhirangi, Robert Mahuta, Tipene O’Regan, Rongo Wetere, Mavis Mullins, Jim Bolger, Doug Graham, Christopher Finlayson and even Robert Muldoon and Tamihere are among the greatest New Zealanders who have ever lived.
Labour’s record is more mixed. It has tended to see Treaty settlements as a subset of social policy, has felt more politically constrained than National on restoring property rights and has focused more on bureaucratic processes. It got itself into terrible trouble trying to confiscate the foreshore and seabed, something Tariana Turia, Finlayson and John Key later resolved.
Key’s Government also made good progress on co-governance of rivers and what were called national parks, and of Ninety Mile Beach and Auckland volcanic cones. In contrast, Labour tends to worry about the membership of panels to make board appointments and ever-more wasteful bureaucracies like the Māori Health Authority.
Those Pākehā who worry about such moves are overconfident in the ability of any bureaucracy or public-sector board to deliver anything to anyone, one way or the other.
Some Pākehā also object to Māori place names on things like TV weather reports, but presumably the networks have done their market research. Those who hate it can get equally unreliable English forecasts online from MetService.
Despite occasional hiccups and the usual stresses of change, an imperfect Māori-Pākehā consensus has generally backed this incremental and pragmatic approach to redress, reconciliation and social and economic development — but it’s no longer acceptable to TPM.
Te Pāti Māori believes that governments and the courts have preferred to talk of the “principles” of the Treaty, rather than the texts, not to advantage Māori but to maintain the legitimacy of the settler state.
Thus, TPM and its supporters have shifted to argue that the original texts should be used. This can’t be dismissed as far-left academic theory. It’s the same case the United States gun lobby makes that the Constitution protects the right to open-carry your Smith & Wesson.
What’s more, TPM says, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, being in the language of the party that didn’t do the drafting, should be authoritative when resolving ambiguity. That too is a perfectly mainstream view.
With some historical support, TPM then argues that the chiefs who signed Te Tiriti just wanted Queen Victoria to control the Pākehā traders, settlers and clerics; European ship deserters and escaped criminals from Australia; and the grog producers, tobacco sellers and pimps who had earned the Bay of Islands the title of “Hell Hole of the Pacific”.
The chiefs never intended, the argument continues, that the Queen would govern them, let alone that they were trading away sovereignty. Less clear is why Māori then also wanted, and Te Tiriti granted, “the same rights and duties of citizenship as the people of England”.
Still, this is now roughly the official story. Even National nearly adopted it when it proposed recognising Te Tiriti rather than the Treaty in its 2022 constitution. Just in time, it turned out that no one in the party had understood the difference and why it might be political dynamite, so they went with the Treaty.
In contrast, TPM knows exactly what it all means. Their vision, outlined on their website, is to “liberate” Māori from the settler state, to “fiercely advocate for the interests of our whānau, hapū and iwi” and to “realise the true intent of Te Tiriti”.
The good news is that this isn’t socialism. The closest European equivalent might be feudalism. The chiefs, TPM asserts, understood they would retain sovereignty over all of Aotearoa. As people of the land, people of the sea and the guardians of both, they would continue to control its law and resources. Under the Māori principle of hospitality, settlers would be welcome, with the Queen’s role limited to keeping them under control.
The probability of TPM realising this vision is lower than National implementing Act’s tax policy or Labour agreeing to the Greens’ demands to withdraw from Five Eyes and recognise Hamas and the PLO as governing a sovereign state.
Luxon and Chris Hipkins will be challenged over the next 140 days about their attitudes to Act and the Greens’ economic and foreign policies. David Seymour, Brooke van Velden, Marama Davidson and James Shaw will then be asked to respond. That’s all good stuff.
But with the poll of polls suggesting Labour and the Greens couldn’t govern without TPM, similar questions need to be put to Hipkins about TPM’s constitutional aspirations — and then back to Tamihere, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi about whether they could live with the response, or prefer to sit on the crossbenches.
The answers matter, not because Labour would ever agree to TPM’s vision. They matter because TPM sitting on the crossbenches would not in fact be a coalition. It would, though, in practice, be Luxon’s “coalition of chaos”.
- Matthew Hooton has previously worked for the National and Act parties, the Mayor of Auckland and a wide range of iwi and other Māori interests.
