Rob Rattenbury: Waitangi Day a work in progress, but constant and mostly kind progress

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins arrives at Waitangi. Photo / Jaime Lyth

Comment

Well, it’s Waitangi Day folks. New Zealand’s national day.

My memory of Waitangi Day only goes back to the 1970s. For many years there was no holiday but I remember the day being re-named New Zealand Day for a while.

Waitangi Day as a day of remembrance did not happen as a celebration until 1934 and did not become a national holiday until 1974.

In 1971 Labour’s shadow minister of Māori Affairs Matiu Rata put a private member’s bill before Parliament to make Waitangi Day a public holiday and to rename it New Zealand Day. The bill failed under the then National Government run by Prime Minister Jack Marshall.

With Labour taking power under Norman Kirk in 1972 it was announced that Waitangi Day would, from February 6, 1974, become a public holiday and be re-named New Zealand Day.

New Zealand Day only lasted two years before Rob Muldoon’s Government re-instated Waitangi Day, thankfully.

We have evolved a lot since 1974 as a nation and a society.

The celebration of Waitangi Day is, as time goes by, becoming of much more significance to more and more of us.

It is a yearly reminder of how far race relations has progressed in New Zealand in 50 years, but also an indicator of how far we, as a nation, need to go to settle things between tangata whenua and tangata tiriti.

A work in progress, but at least there is constant and mostly kind progress.

Waitangi Day is important as a day for us to think about how and why our nation was formed in 1840. The reasons were many and, for the time, sound and common sense.

So here we are today, still working it all out as a nation, 183 years after formation. Waitangi Day reminds us to keep trying, to help the process of healing and settlement progress so that we can become more united as a nation. Not “one people”, a term that is not apt for New Zealand. We are more than “one people”.

It is very sad that for many of us our main emotional attachment to national recognition is the anniversary of a futile battle on the other side of the world where, we, as invaders of Turkey, left thousands of New Zealanders behind in cemeteries. We never won that battle; we got slaughtered by the brave Turks defending their homeland from an infidel army.

History: terrible but real. It could be argued that whilst legally our nation was founded on February 6, 1840 with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, emotionally some of us hark back to April 25, 1915 as the time when our nation was founded, but in blood and steel. In war. A war where both Māori and Pākehā paid an awful price for the folly of empire.

Yes, Waitangi Day is important to our nation and to our self-identity. It always will be - but sadly for some New Zealanders it is just another day off, a chance to hit the beach, the bush or the bars.

Happily, there will be local events in many places today. We will have a family day today with the grandies and our kids. Noise, fun, food, fights. Well the grandies will fight, not us older people.