Michael King: Time to take focus off Waitangi Day

COMMENT

When The Penguin History of New Zealand appeared last October, I inadvertently ruffled some feathers by suggesting that February 6, the date on which we commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, was not a good one on which to base and celebrate the country's national day.

Why not? I can think of at least four reasons.

The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi set the country not on the road to independence but on the path that led to it becoming a dependency of Great Britain. And that word "dependency" is not metaphorical. It is the technical term that describes New Zealand's constitutional status up to 1853.

Only representatives of the Crown and Maori were permitted to sign the document (except as witnesses). Pakeha New Zealanders had neither say nor role in it, nor input into it.

It is inevitable and right that because it commemorates the day that the treaty was signed, February 6 will always be the day on which we check the country's scorecard on race relations. And in that assessment, the Crown will always be found to have behaved less than perfectly.

Waitangi Day, therefore, will always prove to be an invitation to disharmony rather than a focus of national unity and thanksgiving.

I am not saying Waitangi Day ought to be dumped. We should retain it to remind posterity precisely how the country took its first steps towards modern nationhood. And it should, indeed, be the day on which we assess whether successive governments, and the nation as a whole, have lived up to the treaty's principles.

But Waitangi Day ought not to be our national day. A national day should be one on which a country celebrates what its citizens have in common, what they have got "right" rather than "wrong" - those features of its national experience that the country as a whole feels positive about and grateful for.

There are several possible substitutes for February 6.

One is November 25, the anniversary of the day in 1947 when New Zealand ratified the Statute of Westminster. This was the occasion on which Peter Fraser's Labour Administration, and the Parliament accepted complete autonomy and independence from Britain in both domestic and foreign affairs.

It was the day, in other words, when New Zealand embraced its future destiny as an independent nation. That, surely, is an achievement all New Zealanders, Maori, Pakeha and more recent arrivals, would wish to celebrate (the only MPs who spoke against the ratification were conservative members of the National Party who said they preferred to remain "British" rather than be "New Zealanders").

Another possibility is July 14. On that day in 1853 voting began in New Zealand's first general election (at the time, voting had to be held over several weeks because of the elementary nature of transport and communications networks). This was also the day, therefore, that the country, implementing its constitution of 1852, began to acquire the characteristics of a self-governing colony, a step surely more worthy of celebration than the earlier acquisition of dependency status.

A third possibility is Anzac Day which, as I note in The Penguin History of New Zealand, preserves the country's first example of non-Maori indigenous ceremonial. "[This indicates] a persistent and widespread belief that something of enormous significance to New Zealanders occurred on [Gallipoli] - not a baptism of blood, perhaps, but a degree of sacrifice for an ideal that gave New Zealanders a shared nationwide experience."

And Anzac Day, along with Westminster Day and General Election Day, is one that Maori have as much reason to recall with pride and to celebrate as Pakeha. The degree of Maori self-sacrifice in World Wars I and II, as well as on the Gallipoli Peninsula, was every bit as notable as that of Pakeha and achieved for the benefit of the nation as a whole.

Maori, too, have grounds for celebrating the process by which New Zealand became less British in its orientation and more focused on values and preoccupations rooted in this country and its bicultural experience. Maori have also benefited from democracy, which eventually gave every individual adult, whether commoner, slave or woman, the same political rights as rangatira.

One Maori objector has claimed that demoting Waitangi Day would "impose on Maori the will of the tau iwi". Well, it was tau iwi in the form of the Kirk Labour Government that gave Waitangi Day, initially as New Zealand Day, the status of national day in the first instance. And for a decade some Maori took strong exception to that status, declaring as they did so that the treaty was a fraud.

Not much is heard of this argument nowadays. Because, of course, if the treaty is a fraud, the whole basis for the Waitangi Tribunal-based resource claims process would be invalid. And it suits Maori not to believe this. It is the very validity of the treaty that makes it an effective lever to wrest concessions from the Crown and from the Crown's major constituency, the Pakeha majority.

All that is understandable. What is less understandable is why Maori should want to celebrate as their national day the occasion on which they lost their sovereign independence and began to endure an erosion of economic and cultural resources from which they are only now, more than one-and-a-half centuries later, beginning to recover.

* Author and historian Michael King was last year an inaugural recipient of the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement.