“This has been a really challenging story to tell,” reflects Tāmati Rimene-Sproat some way into Hīkoi: Speaking Our Truth. “Because on one hand, I’m a journalist and I want to be completely unbiased. And on the other hand, I’m Māori – and what happened back in 2004 still affects me and my people to this day.”
In truth, one part of the story could not have been properly told without the other. To merely relate the political events that preceded and followed the passing of the Foreshore and Seabed Act would have been to ignore what roused thousands of people – including a 10-year-old Rimene-Sproat – to join the hīkoi that arrived at Parliament on May 5, 2004.
The government’s attempt to cut off the political risk posed by a Court of Appeal’s finding that Māori rights in the seabed and foreshore of New Zealand had not been extinguished and could be explored in the Māori Land Court did not take place in a vacuum, either. Rimene-Sproat, who has previously been seen by the nation as the good-natured guide to te ao Māori in Hongi to Hāngī, does a good job of explaining a political environment whose tensions have faded from memory and seem to be present again 20 years later.
There could have been time in his explanation for a look at what much commentary in the media – including at least one hyperventilating newspaper editorial – was suddenly saying about a legal dispute that had hitherto dwelt only on the margins of the news, but the politics are captured well. Don Brash, the new leader of the National Party, had set out an agenda of Pākehā grievance in his famous speech at Orewa the previous January and voters seemed to be embracing it.
The accounts from inside the political crucible are, unsurprisingly, compelling – none more so than that of Nanaia Mahuta, then the 33-year-old MP for the new electorate of Tainui. Regrets, she has a few.
“With hindsight,” she says, it might have been better if all Labour’s Māori MPs had resolved on “just a blanket ‘no’”. She stayed, and eventually voted in favour of the bill at its final reading.
Her colleague Tariana Turia left the party at a personal cost: “I was lonely,” she admits. Missing – a note at the end says she was approached for an interview but did not respond – is then-prime minister Helen Clark. It’s a shame.
Clark’s ill-considered remarks about the “haters and wreckers” in the march on Parliament didn’t start the fight. As interviews with the protagonists make clear, the resistance came from the flaxroots, and in particular within Ngāti Kahungunu, Rimene-Sproat’s iwi, but they did galvanise the protesters.
Hone Harawira tells the story fondly, recalling the swaying of the Auckland Harbour Bridge as the protesters passed over it and telling a particularly good story about winning police permission to march down Lambton Quay in Wellington by bluffing that it had already been granted.
What happened changed NZ politics. Turia founded the Māori Party after leaving Labour and won the ensuing by-election in Te Tai Hauāuru. By 2008, the party was supporting a minority National government and would witness the repeal of the Foreshore and Seabed Act and its replacement with the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act. Which, as Rimene-Sproat carefully observes, calmed but never really resolved the dispute.
Rimene-Sproat shifts to a personal register to wrap things up: “Some would say that the foreshore and seabed hīkoi was unsuccessful,” he says in te reo Māori, standing on the grounds of Waitangi amid another mobilisation. “But for me and many of my generation, it politicised us, it mobilised us and it challenged the way we think.”
When he concludes in English that his generation is now better equipped “and every barrier we’re met with is another opportunity for us to grow stronger”, he’s edging over that journalistic boundary he frets about.
But perhaps it’s a story that could not have been told any other way.
HĪkoi: Speaking Our Truth TVNZ+
