Shane Jones has always been enamoured with himself. But his sheer arrogance has been sprouting up all over the show since he came into government on the back of New Zealand First’s 6% of the party vote. The way Jones talks you’d think NZ First got 60%.
He thought he could tell Kīngi Tūheitia to stay out of politics when he called a hui at Tūrangawaewae. He fired insults at Tariana Turia’s whānau because they decided to run her tangi in te reo Māori.
Now he’s telling Ngāpuhi he’s going to force them into settling their treaty claims by legislating that the settlement has to be with a single entity rather than with several hapū groupings. Jones (Te Aupōuri, Ngāi Takoto) is treating Ngāpuhi like they’re slaves he can boss around. That won’t end well.
His announcement was qualified by Treaty Negotiations Minister Paul Goldsmith’s assertion that the government was open to having separate cultural settlements for the different Ngāpuhi groups but would be pursuing a single commercial settlement.
Goldsmith’s response to court decisions on the foreshore is abysmal. But it is Jones, with his increasing bombast, who is selling the idea. He is fond of using sweeping generalisations to slag off iwi leaders, but what exactly has he achieved for Māori in the time he has been in Parliament, with all the resources, power and influence that come with such a position? He’s big on theatrics and small on results.
I’m an old boy of St Stephens, as Jones is, and I’ve seen his ilk before. Many of us were sent to Māori boarding schools with high expectations our talents would be nurtured and we’d serve our people. Many have. But there’s a number who drifted into serving their own ego rather than their people.
Jones has built a reputation for oratory, but his achievements don’t match his rhetorical flourishes. He might have mastered the art of the pithy soundbite for the media, the problem is that when those soundbites are about Māori, they are hoovered up by naive Pākehā journalists and disseminated to a Pākehā audience that doesn’t have the knowledge to assess whether he is talking rubbish or not.And his proposal for Ngāpuhi is likely to be proven to be rubbish, legally and morally.
Successive governments and ministers of treaty negotiations have expressed exasperation at not being able to solve the Ngāpuhi settlement question. But it often seems there’s an element of governments getting overexcited by the prospect of the bragging rights of settling with the country’s most populous iwi, which leads them to want to bundle the hapū of Ngāpuhi together to make the task easier.
Political leaders are also scared of the iwi’s assertion that it never ceded sovereignty, an assertion that has a mountain of evidence behind it. That’s a conundrum no politician has had the courage or constitutional chops to seriously grapple with.
There is no reason the crown can’t negotiate separate settlements with the various hapū of Ngāpuhi. Both National and Labour-led governments have already done so with other major iwi groups, notably Ngāti Kahungunu, now our third most populous iwi with multiple hapū from Wairoa to Wairarapa. Each of these groups has distinct histories and Kahungunu is only one of the ancestors they affiliate to. Their grievances with the crown are also distinct. Yet they have successfully negotiated eight separate settlements that amount to around $400 million (if you think that’s exorbitant, go away and calculate what Kahungunu lost).
There have been a number of treaty negotiations ministers over the years who have gone about their work quietly and respectfully, and numerous iwi leaders who have carried the burden of their people’s grievances passed on through generations.
Jones isn’t the minister but he is one of the highest-profile Māori MPs in government and could use that position to negotiate a result with Ngāpuhi. But he doesn’t have the patience or skill to pull it off, so he reverts to dictatorial edicts.
For its part, Ngāpuhi does need to show some internal leadership. But it also has the right to hold the line in its negotiations with the crown. It is the crown that has breached the treaty. Not only were Ngāpuhi the first to debate and sign the treaty, they also filled the ranks of A Company in the 28th Māori Battalion in World War II to uphold their treaty obligations as they saw them. That sacrifice has been repeatedly dishonoured.
The corporate iwi is a crown construct, and one that echoes an earlier history. Many of the breaches of the treaty involved the crown making transactions with groups it had cobbled together and with leaders it wanted to recognise for its own purposes. Those deals often ended up being fraudulent; some led to armed conflict – hence the breach and the grievance. Trying to settle by using the same method is yet another abuse of power and is likely to get similar results – a lack of legitimacy or, in Māori terms, a lack of mana.
Jones’s attempt to legislatively bully Ngāpuhi into a single settlement falls well short of legitimacy or mana.
