Challenge to Crown long overdue
Last week Ngāpuhi created media headlines when they walked out of the National Iwi Chairs Forum (NICF) meeting with the Prime Minister in protest over the policies of his coalition Government.
But what I didn’t see covered in the media was that Ngāpuhi and other iwi were successful in their desire to exclude the Government from future meetings, with a motion passing that the NICF would not invite it “until the circumstances have appropriately changed”.
This has been slammed by some Toitū Te Tiriti activists as a weak response, but in the context of the forum it is a significant break from its history. Since its inception in 2005, the NICF has focused a significant amount of time and resources on working alongside the Crown as an expression of the Te Tiriti relationship. Forum agendas have been dominated by meetings with ministers and responding to government consultation processes.
There is good reason for this. There is often a need for a nationwide response on behalf of Māori to government policy, and the NICF is one of only a few groups, alongside others like the National Urban Māori Authority, with a sufficient mandate to give an appropriate response. Groups like the NZ Māori Council, which used to do this work, are now largely defunct and cannot claim a wide mandate.
However, there has always been a critique of the NICF from activists, and more radical hapū and iwi, that it is too moderate and works too closely with the Crown, not sufficiently focusing on grassroots kaupapa and the reassertion of Māori sovereignty in the governance and management of te ao Māori.
This is reflected in how the motion only passed by a relatively close vote, with 23 of the 56 iwi who voted opposing it. Many iwi leaders see it as their role to maintain positive relationships with the government of the day, regardless of who is in power and what their policies are.
Conservatism remains a strong force in iwi leadership, despite most Māori being progressive in their approach to politics and decision-making. This reflects a class divide in te ao Māori, which is much more complex and nuanced in Māori society than in Anglo societies, but one that exists nonetheless. Household net worth data shows income inequality is higher among Māori than among all other ethnic groups in Aotearoa.
Balancing Crown engagement with independent Māori leadership has been a difficult tightrope for the NICF to walk. The answer, as it often does, lies somewhere in the middle.
The NICF has a duty to represent Māori in negotiations with the Crown, otherwise government policy will hinder Māori aspirations even more than it does now.
Recent environmental planning reforms highlight the problem. Under the last government a significant rewrite of the Resource Management Act was undertaken by David Parker, and the Minister of the Environment worked closely with the NICF.
Iwi environmental technicians invested huge numbers of hours in negotiating over the detail and through their work made considerable improvements to the proposed legislation.
But when the new Government was elected, all their work was essentially undone overnight in favour of the fasttrack legislation which completely ignores and tramples over Māori environmental interests.
This demonstrates that the Crown is not an honourable Tiriti partner, and so the harm-reduction approach will never be enough.
Iwi leaders owe it to their people to assert the tino rangatiratanga that our tupuna fought so hard to protect.
The question activists are now rightly asking of them is what next? What will the forum do to move beyond the confines of Crown engagement and strengthen the tangata whenua sphere of influence as sovereign peoples? How will it respond to the wero being led by Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi for the re-establishment of a Māori parliament?
In theory, the NICF supports constitutional transformation as expressed in the Matike Mai developed by the late Moana Jackson and Margaret Mutu. Mutu, who represents her iwi, Ngāti Kahu, at NICF, continues to lead this work on behalf of the forum. But it is unclear where this is currently at. The Matike Mai report did not go into the level of detail of recommending specific constitutional models, such as a separate Māori parliament.
If an idea like that were to get off the ground it would take years of work to build mandate and consensus among whānau, hapū, iwi and representative Māori groups. The NICF therefore should play a key role in working with radical movements to seek a broad mandate for how rangatiratanga is expressed in the 21st century.
What is often missed is that the Toitū Te Tiriti movement is not just challenging the Crown, but also the established way of doing things within the world of Māori leadership, and that is long overdue.
Jack McDonald is a campaigner and political commentator who has worked for Te Pāti Māori and the Green Party.