Day One of the Treaty Principles Bill...and everyone got what they wanted, and did what they liked. Heated words were exchanged. Culturally appropriate acts of outrage were performed. David Seymour got to play the victim card. Willie Jackson got kicked out of class. A comically red-faced Mr Speaker bellowed “Order, Order” to no avail etc.

In the midst of it all, the only person with the power to stop this total waste of time and taxpayer money chose instead to blame somebody else, pack his bags and fly off to the site of the new Paddington Bear movie. We’re faced with six more months of this “debate” about our founding document.

Making it right

As a kid raised a Catholic, I was always told that true contrition required a recognition of why one had sinned, in order to stop repeating the sins of thought and deed. Problem being, the government’s apology to those harmed in state care has been delivered in a total social vacuum. Does the government know (or care) why previous governments acted in the ways they did?

If this was Sweden or Norway. there would have been lengthy panel discussions in prime time mulling over what lessons we should take from this tragic, terrible history. Lessons perhaps, about the dangers of hierarchies of power and entitlement, of medical arrogance, of stigmatising the mentally ill, of mandatory religious celibacy, and most of all – of the harm done to indigenous people by neo-colonial policies of assimilation.

Maybe I blinked, but there didn’t seem to be any public debate about why the circa 200,000 victims of state “care” were treated in the way they were. Yet we need that understanding to ensure that modern governments do not make similar mistakes. Devoid of context, the apology rang hollow, in ways beyond the issues around compensation.

Until recently, governments did not apologise for what their predecessors had done. A misguided sense of continuity led them to excuse previous administrations – things were different then, they meant well etc. Besides, if governments bad things were done back then, who’s to say that people might not look back someday at current policy, and reach the same damning conclusions?

Some countries seem better at this sort of thing than others. Australia, not so much. This year, Australia defeated the Voice proposal, which would have ensured the country’s original inhabitants would be consulted about any government actions likely to affect them. On the other hand, Canadians and New Zealanders seem predisposed to saying “sorry” at the drop of a hat, even though they tend to be petulant about the response. (“I said I’m sorry” etc.)

Canada has apologised for its record of lethal mis-treatment of those in state care, who were primarily the country’s First Peoples. Billions have been paid out in compensation. In Canada, payments to victims have reportedly averaged about five times what New Zealand has paid on average, thus far. Even Australia’s payouts to those harmed in state and religious institutions have been four times on average, what New Zealand has paid out on average, to date. Meaning: there is a lot of ground to be made up when the details of the new compensation model are finally unveiled next year, around Budget time.

Obviously, monetary compensation has to be a key part of the truth and reconciliation process. But to repeat: so is an accurate diagnosis of the reasons for these evils, so that current social policy settings do not create similar wrongs.

A few causal factors....

At the heart of the harms done to those in state and religious institutions was their “othering,” or social marginalisation. Some of the people holding temporal and spiritual power felt free to use and abuse their victims because those victims were seen to be poor, or disabled, or mentally ill, or racially inferior, or morally deficient.

Moral inferiority could be implied by pregnancy, or by behaviours that had sent young people to the boys’ homes where the abuse occurred. In the spiritual domain, victims were at risk simply by being born with original sin. This enabled them to be seen as imps of temptation, liable to lead astray the officially celibate clergy entrusted with their care.

Whatever the particulars, the desire to perpetuate the hierarchies of power (medical, spiritual and otherwise) also played a key role in the cover-ups and delays. That’s why a government sincere about apologising to victims should be taking care to ensure that its current policies are compassionate and inclusive to people who have already been consigned to the social margins – as a result of the same litany of poverty,disability, chronic illness, mental health problems,childhood neglect and abuse, drug addiction etc.

Many of those factors have been the lingering by-products of colonisation and market dynamics. Currently, sensitivity and inclusiveness in policy formation is notable by its absence. The same coalition government that has said “ sorry” to those abused in state care is busily reviving policies that are strikingly similar to those that generated the original harms. The punitive law and order policies, the fostering of false fears about Māori privilege, the social welfare “traffic lights” system, and the cutbacks in disability care are only a few ingredients of the divisive policy mix being pursued. The whole approach seems to be based on a similar fear and disdain for society’s so-called “bottom feeders.”

False rationales

The Treaty Principles Bill is the poster child for these attitudes. By using rhetoric like “the government should be allowed to govern” ( i.e. do what it likes regardless of its obligations under the Treaty) and “all should be equal under the law” the Bill’s promoters are showing every sign of living in fear and denial of the very existence of indigenous rights.

The Bill says as much at Principle 2, subclause 1 when it says it will “respect and protect” the rights that hapū and iwi Māori had when they signed the Treaty back in 1840, but in the next very next breath, that commitment becomes narrow and conditional:

....If those rights differ from the rights of everyone, subclause (1) applies only if those rights are agreed in the settlement of a historical treaty claim under the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975.

In other words, if David Seymour had his way, indigenous rights would exist only if, and to the extent that, some Māori have managed to negotiate and embed those rights in their individual Treaty settlements. That’s not how the UN Declaration on The Rights of Indigenous Peoples treats these issues, not by a long shot. For example, it says:

Indigenous people have the right to determine their political status and pursue their own economic, social and cultural development.......Indigenous peoples have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, thus preventing them from exercising, in particular, their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests...

Seymour’s mean little Treaty Principles Bill prefers toi live in denial about our colonial legacy. It does so in the name of a bogus “equality” that assumes everyone in New Zealand enjoys equal access to the spoils of privilege. They don’t. Perversely, any attempt to bridge the gaps is being depicted as Māori receiving special treatment.

As we saw from 1840 until the early 1980s, a hierarchy of absolute power is being promoted – one in which the Crown calls all the shots, and the only options on offer to Māori are acquiescence and assimilation. Same as it ever was.

From Port Chalmers to Tenerife

Nadia Reid now lives in Manchester with her partner and two daughters. As she recently told Rolling Stone,she wrote “Hotel Santa Cruz” (the third single from her new album Enter Now Brightness) in her hotel while on holiday in the Canary Islands. The questions raised in the lyrics could be about anybody, or nobody in particular. As always, the whole thing is held together by Reid’s remarkable voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3Fh21QPsco

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