One of the chores I am doing is sorting through 20 years of press clippings and photos from my time in Parliament. Some of it has been very sweet, with old clippings of campaigns to save marine mammals, rescue powelliphanta snails and support environmental education.
There is one report about Hon Judith Tizard and I getting into trouble with the Speaker for wearing NZ Music Month T-shirts in the debating chamber. They were black with a white target spread across the chest. Her target was a bit more prominent that mine and it caused an uproar.
This means that I have got down the pile to 2003 and 2004, the tumultuous years of the foreshore and seabed debate and debacle.
In these years Clark was still smarting from her hubris over the lead-up to the Foreshore and Seabed Act 2004. Clark and Labour were coming under political pressure from the then National leader Don Brash to abandon support for Māori initiatives and Māori people.
The 2004 news headlines describe political attacks by National on tangi leave, the Treaty education programme, Waitangi Day, the school curriculum, and on te reo Māori. The result was that Labour announced a bundle of programme reviews, including reassessing early childhood and primary school teacher education and Māori scholarships.
The Treaty was a hot-button issue and a Treaty of Waitangi information website was taken down after less than two weeks online because of fear of a Pākehā backlash.
It is all very familiar in 2023. It is like someone just picked up the 2005 Brash campaign plan and re-ran it 20 years later. Much of the rhetoric could be read in today’s paper pretty much word for word.
There was a big article with a photo about the Tokomaru Bay Foursquare which developed its own bilingual signage for its store after its owner noted that many of the customers spoke te reo Māori in the shop. The article ends with a comment that "Even TV2’s Shortland St includes Māori language in the show" because two characters routinely said "kia ora" to each other. That should date this for Shorty St fans and te reo Māori speakers alike. Māori TV, launched in 2004, could not have come soon enough.
There are a few reflections here. One is the obvious our whole community has been through the 2023 political racism before and while it undoubtedly does damage, it doesn’t hold. Maori communities and our broader whānau make progress even in the face of political ignorance. And when politicians take a breather on using us as a political football, we thrive even more.
Another is that we are constantly building our common citizenship as people of Aotearoa New Zealand, as a multi-ethnic country with bicultural underpinnings. A review of the Treaty of Waitangi did not stop that in 2003 and won’t in 2023 either. We are collectively too resourceful and too connected.
It has been useful, funny and a bit sad reviewing the last 20 years writ in little black print on yellowed newspaper. Above all it is good to be reminded of how fast that time goes. It means that I am heading into the Niu Ia of 2024, thinking about our resilience both in the last 20 years and next 20 years.
In 20 years’ time, 2043, I will be in my 70s, probably still dreaming about retiring. Just three years earlier, we will have commemorated the 200th anniversary of the signing of te Tiriti o Waitangi.
I am really looking forward to it. I hold fervent hope that it will be a celebration of te Tiriti o Waitangi and not fraught with the uncertainty of the past. I guess then that I probably do have Niu Ia resolutions, despite myself. I want us to be confident of our bicultural identity and the opportunities that affords us all. So I resolve that next year and every year for the next 20 years I will spend working to make that true.
Ngā mihi o te tau hou Pākehā. I hope you have a great rest of the summer and a wonderful 2024.
— Metiria Stanton Turei is a law lecturer at the University of Otago and a former Green Party MP and co-leader.
