The value of community is one of the building blocks identified by Matike Mai for creating constitutional change. Pictured is Whangārei resident Jenni Moore calling for unity before a Council vote on Māori wards in her community. (Photo: Peter de Graaf / RNZ)

Making constitutional change means thinking less about the institutions of power we have now, and more about what values we’d like represented, writes Carwyn Jones.

This is the second of his three pieces examining the work of Matike Mai Aotearoa — the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation. The first piece in this series described the process adopted by the Working Group and the context of its report.

This piece considers the constitutional values identified in the report. You can read the first part here.

The working group of Matike Mai quite deliberately encouraged those attending the hui or wānanga to think about how values can inform constitutional models. More particularly, they were asked what values they thought were necessary to organise our constitutional relationships.

The values-based approach to these discussions was intended to encourage people to think about what genuine constitutional transformation might look like. It helped to move people away from simply focusing on the institutions and mechanisms of our current set-up — a modified Westminster-style parliament, a hierarchy of courts, a monarch as head of state — and allowed the space to imagine something different.

The difficulty with starting from the institutions we have now and trying to think how they could be adapted or tweaked to better reflect Māori aspirations is that our current institutions are based on a particular way of understanding power.

The Matike Mai report notes that all societies have a concept of power and a site of power. These shape the way each society chooses to organise its institutions of government, the rules about who has the authority to make certain kinds of decisions, and how laws are made.

For example, the western concept of power that was brought to Aotearoa after 1840 is sovereignty. This concept describes the absolute authority of a king or queen, which, in places like England, eventually came to be exercised through a parliament as the site of power. The Māori concept of power is mana, sometimes described as mana motuhake, rangatiratanga, or, in Te Tiriti, as tino rangatiratanga. The site of power is the ariki or rangatira.

Systems of government all come with their own particular whakapapa that reflect the development of different concepts and sites of power. That is why it’s so important to think hard about the whakapapa of our constitutional arrangements and the values they’re designed to express. The values that currently underpin our existing institutions of government might be quite different to the values we think are appropriate for Aotearoa in the 21st century and beyond.

The report of Matike Mai Aotearoa outlines seven constitutional values that were drawn from the hui, wānanga, focus groups, and interviews held by the Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation.

These values are:

1. The value of tikanga — that is, the need for a constitution to relate to, or incorporate, core ideals, and the things we think “ought to be” when living in Aotearoa.
2. The value of community — the need for a constitution to facilitate the fair representation and good relationships between all peoples.
3. The value of belonging — the need for a constitution to foster a sense of belonging for everyone in the community.
4. The value of place — the need for a constitution to promote relationships with, and ensure the protection of, Papatūānuku.
5. The value of balance — the need for a constitution to ensure respect for the authority of rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga within the different and relational spheres of influence.
6. The value of conciliation — the need for a constitution to have an underlying jurisdictional base and a means of resolution to guarantee a conciliatory and consensual democracy.
7. The value of structure — the need for a constitution to have structural conventions that promote basic democratic ideals of fair representation, openness and transparency.

The report describes these values as “whakapapa values”. They all relate to, express, or are derived from the importance of relationships. So this is not a list of discrete and isolated, or self-contained, values. They reinforce one another, overlapping and influencing each other “just as the relationships in a whakapapa always do”.

Although these values came out of conversations with Māori groups about their constitutional aspirations, and some of them draw on ideas or concepts from te ao Māori, they are intended to be inclusive values which, it was hoped, would be relevant to all people in Aotearoa.

Discussing and testing these values with tangata Tiriti will be an important step towards setting the framework for constitutional transformation.

Once we have identified the values that we, collectively, want to inform our law-making and public decision-making processes, then we can create the kind of institutional arrangements that would best give effect to those.

For example, among the values listed above, the value of place requires us to consider how we understand relationships to the land. It might lead us to develop environmental ethics and protections as formal limits on law-making and government power.

Or the value of balance suggests that we ought to structure our governmental systems in ways that ensure equal and equitable relationships throughout our society: between Māori and the Crown, across different communities within Aotearoa, and between individual and collective rights.

To give effect to the constitutional values identified, the Matike Mai report proposes a range of models for organising legal and political authority in Aotearoa. These high-level models are intended to help progress conversations about constitutional transformation and will be the focus of the third and final piece in this series.

Carwyn Jones. (Photo: RNZ, Chevron Hassett)

Dr Carwyn Jones (Ngāti Kahungunu) is Pūkenga Matua (Lead Academic) of Ahunga Tikanga (Māori Laws and Philosophy) at Te Wānanga o Raukawa, and Honorary Adjunct Professor, Te Kawa a Māui (School of Māori Studies) at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.

E-Tangata, 2025