There is unfinished business

Celebration is an important part of Waitangi Day, but so is protest. We have unfinished business stemming from the Treaty — and there’s no better place to thrash that out than at Waitangi, writes Jamie Tahana.

 

There’s something uniquely special about Waitangi Day at Waitangi, where history coalesces with nature’s raw beauty on summer’s hottest days. Getting up in the middle of the night to huddle on the hill in the early hours, as karakia and misty breath swirl into the still night air outside Te Whare Rūnanga, its carvings staring out as dawn starts to bleed across the starry sky, the horizon slowly, then rapidly, being set alight.

As day breaks and the sun marches high into the sky, commemoration gives way to carnival as the cicadas start to roar and the crowds flood in, filling the peninsula. There, they laugh, play and listen. The markets hum, and the forum tents are packed with kōrero. From the stages, the music blasts, and on the shimmering crystal bay, the flotilla of waka draws in on the beach as thunderous haka roars.

Children and adults alike launch themselves off the bridge, leaping high and folding into various shapes — cheesecutter, manu, a bomb, king tuck, the whole range —  before piercing the river beneath, a welcome reprieve from the February heat for those diving in and the delighted onlookers getting splashed on the bridge.

On these pōhutukawa-lined grounds, on the first week of February every year, it’s a jovial atmosphere of celebration, reflection, and togetherness. Of kōtahitanga.

Of promise.

But it’s also a time for poignant reflection about the promises made on those grounds, and how they’ve been broken (and continue to be). It’s a place to ponder how those broken promises play out today, but also how they offer a light on the path forward. It’s a place to share frustration that today’s generation is still fighting much the same battle that’s been fought for 185 years, with the same Crown that still seems to care so little.

Waitangi is also a place to swell with the immense pride in being Māori. With the sense that, against all odds, we’re still here as a people, holding firm to what was signed and refusing to be told otherwise.

That seemed especially the case this year, amid the febrile atmosphere created by the ACT Party’s divisive bill — the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill — which last year provoked one of the largest protests the country has ever seen. The new year began with Māori-Crown relations at their lowest point in decades, starting with pointed kōrero at Rātana and then two bouts of select committee hearings over the Treaty bill.

The prime minister has insisted that National will not support the bill beyond select committee hearings. At Waitangi, New Zealand First’s Shane Jones said those worried about it were “chasing shadows” because it wasn’t going to pass.

Few at Waitangi were taking comfort in that assurance, fewer still seemed to be taking the government at their word. While the Treaty bill may already be dead, there was plenty else to be concerned about.

And even if the bill has no chance of passing, it’s already opened the door to a whirlwind of anti-Māori rhetoric and stirred up cultural insecurities that linger beneath the surface. Tired debates about so-called Māori privilege and takeovers are being relitigated as we once again wade through arguments that most reasonable people settled decades ago.

At Waitangi, the people came to make their displeasure known. When National’s Tama Potaka took to the microphone, a group of wāhine stood from their seats and turned their backs on him. They clutched their hands and stood in silence, draped in red hand-stitched blankets with He Whakaputanga and Tino Rangatiratanga flags, staring away from the government’s words.

“We’ve suffered the brunt of consecutive governments since the signing of our beautiful Tiriti o Waitangi, which is very clear. We shouldn’t have to be still fighting, but we are still fighting,” one of the women, Hinerangi Himiona, told RNZ’s Ella Stewart. “That’s why we are here today to try and minimise giving to this coalition government the anger they seek and the reaction they seek. We’ve leaned into our tikanga, into our history.”

Then, when ACT leader and soon-to-be deputy prime minister David Seymour stood to defend the bill, the wāhine stood and turned again. The leaders of last year’s hīkoi started chanting too, and then many of the crowd started to drown him out with waiata. “Ngā iwi e” rang around the grounds.

Seymour had been asked to stay away by his hapū, Ngāti Rēhia. The sound dipped in and out as the chair of Ngāti Wai, Aperahama Edwards, swiped the microphone from beneath Seymour, before it was returned, only to be swiped again.

But, then again, politicians who speak at the political pōwhiri are never really there to address the marae. Strapped with a lapel mic he’d brought himself, Seymour was speaking to his own (largely supportive) audience on social media, who heard him loud and clear.

What followed was the usual circus, where the politicians gave their response to the pōwhiri to the national media. Seymour said they could take away his microphone but not his ideas. Tama Potaka described himself as “kūpapa for the kaupapa,” whatever that means. Shane Jones issued a veiled threat, saying the Waitangi National Trust could have its funding reconsidered if pōwhiri didn’t fall into line in future, describing Wednesday’s event as a “circus” and a “cheap stunt.”

The political sideshow is only a couple of hours in a week’s festivities, and it’s not even on Waitangi Day. Why bother with the whole charade at all? It only distracts from the real kaupapa and makes a lot of people hōhā that the politicians are even there.

Yet, it’s vitally important. Waitangi should be a place where political leaders are made to justify their decisions from the past year, to take stock of how they’re upholding their side of the Treaty partnership.

Waitangi is one of the few places where politicians have to confront Māori for their decisions at their place, by their tikanga — and that shouldn’t be thrown away in favour of a carnival. Besides, if the Treaty was being honoured, they’d probably feel more comfortable.

Celebration is important, of course, and that’s what 98 percent of the week is. But there also remains unfinished business that stems from the Treaty, and there’s no better place to thrash that out than on the grounds it was signed on.

For some people, the fact that Māori dare protest at Waitangi is seen as something to despair over. Many prime ministers have lamented that the day has become “political” or that it’s been taken over by “radicals”, instead trying to steer clear altogether. Some have even gone as far as to suggest that the day shouldn’t be called Waitangi Day at all. How about New Zealand Day? An Australia Day-style mass denial with barbeques in some perverse reinvention of history.

But that same argument has been made every time Māori have stood up to protect their rights, where a call for harmony is more often than not a call to assimilate: a call for Māori to shut up. The gains of the past half-century have not come by accident or benevolence but from a willingness to fight for what Māori see as rightfully theirs.

Few doubt now that the recognition of te reo Māori as an official language worth protecting and celebrating, the “principles” of the Treaty as they stand today, or the settlement process of the last 30 years would exist today if Māori hadn’t caused a scene to upset the national miasma of perfect harmony in the 20th century. If Ngā Tamatoa hadn’t gatecrashed Waitangi proceedings in the 1970s. If tens of thousands of Māori and Pākehā hadn’t put their names to petitions calling for an end to the stripping of Māori land.

These protests, often framed in the press at the time as a mere nuisance supported by “haters and wreckers”, were only a manifestation of what had been bubbling below the surface for decades: the continued pursuit by Māori for the government to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Just as to be Māori is to be inherently political, so protest is in the whakapapa of Waitangi Day. In 1990, for the sesquicentennial, Queen Elizabeth had a T-shirt thrown at her, as the crowd drowned out official proceedings and chanted “honour the Treaty”. In regal understatement, the Queen stood to say the Treaty had been “imperfectly observed”.

If a government is willing to put those gains on the line, to relegate the language, or to go as far as trying to reinvent Te Tiriti in a way that writes Māori completely out of it, then little surprise Māori aren’t taking kindly to that. If anything, the swiping of a microphone and some red blankets is tepid compared to the protests of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

But the prime minister chose not to confront that at Waitangi itself, instead choosing to spend the day with Ngāi Tahu at Ōnuku Marae, near Akaroa. Christopher Luxon is by no means the first prime minister to skip Waitangi — most prime ministers have made that unfortunate decision when the heat comes on. But if he was looking to avoid a challenge to how his government is honouring Te Tiriti, then doing so with Ngāi Tahu was a bold call.

The chair of the Ōnuku rūnanga, Riki Tainui, told RNZ on Thursday morning, before the visit: “He’ll get strong messaging from the paepae. He won’t be let off the hook here.”

Ōnuku is where, in 1998, then-prime minister Jenny Shipley apologised to Ngāi Tahu on behalf of the Crown. There, she rattled off the long list of crimes and broken promises before coming to the words the people had waited generations to hear. “The Crown expresses its profound regret and apologises unreservedly.”

That apology kicked off nearly 30 years of apologies from various governments as the protracted and tortuous Treaty settlement process played out. Up and down the country, prime ministers have been expressing their “profound regrets”, often followed by another promise to “restore the honour of the Crown”, or words to that effect. Deep words that replace the hurt with the possibility — the promise — of a new Treaty relationship.

In his speech, Luxon said the Ngāi Tahu settlement “created a legacy that inspires us all.” But Ngāi Tahu has already warned that some of the government’s proposals, such as the fast-track legislation and other measures to remove Treaty clauses from legislation, risk destabilising that very settlement.

At Ōnuku, Ngāi Tahu kaiwhakahaere Justin Tipa couldn’t have made that clearer:

“We’re living through a critical juncture in our history, where the machinations of modern party politics threaten to corrupt the dignity of our nation’s complex and contingent identity,” he said. “Because distorting the truth and framing us as greedy radicals is more convenient to their political fancies than reckoning with our legitimate rights under Te Tiriti.”

Of course, at Waitangi, it’s easy to ignore all of this. The political fiasco is a mere blip at the top of the hill that’s over as soon as it starts. There’s a whole market and festival, kōrero and catch-ups to have, hāngi and seafood to devour, and music to enjoy beneath the shade of a pōhutukawa tree.

Indeed, celebrating is what most people there are doing. It’s a truly magical experience. But that shouldn’t overshadow the fact that there is unfinished business underlying the Treaty.

Plenty of people do both, as the mulleted kid in a “Toitū Te Tiriti” shirt doing a manu off a bridge railing besides a fluttering Tino Rangatiratanga flag so aptly illustrated.

 

Jamie Tahana (Ngāti Pikiao/Ngāti Makino/Tapuika) is a journalist and broadcaster who has worked in both Aotearoa and the Pacific. He grew up between his Dutch mother in the Hutt Valley, Wellington, and his Te Arawa dad in Rotorua, going on to qualify with a master’s degree at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University. He was the Māori news editor at RNZ until May 2023, and is now working in London.

E-Tangata, 2025