Today is New Zealand's national day, Waitangi Day, which marks the signing of the treaty between Māori Chiefs and The Crown in 1840.
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00:00 This is Waitangi Day and over the last five days or so, there have been tens of thousands
00:06 of people arrive here at Waitangi.
00:09 Obviously, the host people who are Ngapuhi have invited the motu or the whole country
00:15 to come.
00:16 So all the political parties come, the Maori King comes, a lot of the significant hahi
00:22 or religious movements like Ratana come, and they come to reaffirm their connection with
00:28 this place and to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi, and to celebrate what
00:33 it means to us as Maori, and then to debate and talk about what it means to the country,
00:39 particularly in this time with a new government and some new ideas about how we take that
00:43 forward.
00:44 So for the audience here in Australia, Tākuta, can you explain what the Waitangi Treaty is
00:49 and its importance to you?
00:52 Yeah, well the Treaty of Waitangi is very important to New Zealand's history.
01:00 It's one of the founding documents of the country.
01:02 There is a forerunner to the Treaty, which is called the Declaration of Independence,
01:08 He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o New Tirini, and that was signed in 1835, where
01:13 Māori declared themselves an independent country.
01:16 And then in 1840, the Treaty was signed, and one of its base tenets was a request from
01:22 the Queen to establish legal immigration for her subjects.
01:27 And on that basis, the Treaty was created.
01:30 It subsequently created a nationhood between Māori, who are the tangata whenua, or the
01:35 indigenous people of New Zealand, and the incoming people, who are commonly known as
01:40 Pākehā, and more later as Tauiwi, in a reference to the many different peoples that would come
01:46 to Aotearoa.
01:47 But they all enter under the banner of the Queen, of the government, and are able to
01:52 stay here in Aotearoa via the citizenship that they receive from that pathway.
01:57 So that's sort of what the Treaty is.
02:01 And for a long time now, successive governments of New Zealand have not done a very good job
02:06 at upholding their Treaty.
02:08 And unfortunately, you know, over the past 20, 30 years, there's been a lot of good progress
02:13 made, and the current coalition government are sort of seeking a return to the 1980s
02:19 or 70s.
02:21 And it's obviously not going down very well.
02:23 And so Māoritim has arrived here at Waitangi to demonstrate that message, and then to make
02:29 sure that the pathway forward from here on out is a more collegial one, and one that's
02:34 respectful of both signatories, both parties to Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
02:39 So the new government, as you say, is proposing changes.
02:42 They justify those proposed changes by saying it will deliver better public services based
02:49 on people's needs, not their ethnicity.
02:52 I think they're proposing a referendum as well.
02:55 What's your plan to stop those changes being put in place?
02:59 What's your plan for opposition?
03:02 Well, the Māori Party plan is to represent the aspirations of the Māori people.
03:09 We don't consider ourselves an opposition party.
03:11 We consider ourselves a mana motu hake party, which is an independence party.
03:16 And we're premised on the independence of the Māori people.
03:19 And over the last month, probably, or two months maybe, the Māori people have shown
03:23 out in droves in their tens of thousands at different hui, different national gatherings
03:28 around the country, and have really put forward a strong message that they are not interested
03:33 in what the new government is suggesting.
03:35 Now the new government is trying to rewrite some key tenets of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and
03:40 the main one really is they want to change the makeup of the two constitutional partners.
03:46 Obviously, they were Tangata Whenua and the Crown, and now a small party called the ACT
03:52 Party wants to change those two groups to define themselves as New Zealanders, all New
03:58 Zealanders, i.e. chucking Māori in with all of the rest of the people in Aotearoa, and
04:03 the Crown.
04:04 So that's pretty much a ground zero for what the proposal is, and tiwi Māori are obviously
04:10 not interested in doing that.
04:12 If you come down to a level where we're dealing with the constitutional law and the makeup
04:15 of constitutions in the country, they're not generally things that the public have a great
04:20 say on, and in this case the Treaty was signed.
04:23 The fact that it's a Treaty demonstrates that it was an agreement between two sovereign
04:28 peoples, i.e. Māori and the Crown, and now diluting that down to encompass all people
04:34 in New Zealand and the Crown is not a step that Māoridom will tolerate.
04:38 Bye.
04:39 [BLANK_AUDIO]